Star Trek Discovery's Season 2 Illustrates A Classic Time Travel Paradox

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The second season of Star Trek: Discovery hinges on the mysteries of time travel. The crew pursues seven red burst signals through the stars, eventually finding they were sent by a time traveler they have named the Red Angel. Michael Burnham and the Discovery crew's relationship with time only grows more complex towards the end of the season, when they decide to send the ship nearly a thousand years into the future to prevent a self-aware AI, Control, from getting its hands on precious data from an ancient life form (the «Sphere»), and evolving to subjugate all intelligent life.

Science fiction's job is to pose questions about the universe, humanity, and evolving technology. Discovery does this in plenty of ways, and when it comes to time travel, it seeks to know: Can our future selves interfere with their own timelines? If they did, would we know it was happening? Are some things predetermined, bound to happen; and if they are, why? The overarching plot of Discovery's second season explores these questions through a classic element of time-travel stories: the causal loop.

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A causal loop, also known as a bootstrap paradox,is a type of paradox in which a sequence of events begets itself, and as a result, its starting point is impossible to determine. In other words, a specific event occurs and sets off a chain of events. The end result of this chain is the event that caused the sequence to begin in the first place. The question, then, is where did the first event originate? What began the causal loop?

Time-travel stories in fiction are rife with this trope. One famous example occurs in the first Back to the Future film: Marty McFly plays «Johnny B. Goode» onstage while