Star Trek broke causality. now it's everyone's problem

causality is the idea that things happen because of other things, which happened before them. this ordering is very important for anything to make sense. imagine if things happened as a result of things that haven't happened yet? chaos.

this is the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) from Star Trek: The Original Series. ToS doesn't reference Enterprises other than NCC-1701, but other shows reveal a series of ships with that name. many came after, such as the NCC-1701-D from Next Generation.

and a few came before, like the NX-01 from the aptly named Star Trek: Enterprise.

it's clear that these federation ships are all named after each other, much like real US aircraft carriers are often named after decommissioned carriers. one such real world carrier lineage is even the Enterprise.

so far so good. ships are named after previous ships. even if there was an issue it would be contained within the Star Trek universe. Star Trek time travel is a mess I'm not going to get into now, but does not pose a coherency risk to the real world. even faster-than-light travel, mundane in Star Trek, is enough to break causality under relativity. but again, boxed within fiction.

so what was the first starship Enterprise named after? the intro to Star Trek: Enterprise has the answer. it starts with old maps and the HMS Enterprize (what appears to be one of several British navy ships from the 1700s). it goes on to depict several notable sea, air and space craft, including a balloon (that may be an Enterprise?) and the Space Shuttle Enterprise. it doesn't show any modern military ships, presumably because that would harsh the vibe, but it's easy to fill in the gaps. Enterprises named after Enterprises from sailing ships to aircraft carriers to a Space Shuttle to federation starships.

one problem.

the first Space Shuttle isn't named after a sailing ship or a balloon or even an aircraft carrier.

it's named after the NCC-1701

this has serious implications for the Star Trek universe. what happens when a cadet assigned to an Enterprise looks up the origin of their ship's name? do they find out about the Space Shuttle program? presumably yes, as the Enterprise shuttle is referenced several other times in the Star Trek universe. do they find out about the letters to NASA, asking for it to be named after a ship from a TV show? what show???

but unlike other Star Trek consistency issues, this problem bleeds into the real world. the Enterprise Shuttle is real, you can go see it, and it really is named after itself. future spacecraft are likely to be part of the loop (like the VSS Enterprise already was). neither the Shuttle nor the VSS went to space, but it's only a matter of time before a Shuttle-Trek Enterprise does, spilling our causal loop into the cosmos.