So in this episode they go into a cave, and can read some sort of energy field, as well as Troi having a sense that there are lifeforms present. Geordie explains that the people must be displaced in time, but only by a few milliseconds. If that's true, how is there not overlap? Say the people are a few milliseconds ahead of the enterprise when they arrive, shouldn't they appear a few milliseconds later, as they still would have had to be 'present' during that time? I don't understand how they would be consistently invisible if time is a dimension like space that can be traveled through. Some past (or future) version of them would be present regardless of the desynchronization would they not?
Please if anyone could help me understand or shed some light on this I'd appreciate it.
My understanding of the concept was that it was something like multiple channels of data being sent along the same wire. So long as the frequencies are the right kind of different they’ll essentially exist completely independent of each other.
Maybe this requires a minimum of two time dimensions so that the variance can result in the different beings following time along different “tracks”?
I took Troi’s awareness of the beings to be a result of the intermittent overlapping bits of time where they did overlap. Like, it happened too quickly to perceive visually, but enough for the empath to have something to pick up on.
Huh. It occurs to me that the writers were treating the passage of time as though they were frame rates of film/ video.
I'm not sure there's anything to this but the concept of matter and energy in our observable reality "vibrating" at a certain frequency might have something to do with the episode. Putting this in film terms we would say that the universe runs at 120fps (or more) while the Enterprise, crew, et al, reside/ experience reality at 60fps, and the orifice aliens experience it on the alternating frames also at 60fps. We're seeing two different narratives taking place on alternating frames.
This doesn't explain why the same planet is still there on the alternating frames.