The Temporal Trolley Problem
***This post contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 4, Episode 1, “Valles Marineris,” and Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 3, Episode 15, “Yesterday’s Enterprise.”***
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has returned for its fourth season—and apparently merely exploring strange new worlds was no longer ambitious enough. This time, the Enterprise manages to find one of the strangest worlds imaginable: our own, sixty-five million years before anyone was around to complain about the continuity.
This first episode seems so very timely for me as it intersects beautifully with the questions I have been exploring in my three-part series on time travel (Part three still to come). I also happen to be up to season 3 of Star Trek TNG in preparations for ne newest podcast project and It may even offer a cheeky new way to read John 11, where Jesus delays his journey to Bethany, Thomas sees death waiting on the road ahead, and the raising of Lazarus helps set the plot of the cross in motion.
Season Four begins with “Valles Marineris,” an episode overflowing with the kind of glorious science-fiction ingredients that Strange New Worlds handles so well: a stellar storm, dinosaurs, ancient Martians, insectoid aliens, antimatter, planetary warfare and Captain Pike once again discovering that command is what happens when every available option is fraught.
Episode Synopsis
After entering a mysterious stellar storm, the Enterprise is thrown sixty-five million years into the past. Pike and his crew initially believe they have reached an unknown alien planet populated by dinosaurs, only to discover that they are standing on prehistoric Earth. Above them, the fouth planet (Mars) is still a living world inhabited by an advanced civilisation locked in conflict with insectoid beings from a fifth planet.
When the Martians learn what the future holds for their world, they attempt to prevent their extinction. Their actions instead unleash the chain of events that will devastate thier planet (Mars), destroy their enemies and send the Chicxulub asteroid towards Earth. The resulting impact will wipe out the dinosaurs—but also create the evolutionary conditions from which humanity will eventually emerge.
Pike, in this split second, is therefore confronted with an impossible choice. He can interfere and attempt to save the ancient civilisations before him, but doing so may erase humanity and everyone aboard the Enterprise. Or he can preserve the known timeline by allowing planetary devastation and mass extinction to proceed.
The crew have not simply travelled into Earth’s history. They have become participants in the catastrophe that makes their own existence possible.
The Enterprise is caught in a temporal loop, but Pike is caught in something worse: a temporal trolley problem.
And if that dilemma feels strangely familiar, it should. Decades earlier, The Next Generation placed another Enterprise beside another temporal lever in “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” Long before either captain faced the question, John’s Gospel may even have imagined its own theological version: Jesus delaying his journey to Lazarus, Thomas recognising that the road ahead leads towards death, and Caiaphas deciding that one man should die to save everyone else.
Three stories. Three captains—or perhaps two captains and a carpenter. One lever.
The trolley problem is a philosophical thought experiment about the ethics of intervention. A runaway trolley is heading towards five people trapped on the track. You can pull a lever and divert it onto another track, saving the five but killing one person instead. The dilemma asks whether actively causing one death is morally preferable to allowing several deaths through inaction. In The Good Place’s wonderfully gruesome version, Chidi begins with a tidy classroom explanation before Michael turns it into a horrifyingly physical experience, exposing the distance between discussing an ethical decision and living with its human consequences. The problem’s many variations test how responsibility changes according to intention, personal involvement, certainty and consequence. There is no comfortably innocent option: pulling the lever makes us responsible for choosing who dies, while refusing to pull it does not free us from responsibility for what we knowingly allow to happen.
Most trolley problems begin with a runaway carriage, a lever and a terrible choice. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds begins its version with the Enterprise, a stellar storm and sixty-five million years of history.
Captain Christopher Pike does not have to choose whether one person should die to save five. He is confronted with something far worse: should he intervene to save the people who are alive in front of him if doing so will erase humanity, Starfleet and everyone he has ever known?
“Valles Marineris” is a wonderfully crafted piece of science fiction. It gives us an Enterprise hurled back into Earth’s prehistory. Underneath all that, however, is a serious and disturbing moral problem. It is not merely a time-travel story. It is a temporal trolley problem.
Pike appears to have three possibilities.
He can intervene to prevent the catastrophe, saving the ancient civilisations before him but potentially erasing the human future.
He can refuse to interfere, allowing planetary devastation and mass extinction to occur because they belong to the history from which humanity arose.
Or he can search desperately for another track—a way to save both past and future—while risking a paradox that could destroy them both.
None of these is a clean choice. There is no untouched timeline to which Pike can retreat. Even observation is a form of presence, and the Enterprise has already become part of the causal chain.
More importantly, Pike is not an impartial decision-maker. He has an overwhelming personal interest in preserving one particular future. His crew, his civilisation and his own existence depend upon it. Preserving the timeline therefore appears to be a principled defence of history, but it is also an act of collective self-preservation.
That leaves us with the episode’s sharpest moral question:
Is preserving the timeline morally different from preserving ourselves?
It is not the first time an Enterprise has been caught on those tracks. More than thirty-five years earlier, Star Trek The Next Generation series 3 episode 15 “Yesterday’s Enterprise” gave us a scenario in which Picard must send an earlier Enterprise back into the past to face almost certain destruction. Watched together, the episodes approach the temporal trolley from opposite directions. Pike risks the people of the past to preserve his future. Picard risks the people in front of him to recover a future almost nobody remembers.
Star Trek often treats the integrity of the timeline as an almost sacred good. Temporal agents protect it. Captains accept terrible losses to restore it. Characters who attempt to rewrite history are warned about unintended consequences. But “the timeline” is never a morally neutral abstraction. It is the name given to the world inhabited by the people making the decision.
We call it the proper timeline because it is ours.
To the lives extinguished along the way, it might look rather different.
“Yesterday’s Enterprise” presents almost the mirror image of Pike’s dilemma.
The Enterprise-C emerges through a temporal rift while attempting to defend a Klingon outpost at Narendra III from a Romulan attack. The moment it arrives in the future, reality changes around the Enterprise-D. The familiar vessel of exploration becomes a battleship. The Federation has been at war with the Klingon Empire for decades and is approaching defeat. Worf is gone. Tasha Yar is alive. The warm, open Ten Forward has become a place of military rationing and exhausted conversation.
For almost everyone aboard, this reality is simply reality. They possess no memory of another history. There is no glowing sign above the bridge declaring INCORRECT TIMELINE. The war, their losses and their relationships are all real to them.
Only Guinan knows that something is wrong.
She cannot provide Picard with equations, historical records or sensor readings. She offers something closer to temporal intuition: a deep awareness that the world is not as it should be. She tells Picard that the Enterprise-C must return to its own time and complete the battle from which it was displaced. Its crew will almost certainly die, but their apparent sacrifice in defence of the Klingons may prevent the war now consuming the Federation.
This transforms the temporal trolley problem into an epistemological one. Picard is not merely being asked to choose who must die. He must decide what degree of knowledge could ever justify such a choice.
How certain must we be before pulling the lever?
Pike possesses historical knowledge. He knows that humanity exists because the catastrophe in the deep past occurred. Alternate Picard has no such certainty. He has Guinan’s conviction, the Enterprise-C’s unexplained displacement and a military situation in which the Federation is already losing. He must contemplate sending more than a hundred people to their deaths on the strength of a history he cannot remember.
At first, Picard resists. Guinan’s assurance is not enough when lives are at stake. Yet the terrible arithmetic eventually becomes persuasive. In the current timeline, the Enterprise-C is one more damaged ship in a war the Federation expects to lose. In the past, its sacrifice might become a gesture of courage capable of changing the relationship between two civilisations.
Picard pulls the lever.
But the lever is stranger than it first appears. If the plan succeeds, the alternate Picard will not survive to enjoy the restored future. Neither will the Riker, Data, Crusher or La Forge standing around him. Their lives, memories and shared history will be overwritten. Picard is not sacrificing a smaller group so that his own world may continue. He is choosing the possible erasure of his entire world in favour of one that Guinan insists is more rightly ordered.
Pike preserves the history that produces him.
Picard chooses the history that may unmake him.
That difference matters. It prevents the temporal Prime Directive from becoming merely a sophisticated name for self-preservation. In “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” preserving the timeline is not about ensuring that the captain gets to go home. The captain making the decision may have no home in the history he restores.
Guinan’s role makes the episode theologically fascinating. She knows more than she can prove.
Religious traditions are familiar with people who claim to perceive that the present order is not the only possible one. Prophets look at arrangements everyone else regards as normal—war, inequality, exclusion, exploitation—and declare that the world is not as it should be. They often cannot offer a complete map of the alternative. Their authority rests partly upon their capacity to reveal the wrongness that habit has made invisible.
Guinan functions almost prophetically, but “Yesterday’s Enterprise” does not allow that comparison to become comfortable. Prophetic certainty can be dangerous when it demands that other people pay its price. Guinan will not be aboard the Enterprise-C when it returns to Narendra III. Her perception may be correct, but others must die because of it.
Picard therefore has a responsibility that cannot be surrendered to the prophet. He listens to Guinan, but he must still judge, disclose what he knows and speak with Captain Rachel Garrett. Garrett and her crew are not pieces he secretly moves across a temporal board. They are given the truth and allowed to participate in the decision.
This does not remove the coercion entirely. Can a Starfleet captain freely refuse when told that returning to certain death may save the Federation? Duty, honour and institutional identity are powerful pressures. Yet the conversation matters. Ethical discernment is not made good merely by producing the right outcome. It must also take seriously the agency of those being asked to bear its cost.
That is an important qualification to every trolley problem. People are not cargo distributed between tracks. Wherever possible, they must be allowed to speak.
Tasha Yar makes the dilemma more personal still. Guinan tells her that she is not supposed to be alive—that in the other history she died an empty death. Tasha then chooses to join the Enterprise-C, knowing that its return will almost certainly kill her.
Her decision is brave, but it is also troubling. Can we bear loosing her again!
Tasha does not merely want to help restore the timeline. She wants her death to mean something. The episode gives her a second chance, not at life, but at a better death.
Christian storytelling has often been drawn to meaningful sacrifice. Martyrdom, crucifixion and laying down one’s life for another sit close to the centre of its imagination. Yet there is a danger whenever death is valued primarily because it serves a larger story. Institutions can become very skilled at praising sacrifice when someone else is making it.
Tasha’s choice belongs to her, and that agency distinguishes sacrifice from execution. Even so, her story asks an uncomfortable question: does a meaningful death redeem a life, or have we failed to imagine forms of meaning that do not require a person to die?
The later consequences of her choice make the question even more complicated. Time refuses to remain a clean equation. The person sent back to repair history becomes the source of further history, suffering and disruption. The trolley does not disappear after the lever is pulled. It continues down tracks no one could see from the junction.
This is where “Yesterday’s Enterprise” strengthens “Valles Marineris.” Both stories resist the fantasy that restoring history leaves our hands clean. The right timeline, if such a thing exists, is still made from costly choices, incomplete knowledge and lives that cannot be reduced to temporal bookkeeping.
This is where I want to become theologically cheeky.
What happens if we read John 11 as another temporal trolley problem?
I do not mean that Jesus is secretly a Time Lord, although the writer of John’s Gospel occasionally makes him sound as though he has read the final page before everyone else has finished the prologue. This is a speculative reading rather than a claim about hidden technology in the text. Yet John’s Jesus possesses an unusual relationship with time. He speaks of an “hour” that is coming before it arrives. He knows when that hour has not yet come and when it finally has. He acts in the present with a striking awareness of the future towards which the story is moving.
Then word arrives that Lazarus is ill.
Jesus loves Lazarus, Martha and Mary. Yet after hearing the news, he remains where he is for two more days. By the time he reaches Bethany, Lazarus has been in the tomb for four days. Martha’s first words give voice to the timeline that might have been: if Jesus had been there, her brother would not have died.
The delay is especially provocative within John’s Gospel because Jesus has already healed at a distance. In John 4, an official asks Jesus to come to his dying son. Jesus does not travel to the house. He speaks, the father believes, and the child recovers. Within the imaginative world of the Gospel, Jesus apparently does not need to be physically present beside a sickbed to heal.
He could have healed Lazarus promptly.
He could have healed him remotely.
He could have done it quietly, avoiding the dangerous return to Judea and preventing Martha, Mary and Lazarus from passing through death and grief.
That is the unexplored track beside John 11: the timely and discreet healing. Lazarus recovers, the household rejoices, and the event attracts little attention. Jesus avoids Bethany. The authorities are not confronted with a man walking out of a tomb. The machinery leading towards the cross may continue to turn, but it does not receive this particular violent acceleration.
Instead, Jesus delays.
When Jesus finally announces that they will return to Judea, the disciples are alarmed. They remind him that people there have recently attempted to stone him. They can see where this road leads.
Thomas understands it most clearly. “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”
We usually meet Thomas near the end of John’s Gospel as the disciple who doubts the resurrection. Here he is the disciple who does not doubt the danger. He cannot see resurrection, but he can see the track running towards death. His declaration is courageous, loyal, gloomy and perhaps unintentionally prophetic.
Thomas thinks Jesus is choosing a path that will get them all killed.
He is not entirely wrong.
If Jesus can perceive the temporal possibilities more fully than the disciples, then he knows what Thomas only senses. A discreet healing might preserve safety. A public raising will reveal glory, restore Lazarus and draw many people towards belief—but it will also make the conflict impossible to contain.
The raising of Lazarus is therefore not merely a miracle occurring on the road to the cross. In John’s narrative, it helps move the trolley onto that track.
After Lazarus comes out of the tomb, some witnesses believe in Jesus. Others report what has happened to the authorities. The chief priests and Pharisees gather the council and ask what they are going to do about a man performing such signs. They fear both his growing influence and the Roman response it might provoke.
Then Caiaphas provides the brutal arithmetic: it is better for one person to die for the people than for the whole nation to be destroyed.
John has placed an explicit soteriological trolley problem inside the aftermath of Lazarus’s resurrection.
Caiaphas believes he is diverting political catastrophe onto Jesus. John tells us that his words carry a meaning deeper than Caiaphas understands: Jesus will die not only for the nation but to gather God’s scattered children. The high priest reaches for political expediency, while the evangelist hears an unintended prophecy.
But the temporal version makes the dilemma stranger. If Jesus foresaw the possible branches, then a timely, private healing of Lazarus might have delayed or avoided this particular sequence. By waiting and then raising Lazarus publicly, Jesus restores one life while provoking the decision that one life, his own, must be taken.
Jesus appears to pull the lever towards a theological soteriological future.
Pike preserves the history that will produce him. Picard chooses a history that may erase him. Jesus, in this speculative reading, refuses the safer history that might preserve him.
He chooses the track that leads towards the cross.
This reading becomes dangerous if Lazarus, Martha and Mary are reduced to pieces on Jesus’ temporal chessboard. Lazarus must die so that Jesus can produce a greater sign. The sisters must grieve so that the disciples can believe. Their suffering becomes necessary scenery for someone else’s glory.
John himself brings us uncomfortably close to that interpretation. Jesus says that Lazarus’s illness is for God’s glory and that he is glad, for the disciples’ sake, that he was not there. Those sentences can sound chilling when separated from what happens beside the tomb.
Jesus weeps.
Whatever Jesus knows about the future, he does not stand outside the grief it costs. He does not explain the sisters’ sorrow away as a necessary contribution to salvation. He enters it. The one who may perceive the branching timelines still trembles before the tomb in this one.
That does not solve the moral problem, but it prevents easy theodicy. John does not give us a Jesus who says, “Everything happens for a reason,” and expects grief to applaud. Divine purpose does not make death painless. Foreknowledge does not cancel tears.
Nor does resurrection remove Lazarus from danger. In the next chapter, the chief priests plan to kill Lazarus as well because his continued existence draws people towards Jesus. He emerges from one tomb only to become a marked man. The trolley continues beyond the miracle.
Lazarus therefore challenges any soteriology that treats those who suffer as expendable instruments in a story about Jesus. If the cross reveals God, it cannot reveal a God who regards other people’s deaths casually. The distinction that has followed this essay remains essential: redemption may emerge from catastrophe without making catastrophe good.
The traditional trolley problem imagines us standing outside the danger. We pull the lever and someone else dies.
John’s Gospel changes the position of the decision-maker. Jesus does not divert the trolley towards a stranger. He steps onto the track himself.
That is part of what Christian theology has tried to say through incarnation and cross: God does not remain safely above history, calculating which human losses will produce the optimal ending. God enters the consequences of the world’s violence. The one beside the lever becomes the one beneath the wheels.
Yet John 11 refuses to let even that claim become simple. Jesus’s self-giving does not mean that nobody else is hurt. Lazarus dies. Martha and Mary grieve. Thomas walks towards a danger he barely understands. The disciples are drawn into a conflict they cannot control. Salvation is not a private exchange between Jesus and death; it unfolds through a community whose members bear real costs.
Perhaps that is why Thomas matters here. He cannot yet see Easter. He can only see Jesus walking towards death, and he chooses companionship: let us go with him.
Thomas does not solve the temporal trolley problem.
He refuses to let Jesus face it alone.
The most confronting theological idea in “Valles Marineris” is that humanity’s beginning depends upon catastrophe. The death of one world opens the evolutionary possibility of another. The dinosaurs perish; mammals flourish; humanity emerges; the Enterprise eventually travels back to participate in the circumstances of its own beginning.
Apocalypse becomes genesis.
This resonates with the biblical image of tohu va-bohu: the formlessness, emptiness and disorder over which the Spirit hovers at the opening of Genesis. Creation does not necessarily begin with a pristine canvas. It begins amid deep waters, darkness and unrealised possibility. In the biblical imagination, God makes a world not by pretending the chaos is absent, but by drawing life and relationship from within it.
That does not mean the catastrophe was good.
Christian theology has sometimes used the expression felix culpa—the “fortunate fall”—to describe how redemption can bring a greater good from human brokenness. It is a beautiful idea when it means that failure is not beyond redemption. It becomes dangerous when it suggests that suffering was secretly necessary, deserved or divinely arranged for someone else’s benefit.
The same distinction matters in “Valles Marineris.” Humanity’s emergence from extinction does not retrospectively bless the extinction. The life that follows a disaster does not justify the disaster itself. Resurrection does not make crucifixion virtuous.
This is why I remain wary whenever tragedy is met too quickly with the claim that “everything happens for a reason.” Sometimes that phrase is an attempt to protect faith from the terrifying possibility that the world contains genuine contingency, loss and chaos. It can also become a way of turning another person’s suffering into a supporting scene in our own story.
Perhaps redemption offers a more honest claim. Not that every horror was required, but that no horror has the final word. New creation can occur without calling the chaos good. Life can emerge from devastation without requiring us to sanctify what was destroyed.
Pike is a particularly appropriate captain for this story because he already lives beneath the weight of foreknowledge. He has seen his own future. He knows the accident that awaits him and the suffering it will cause. His life is shaped by the tension between knowing what will happen and continuing to choose how he will live.
That tension resembles the old theological problem of divine foreknowledge and human freedom. If God knows the future, are our choices genuinely free? If an event is known in advance, can it still be otherwise?
“Valles Marineris” does not resolve the problem, but it makes us feel it. Pike still chooses, yet he chooses inside a history whose destination he already knows. His knowledge does not turn him into a puppet, but it gives every action a peculiar gravity. He cannot unknow the future long enough to make an innocent decision.
Perhaps freedom is not the ability to act without history. None of us possesses that kind of freedom. We inherit bodies, families, cultures, wounds, privileges, debts and stories we did not choose. We begin halfway through a chapter written by countless hands.
Freedom may instead be the capacity to become responsible within history: to recognise what has made us, discern what should not be repeated and decide what kind of ancestor we will become.
There is a temptation to imagine ourselves as the triumphant conclusion of history. From that position, everything that preceded us becomes a necessary step towards our arrival. Extinctions, empires, wars and displacements are folded into a story whose implicit destination is us.
The temporal trolley problem exposes the arrogance in that perspective.
If Pike allows an ancient civilisation to fall because humanity must eventually rise, he is treating future humanity as possessing greater moral weight than the people before him. Yet those people are not hypothetical. They are present, conscious and afraid. Humanity, from their perspective, is only a possibility.
This has echoes beyond science fiction. Nations often tell histories in which the suffering of earlier peoples becomes an unfortunate but necessary stage in the nation’s emergence. Churches can tell stories in which institutional survival justifies the damage done to inconvenient individuals. Progress becomes a theological solvent: whatever produced the present is forgiven because we like being here.
But survival does not confer innocence.
We can be grateful for our lives without declaring every event that made them possible morally necessary. We can honour those who carried us here while also naming the violence embedded in the road. We can inherit a history without defending all of it.
That may be one of the most important acts of temporal ethics available to people who cannot travel through time: truthful remembrance.
And perhaps, one day, they will look back through the canyon of time and realise that we were the ones standing beside the lever.