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Star Trek: Voyager's "Blink of an Eye" introduces us to Kelemane's planet, a planet where time is greatly accelerated compared to the rest of the galaxy.

Do the inhabitants of this planet "feel" the difference? For example, when pilot Gotana-Retz stepped on Voyager, could he tell, apart from the frozen Voyager personnel, that time there was different?

On Kelemane's planet, individuals live much "faster" than others, but from their perspective, their lives are of normal speed and length, correct? I guess I'm somewhat confused, since there's a part in the episode where Janeway states that if they go down to the planet, their lives will be over in the blink of an eye. This seems similar to the experience of Captain Picard in "The Inner Light." Though he felt like years had passed, he had only been "gone" for a few minutes.

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  • Logically it would be impossible for natives of Kelemane's planet to feel the difference. If there are 1,000,000 seconds on the planet for every one second outside, the natives will experience 31,557,600 seconds, or approximately one Earth year, of events while only 31.5576 seconds pass in the outside world. If time in some type of time bubble passes slower or faster than in the outside world, or even backwards, it will seem like it is passing at the normal rate to those inside the time bubble, because they can't experience any different rate of time than that of the time bubble they are in.
    – M. A. Golding
    Commented Jul 6, 2018 at 18:22

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The very short answer is that time doesn't seem to pass any differently within the temporal field that Voyager inadvertently created. People live normal length lives, get married, have kids and do all the things you'd expect people in a pre-warp civilisation to be doing. Occasionally their planet experiences massive seismic upheavals, but those don't appear to have any discernible effect on the passage of time.

It's only from outside of the temporal field (where time moves at the normally agreed rate) that their world appears to be moving faster, a time-differential of around 1:60000-80000

SEVEN: For each second that passes on Voyager, nearly a day goes by on the planet.

and

JANEWAY: Then you'll be the best looking blob on the planet. I'm keeping you down there for three seconds, Doctor. That will be almost two days in their time frame. Gather whatever data you can. Seismic charts, meteorological records, anything that might give us a clue about how to break orbit.

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  • Okay, so there’s no “problem” as long as these people remain on their world. It’s only when one leaves, and then tries to return, that they’d find that their friends and family have aged much more than they have.
    – Ham Sandwich
    Commented Jul 6, 2018 at 21:58
  • @HamSandwich - Precisely. They seem to carry some of the temporal distortion with them. When it wears off, a few minutes later it's years later on the surface and hours later it's hundreds of years.
    – Valorum
    Commented Jul 6, 2018 at 21:59
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    Did Voyager create the field? I never got that from the show. I thought that they only caused the earthquakes.
    – Xantec
    Commented Jul 7, 2018 at 10:48
  • @Xantec - That certainly seems to be the implication. Prior to their arrival the relative spin of the planet was 58RPM relative to the outside world. After Voyager arrived, that cranked up to the thousands.
    – Valorum
    Commented Jul 7, 2018 at 11:17
  • They note the 58 RPM before entering orbit. That high of a rotational speed is extremely high for an Earth-like planet, and I wouldn't be surprised if it would normally break apart at that rate. Voyager may have accelerated the time differential, but I don't think it created it.
    – Xantec
    Commented Jul 7, 2018 at 11:23

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