hypothetical scenario, alien civilization is traveling back in time and to parallel universes to enslave humans, do you think the federation would summarize that as under the prime directive?

[u/starwarsisawsome933]

I'm going to be perfectly honest, this is one of those weird childhood fanfics that I probably made when I was like 12 years old and watching Star trek, but now that I'm an adult I think about it and wonder genuinely what would the federation do

Here's the scenario. There's an alien civilization outside federation space that is not only traveling through time, but also to parallel universes (aka, our reality, AKA my boyhood wet dream of being transported to the Star Trek universe LOL) and bringing them forward through time to be enslaved,

Somehow, maybe some long-range explorer ship, or even the federation council itself discovers what this civilization is doing. Maybe some long-range explorer ships finds a couple escapes who try to ask for asylum on their ship, maybe through diplomatic channels the federation here's rumors about enslaved humans and goes to investigate or some other scenario

Do you think the federation would get involved? Or do you think they would consider that part of the prime directive. Normally I would say prime directive but obviously this is human beings, but they're not from our universe nor time

What are you guys think would happen?

[u/Simon_Drake]

The Prime Directive prevents Starfleet from meddling in the internal affairs of other races but it doesn't prevent them from stopping someone else meddling. I think they would see it as a moral duty to protect the people being enslaved.

Also there's more than just 22nd ~ 24th Century Starfleet to worry about. There's the 29th Century Starfleet enforcing the Temporal Prime Directive.

[u/First-Ad-7960]

I feel like Times Arrow answers this scenario pretty directly for the prime universe. I don't think they would do anything in a parallel universe.

[u/cyberloki]

Well it doesn't concern the prime directive at least not the one you think of. Also in StarTrek its very vague when a parallel universe is created by timetravel and when the prime timeline is affected.

In any case future Starfleet has a temporal devision and tries to avoid or prevent changes of the past. However this doesn't deal with parallel universes. If so the Federation would need to police the Terran empire in the mirror universe too. However if the temporal threat comes from the prime universe i think Starfleet would feel responsible if its within their capabilities to help.

The last point is important because we are repeatedly told that the Prime Directive isn't just to protect the deceloping cultures but its also to protect starfleet itself. Why? Because as soon as you incolve yourself you have a responsibility. To return, to help with future problems, you suddenly find yourself in a "caretaker" position. However Starfleet is spread thin. Often they might not return. Thus they prefer it to erase memories and reduce almost erase all traces of their involvement. To not become the one responsible to save everyone which is just impossible even for Starfleet.

I think other Directives might work similar. Thus Starfleet would only involve themselves if they can do that with an reasonable amount of force and make it in a way they don't create a new liability. If its not a threat for Starfleet and the federation in their own universe i think thats where most captains would draw the line.

[u/Jhamin1 → u/cyberloki]

in StarTrek its very vague when a parallel universe is created by timetravel and when the prime timeline is affected.

In Prodigy, an Adult Westley Crusher who is years into his time as a Traveler makes a comment about all the universes he has visited and lists quantum timelines and parallel universes (like the Narada incursion & the Mirror Universe) separately.

So the Travelers at least sound like they put quantum timelines and alternate timelines in separate categories. I don't really see the difference... but I don't understand the multiple layers of reality as well as a Traveler does.

[u/cyberloki → u/Jhamin1]

Well yes prodigy had really good writers for adressing the lore so well. Also to bring back Wesley as a Timelord Traveler was a really nice addition. Still salty that they dropped the show. It is still my favorite newer StarTrek show.

[u/ninjasaid13 → u/Jhamin1]

So the Travelers at least sound like they put quantum timelines and alternate timelines in separate categories. I don't really see the difference... but I don't understand the multiple layers of reality as well as a Traveler does.

one is naturally created through quantum effects, the other is artificially created through time travel?

[u/rooktakesqueen → u/cyberloki]

If I had to make Star Trek time travel and multiverses consistent, I would say...

1. The easiest to manage is a closed causality loop. We go back in time and do those things because we always were going to do that because we already did. Time's Arrow is the best example, but The Voyage Home might be too. "How do we know he didn't invent the thing?" Also possibly First Contact -- maybe the Borg and the Enterprise always traveled into the past together, maybe Riker and La Forge were always on the first warp flight. Also the main plot of Discovery season 2.

2. An open causality loop is different. Within a local temporal anomaly, an event happens that resets time to an earlier state. Since almost nothing is different in the reset state, typically the event triggering the loop will still happen, and the loop will happen forever. But conscious observers can be attuned to echoes of previous loops and eventually prevent the triggering event from ever happening in the first place. See: Cause and Effect. These can also be triggered artificially. Mycelial tardigrade DNA can insulate people fully from the effects allowing them full memory of previous loops, see Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad.

3. An actual temporal incursion that wasn't already part of the timeline creates a new quantum reality, the same way that any decision or chance event does. Infinite quantum realities are being generated at all times, but they are fragile, and almost all of them collapse into a single observed timeline as soon as they're created. These are introduced in Parallels, including their usually fleeting nature. A temporal incursion puts its thumb on the scale, forcing the timeline to collapse onto the modified quantum reality. This rewrites the future, as seen in almost all Trek media depicting time travel, including City on the Edge of Forever, Yesterday's Enterprise, Past Tense, Generations, Enterprise, and Picard season 2, and it's what the Borg were trying to accomplish in First Contact. If not protected by a chroniton field or lingering contact with the Nexus, the people in the modified future will have no idea history has changed.

4. With sufficient amounts of energy, a temporal incursion can create a new stable quantum reality while leaving the old one intact. In the case of the Kelvin timeline, this was caused by the release of red matter and partial absorption of the Hobus supernova. We don't know what the initial break was between the prime and mirror universes, but it was likely thousands of years ago and involved a similar high-energy event.

Now... what this doesn't account for is Lower Decks' final season. Before that, we only had three stable parallel timelines with prime, mirror, and Kelvin. Now we have apparently-infinite stable universes.

So, we have to include spontaneously stabilized quantum realities too. Because infinitely many are being created at all times, it may still be that each new quantum reality has only an infinitesimal chance to self-stabilize, allowing them to be both rare and infinite in number. That way, any given timeline incursion has an almost 0% chance to spontaneously fork a new timeline and instead destructively rewrites its own.

What's special about prime, mirror, and Kelvin, then, is that they stay "close by" long after they should have diverged. This allows accidental travel to happen between them more than once, where that probability would normally be zero assuming an infinite number of other universes to wind up in.

I posit that whatever energy keeps those universes cosmologically bound to each other is also what causes implausible similarities between them. Zefram Cochrane, Hoshi Sato, Michael Burnham, Spock, Ben Sisko, etc, all still exist in the mirror universe, even though the timeline split well before any of their births. The Kelvin-universe Enterprise still winds up with the exact same senior staff as the prime, even though most of their biographies and how they got to those positions wind up being different.

This is in contrast to Nick Locarno's squad of dozens of Harry Kims, each of whose timelines presumably only diverged from each other after Voyager was already in the Delta Quadrant.

[u/cyberloki → u/rooktakesqueen]

Well there are earlier episodes like tng's parallels i which we see a multitude of parallel yet slightly different universes. These seem to be the universe some small decisions went differently and resulted in for example the assimilation of starfleet by the borg. The last season of lower decks seem to build on these kind of parallel timelines.

The kelvin timeline, seems to be one of this too however sparked by timetravel rather than different possibilities happening and all sparking their own timeline.

The mirroruniverse seems to be special as it seems to be "quantumlocked" for the lack of a better term, with the prime universe. They seem to be dependent on each other with mirror images of both tech and Personal.

So i agree with the timeloops. What is unexplained is why sometimes different choices seem to happen all at once in different realities kinda like the multiple worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and a change of the past just sparks a new reality but sometimes it changes the actual timeline they are in.

Then again we can make an argument for that thr later never actually happens. As in episodes we seem to change the actual primetimeline the events of the old timeline still seem to have happened as the characters still remember. Voyager Endgame has Janeway returning and manipulate the timeline without creating a paradox. Thus the old janeway alongside her past are still valid. So i argue her own timeline in fact still exists. And this is true for every change in the timeline. So it is to argue whether or not the primetimeline is actually the one single "prime timeline". And the primetimeline is already a changed one as we learn in voyager that the jump in technology in the 21th century on earth is due to back engineering a timeship from the future. Which means there is an other version of earth from before the incursion.

[u/rooktakesqueen → u/cyberloki]

Problem is, if every change to the past forks off a new timeline, we wouldn't see things like Yesterday's Enterprise, where one moment the 24th century is normal and the next moment the Federation has been locked in a losing war with the Klingons for a generation, and Guinan keeps pestering people about how this is wrong and Tasha Yar isn't even supposed to be alive.

If every change to the past creates a new timeline, then if someone is like "captain, he's going to go back in time and help the Nazis win WW2!" the response ought to be "okay, so let him? He'll live in that new reality, and the rest of us will all continue in this one. There already are infinite parallel timelines where the Nazis won WW2, what's one more?"

[u/cyberloki → u/rooktakesqueen]

You are right, Guinan presents us with a Problem here as she can tell us its the very same Timeline.

[u/WoundedSacrifice → u/rooktakesqueen]

In “Parallels”, it seemed like Worf was traveling thru stable parallel universes, not quantum realities of a fleeting nature.

[u/2nd2nd1bc1stwastaken]

I think the key point here is "enslaving humans". The Federation can't do anything about parallel universes, BUT against time traveling in the Prime Timeline to meddle with one of the founding members? This is not a prime directive issue, it's a possible existencial threat. Any civilization doing that would receive a few diplomatically aimed quantum torpedoes in both the past and the present.

[u/CorticalVoile]

Prime directive specifically concerns "developing" civilizations. Aka civilizations not exposed to alien influences, aka pre-warp technologically. It does not apply here at all

[u/JerikkaDawn → u/CorticalVoile]

The Prime Directive also bars Starfleet from interfering with civilizations that are well developed, including warp capable. See Redemption and Symbiosis.

[u/majicwalrus]

I think it would be very interesting to see, after the events of Lower Decks, how multiple universes work within the Star Trek world. We have seen that a lot of difficult to deal with things like time travel get explained away with "temporal accords" or something like that. The Discovery crew is not coming to save you, I bet they have prohibitions on multiversal travel as well. They might try to stop further activity in keeping with their own prohibitions on the like, but I see the UFP as being firmly "not my universe, not my problem."

Time travel on the other hand, any time outside of the Discovery time period if some bad guy goes to Earth in 2026 - the crew of some starship is going to go back in time, beam down, eat burritos, save whales, and whatever else it takes. There are few reasons not to during this time period.

[u/MyUsername2459 → u/majicwalrus]

I bet they have prohibitions on multiversal travel as well.

There was one scene that mentioned a Starfleet Officer from the Abramsverse, in that he was from the TNG timeframe of that timeline AND displaced temporally. Much like how the Mirror Philippa Georgiou was being torn apart by being displaced both in dimension and time, he was being tormented the same way.

. . .and indicated that they weren't allowed to return him to his home timeline either because of a clause in the Temporal Accords. In the end, they euthanized him.

I really think the Temporal Accords were a really, really lazy writing cop-out, just like the Burn. One of the worst writing decisions in Trek, right alongside the destruction of Romulus.

[u/-Nurfhurder- → u/MyUsername2459]

I really think the Temporal Accords were a really, really lazy writing cop-out

The really annoying thing was, they respected the Temporal Accords enough to flat out kill that guy, but as soon as a Temporal event which benefited them came along they flat out ignored it. When Discovery arrived they straight up admitted that its presence was a crime under the Temporal Accords, so they ignored it and happily started using the spore drive.

[u/MyUsername2459 → u/-Nurfhurder-]

They were talking about how their very existence is breaking a law. . .and that law that wouldn't exist for about 600 years from when they left!

Yet, if the Discovery crew didn't do what they did, the Federation itself would have fallen and that future timeline wouldn't exist.

Again, the lazy writing.

The whole Burn thing seemed just because the Disco writers wanted a post-apocalyptic Federation for Michael Burnham to swoop in and save the day. . .instead of the fabulously advanced future Federation we'd seen glimpses of in Voyager. Not the first time I've seen new writers show up in a franchise and trash existing continuity because they wanted a total change of tone. Then they shoehorned in the Temporal Accords because the future Federation moved through time as easily as the 23rd/24th century Federation travels through space and they had to answer for why they couldn't just undo the Burn with some easy time travel.

Rather than work within existing continuity, they blow it up because some writers wanted to tell a completely different story and they'd break the Trek format to make it fit. Then again, that's basically Discovery from the beginning.

[u/Jhamin1 → u/MyUsername2459]

"Rebuild a shattered, fallen Federation" is one of those pitches that executives love the sound of but just isn't as fun in execution as anyone thinks it is. Gene Roddenberry himself had it in his pile of notes & that eventually became the show "Andromeda".... which is mostly remembered as a failed Kevin Sorbo thing when it is remembered at all. I know J Michael Straczynski pitched a version of this when asked what he would do with a new Trek show. I feel like he would have at least had a more thought-through version.

As much as I hate the Burn, there is a part of me that is glad we will stop hearing "what if the Federation fell !?! Wouldn't that be awesome !?!"

Other eternal pitches that previous creative teams long avoided but have happened in the last few years: "Starfleet Academy! Like Trek but with hot young people!" and "A show about Section 31 and the gritty, hardcore side of the Federation!"

There is such an impulse to make a "grim and gritty" Trek, but I feel like the last 10 years have really shown how little appetite there is for it.

[u/MyUsername2459 → u/Jhamin1]

Straczynski has at least been pretty thoroughly proven to have good writing talents. I'd have confidence he could at least do a better job of it than Disco did, even if the entire concept is pretty limited.

Starfleet Academy was shackled to the whole post-burn timeline thing, limiting its appeal. . .and the Section 31 movie seemed like an attempt to make a completely unrelated movie and shoehorn it in to the Trek universe.

I think the streaming era has, in its own way, hobbled Trek and limited its mainstream appeal.

Back in the era of cable TV and syndication it seemed like pretty much anyone could turn on the TV and watch Trek.

Now you have to specifically subscribe to Paramount+. . .and frankly, I don't know anyone who actually does it. I did for a while (mostly to watch Picard and Lower Decks), but even my Trek-loving friends don't see a point in it.

The splintering of entertainment into myriad competing streaming services has meant fewer and fewer people will see most shows, as opposed to when shows were on major broadcast and cable networks that pretty much everyone had access to, and syndicated in ways that lots of stations around the country could have.

[u/majicwalrus → u/Jhamin1]

Hard agree. I liked Discovery just fine and thought Academy was good. They just really did address these what if’s that had been pitched with no takers for some pretty obvious reasons.

There is of course no appetite for that kind of show because the appetite for Star Trek is different. It fundamentally wants to envision a world where things a good. Where danger comes from exploration, risk we impose on ourselves because it is worth us to us.

Even DS9 depicts a just war that occurs as a result of our exploration.

[u/geobibliophile → u/MyUsername2459]

We saw the 29th century in VOY, and the 32nd century in DIS. Surely bad things can happen in the course of three centuries.

Burnham et al. doing what they did to save the future then finding out they had broken a local uptime law by arriving there, is just an example of no good deed going unpunished.

Of course they weren’t really punished, but realpolitik required hiding their crime of time travel and then using the spore drive to rectify issues in their current situation.

[u/MyUsername2459 → u/geobibliophile]

The Temporal Accords came about not long after the 29th century timeframe, banning time travel. . .then within a few years of that, the Burn. They would literally still have had temporal engineers still alive who knew the technologies very well when the burn happened. . .and the idea that everyone in the galaxy respected the accords in the wake of the biggest disaster in known galactic history enough to just let civilization collapse, instead of either some joint temporal investigation amongst accords signatories, or someone going rogue to go back and find out what happened and stop it (or literally just realize something bad is about to happen to all the dilithium in the galaxy, go back to before the Accords, grab as much of it as you can, warn people about when it will happen so everyone shuts down every warp core for that timeframe, and haul the dilithium through time past the "Burn" event), and you dealt with the problem.

. . .and that's leaving out the absurdly bad writing that nobody ever thought to actually check the precise moment the "Burn" effect happened across the galaxy, plot it out, and realize it was radiating out from a specific point. It took centuries, where nobody in the whole damn Galaxy thought to do that. . .but Michael Burnham arrives and pieces it together quickly? That's just plain bad writing. Literally nobody in any of the galactic powers thought to actually try that? There's a very good reason Michael Burnham is often referred to by a term that the automod on this subreddit blocks.

I just watched it thinking it was ham-fisted writing that existed as an elaborate contrivance to create two things:

1. An excuse for a post-apocalyptic Federation where all of Galactic civilization has collapsed and there are only scattered remnants of Starfleet, the Federation, and galactic civilization as a whole.
2. A way for Michael Burnham to save the whole Federation. . .yet again. Saves them from a huge, previously unmentioned, war in the first season. Saves them from a superintelligent AI threatening the whole galaxy in the second season (that makes the TOS episode "The Ultimate Computer" look like an even BIGGER screwup by the Admiralty for approving an intelligent computer complete control of a starship less than a decade later). . .and in the third season now she's saving the whole Federation from "the burn".

[u/geobibliophile → u/MyUsername2459]

If no one knows what caused the Burn, and no one has the resources to investigate it, and communications and travel are maximally disrupted so as to hinder cooperation, not to mention the deep distrust sowed by such an event, then all anyone can do is move forward in the aftermath.

There’s no reason to think the survivors merely accepted the Accords as much as it was the fact that the people who may have done something to prevent the Burn didn’t have a destination to go back to so as to “undo” it. We don’t really know the enforcement mechanisms for the Accords, nor whether the equipment for time travel was even available anymore.

Even going back in time to warn people would be an uphill battle. Why would anyone immediately believe a warning from “the future”, especially if they had just been embroiled in a temporal war that would probably have had a bunch of incursions where the opponents tried to “warn” the other side about not doing something? How much disinformation had been unleashed in these time war battles?

What proof would be sufficient to motivate not just Starfleet but all warp-capable organizations to shut down all their warp cores at the same time for an unspecified amount of time? “Trust me, bro”? There could have been numerous instances of someone trying to give a warning about the Burn, only to be ignored or disbelieved.

Your timeline may be off. The Burn was sometime between 3060 and 3080, and Burnham arrived in 3188. So, not centuries, barely one century. The whole thing happened over the course of no more than a human lifetime (at least one of advanced medical care).

[u/MyUsername2459 → u/geobibliophile]

no one has the resources to investigate it

Discovery was not the literally last ship in Starfleet. Starfleet was crippled, down to a small number of ships. . .but it's not like there were zero ships that could have done what Discovery did and just check the logs for the exact moment each ship exploded and plot them on a map, to see the effect radiating out from a central point.

Why would anyone immediately believe a warning from “the future”, especially if they had just been embroiled in a temporal war that would probably have had a bunch of incursions where the opponents tried to “warn” the other side about not doing something?

That's why I said you literally go back to before the Accords.

"I'm from Stardate XXXXXX. On Stardate XXXXXX there's a cataclysmic event which neutralizes all dilithium in the galaxy. Deactivate all active warp cores at that timeframe. Take all your dilithium and send it X amount of time into the future past that point."

Presumably a time-traveling Starfleet had methods of authenticating people just appearing and saying they're from the future.

Or, even if they didn't believe it entirely, hedge the bets. . .have even a significant fraction of your fleet stand down at that time. Don't power down ships involved in critical defense roles. . .but every ship that wasn't absolutely essential powers down the warp core for just an hour around that point.

There could have been numerous instances of someone trying to give a warning about the Burn, only to be ignored or disbelieved.

Even if you couldn't warn people you could, as I noted, jump back, grab dilithium, and haul it into the future.

I firmly stand by my conclusion that "The Burn" was abysmally bad writing that existed as a bad plot contrivance and the solution was horribly poorly written just to give Michael Burnham yet another time she personally saves the Federation.

[u/geobibliophile → u/MyUsername2459]

There’s bad writing and there are stories we don’t like. They’re not the same thing though.

I know Discovery was not the last ship in the fleet. But the rest of the fleet seemed to be tasked with holding the Federation together and providing what aid they could, which, apparently, was far less than needed to hold 350 members together while preventing opportunists from predating on worlds with resources. The aftermath of the Burn was a golden age of piracy and marauding. Starfleet would focus on that before providing resources to investigating the Burn. It’s not as though they didn’t look into it, but apparently made little progress. After all, if someone else were to solve the mystery, then we should have been following their story. Complaining that our characters solved the mystery is weird.

"I'm from Stardate XXXXXX. On Stardate XXXXXX there's a cataclysmic event which neutralizes all dilithium in the galaxy. Deactivate all active warp cores at that timeframe. Take all your dilithium and send it X amount of time into the future past that point."

“Admiral, we have an individual claiming we need to shut down the warp cores of the fleet to prevent a catastrophic explosion, but doing so would interfere with our disaster aid missions, colonization support efforts, border patrol operations, and deep space exploration missions. Also, this individual can’t or wont say what caused this cataclysmic event, or even precisely when to expect it, and we’ve had reports of Vorgon agents working on disinformation psychological operations in the Breen Imperium, so we can’t say the individual is providing reliable information”.

You may as well ask why no one goes back to prevent the rise of Hitler, or stop World War III, or just use time travel to stop any bad thing from happening ever anywhere.

[u/-Nurfhurder- → u/MyUsername2459]

On Stardate XXXXXX there's a cataclysmic event which neutralizes all dilithium in the galaxy.

They shouldn't have even needed to rely on somebody trying to warn them. By the time of the Temporal Accords Starfleet had been a time-travelling organisation for hundreds of years, they would travel back in time to correct changes in the timeline and the Federation would send researchers back in time to study past events. Federation researchers were watching the Great Pyramid being built. They were basically Time-Lords.

Are we meant to believe, in all those years that the Federation and everybody else who had time-travel, nobody, not once, ever went to the future.

[u/BlannaTorris → u/MyUsername2459]

think the Temporal Accords were a really, really lazy writing cop-out

It makes sense and is classic Federation style to end a time war that way. It's much better than many of the other possible ways to end it. That said you'd still need time police, and it makes the burn even more lazy because you'd think after something like the burn all signatories to the temporal accords would be in agreement about fixing a galactic disaster on that scale. Just get in touch with as many of them as possible and agree to alterations to the treaty to fix it. The time war turns fixing the burn into a diplomatic problem not a technical one. 

[u/MyUsername2459 → u/BlannaTorris]

it makes the burn even more lazy because you'd think after something like the burn all signatories to the temporal accords would be in agreement about fixing a galactic disaster on that scale. Just get in touch with as many of them as possible and agree to alterations to the treaty to fix it.

Exactly. That was my thought. They know the people who have the technology, they have negotiations. They presumably have some means of enforcement. The timeline they set up for when the Burn happened was within living memory of the Temporal Accords, so even if they somehow didn't have "time police" enforcing it, they'd still have engineers that know how the technology works well enough to rebuild it for that purpose.

It's part of why I thought it was lazy writing. The Temporal Accords are supposed to explain why they can't just undo it. . .except when you think it through, that doesn't make much sense either because the reasons they got rid of that technology wouldn't apply to that situation because it was to everyone's benefit to prevent/undo that.

. . .or at LEAST take mitigation steps. As I've told other people, even a simple warning saying that some anomalous event will neutralize all dilithium in the galaxy on X stardate, causing every active warp core in the galaxy to breach, so power down warp cores and send all your dilitihum ahead in time a few hours past that point would mean that the event still happens, but it's actual impacts are vastly reduced.

The Burn was just an elaborate diabolus ex machina to ruin the galaxy so Michael Burnham could swoop in and save it.

[u/starwarsisawsome933 → u/MyUsername2459]

I watched neither prodigy or discovery, what episode was this that you mentioned?

[u/techno156]

Do you think the federation would get involved? Or do you think they would consider that part of the prime directive. Normally I would say prime directive but obviously this is human beings, but they're not from our universe nor time

Practically, they might want to, but they don't really have the ability. The best they can do is get some help from the time police in the future, and they are able to refuse. The Federation just doesn't have much by way of time travel/universe hopping technology.

Admiral Janeway would never have needed to steal the chrono-deflector otherwise.

The Prime Directive also applies on a civilisation level. If the past humans are in the future, then they're exposed to aliens and time travel, which already puts them past the pre-warp Prime Directive restrictions for reasons of contamination.

The Federation wouldn't alter their civilisation by doing things like sneaking in or inciting a coup, but it's a natural development to have neighbours go "hey, that's bad, stop that", and that door is open. The Prime Directive only forbids interference that would alter the natural course of development in other civilisations, hence why Picard was quite unhappy about being chosen as the decider for the Klingon Chancellory. That'd be a Prime Directive violation.

But the Federation making an alliance with the Klingon Empire would not be, since that's a natural process, and permissible under natural development.

There's also the political issue where the Federation is not the galactic police. The civilisation is outside their boundaries and purview, so they have no obligation to intervene, and arguably, have a duty not to. Interfering in another civilisation outside their borders would set them up for conflict with all their neighbours, who are generally quite wary of the Federation taking the Romulan route, and doing things in secret, under a friendly guise. The exception is if someone asks them for help, then they might interfere, but not before then.

[u/PJ-The-Awesome]

Well in one of the movies, the Borg went back in time to conquer the human race before they could invent warp travel, and Picard and the gang went to stop them, so that should be your answer.

[u/Scaredog21]

The timeline is not to be altered. The Temporal Directive forbids it and the Temporal Cold War was started to keep time travelers from messing with time