Right. Assuming that time travel doesn't automatically create a new timeline, if I go back to October 6, 1940 events will be changed from that point on. It wouldn't influence anything happening in 1939, 1914, 1898, etc.
Why haven't the prime universe Kelven and Franklin shown up novels?
- Thread starter killerbee256
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Right. Assuming that time travel doesn't automatically create a new timeline, if I go back to October 6, 1940 events will be changed from that point on. It wouldn't influence anything happening in 1939, 1914, 1898, etc.
Neither does just about any time travel story ever. Even the version that does make sense, the one defined by theoretical physics, contradicts everyday expectations of sense, because it's so completely outside normal experience.
Here's how I put it in an earlier thread:
But consider, as a result of Nero's arrival, the chain of events that transpires afterwards means that perhaps the Enterprise never visits the Guardian of Forever's planet, which means McCoy doesn't travel back to the 1930s and drops his phaser, which doesn't get picked up by a homeless man who doesn't accidentally vaporize himself. And now things from 1930 onward are changing.
A silly example, perhaps, but you get the point.
I see what you mean. I'm not sure I buy into quantum retrocausality but it's as equally valid as any other theory about time travel, I suppose.
I do. My head hurts, too.
Perhaps not in the Kelvin timeline, but the original timeline's Enterprise will still do everything we saw it do in TOS. That timeline is not erased, so therefore, everything in it still happens. Including ALL time travel that is derived from any point along that timeline - even post-divergence.
It's like the old time-travel question. If you went back into the past 50 years before your grandfather was born, carved your initials into a tree, and then jumped forward 50 years and killed your grandfather before he could meet your grandma and have your father, would you still exist and would your initials still exist?
Theoretical physics says that both your initials and the time-travelling you would still exist, as you carved the initials before the point of divergence, because in one timeline, your grandfather never died so you were born and were able to travel in time, however your initials would exist in the timeline where you killed your grandfather, but you would never be born.
And that is the most consistent with what we've seen in Star Trek, where practically every time-traveller from the future we've met has been from what ended up being an alternate future.
Also, the idea that time-travellers from alternate futures could collide in their common pasts is rife with possibilities that I will not speculate further upon for obvious reasons. Except to point out that The Sarah Connor Chronicles started experimenting with that concept and it was really interesting.
I guess all this means Data's head might not be under San Francisco in the Kelvin timeline, with all his memories up until TNG season 6. And that makes me sad.
To be fair here, I realize that this question has already been answered to your satisfaction. I really like Christopher's re-post, particularly options 2 and 3. The idea of seeing stories that show that the Kelvin-timeline is a reality that has been influenced by multiple crossover points that have caused changes sounds like a fun idea. I like how Simon Pegg suggested that changes have rippled all the way up and down the timeline, the Big Bang to the end of everything and everywhere in between. That's one way to not half-ass it.
I just like the fun of these ideas as something that can be played with to examine or create the stories, within and without. Why does Nero's arrival change so much? Because it's amazing. It's fun. And weird. ST is great when it does weird stuff.
I had a friend who we would always talk about TNG the next day at school. And then later on we went and watched the movies together. And every time we went to see the movies, I would turn to him while waiting in line and tell him, "Now, remember, Data's head is a couple hundred years older than the rest of his body!" And everytime, he remembered and realized that he had forgotten...again. He would always say something like, "That's going to be weird to think about, now, going into the movie..." Exactly.
I think it's best not to read too much into the Okudas' suggestion (remember, Pegg was probably just repeating what he'd seen in an advance reader copy of the revised Encyclopedia). It seems to me that they were just trying to offer a handwave for any seeming inconsistencies in the Kelvin movies that couldn't be explained by the change in 2233. And, perhaps, to provide pre-emptive cover for future filmmakers who might want to tweak the backstory still further. It's basically the temporal equivalent of "a wizard did it."
The irony, of course, is that Beyond turned out to be the one movie that needed that handwave the least, because it didn't attempt to show us Earth, any older starship classes, or any established alien races besides Spock. There are a few slight, seeming inconsistencies between the Franklin backstory and what ENT established, but no worse than the inconsistencies between ENT and prior Trek, and nothing that can't be reconciled the old-fashioned way. (And no, Sulu's sexuality isn't hard to reconcile, because he was most likely born after 2233 and sexual orientation can be influenced by epigenetic conditions during pre-natal development. And Sulu Prime never got an onscreen romance, so it's hard to say for sure what his orientation was anyway.)
My less than science-y rationale was since Nero and Spock both entered the same rift and exited at different times, it's possible some piece of technology from Nero's ship came out at an even earlier time when no one was around to see said rift. Starfleet finds it floating around, gleaned some tech from it which eventually informs a shift in technology development leading to the big ass ships we see in the Kelvin timeline.
But that was just a thought when I had read the Pegg interview and wanted something more satisfying than 'some things might be different just cuz'. I was actually perfectly accepting that the Kelvin was part of the prime universe proper. In fact I think it fits even better now with Discovery in the mix.
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That was always my thought as well, that theres nothing in Star Trek-09 to tell us that *only* the Nerada and Spock's ship time travelled, thats just all we see depicted. Anything could have gone through and exited earlier. Even something small could have resulted in the changes we saw, as you say. I never thought it much of a problem, to be honest.
My issue was more related to time travel effects having an impact on the past of the destination without any other cause, as if the propagation of time instability in both directions of the arrow was an intrinsic property of time travel. Quantum retrocausality has an internal logic to it, but I personally don't like the theory (as if that matters).
Anything like... the Hobus supernova.
Part of the logic of quantum retrocausality, though, is that the advanced waves propagating back in time are usually cancelled out by the retarded waves traveling forward and thus have no effect -- but not necessarily in every case. So the potential is an intrinsic property of time travel, but it would only happen in unusual circumstances where the two sets of waves don't cancel each other out. Just because something is allowed by physics, that doesn't mean it's guaranteed or even likely to happen -- just that there are certain exceptional circumstances where it could happen, even when it normally doesn't. Heck, time travel itself is an exception to the normal rules -- it's theoretically allowed under the laws of physics, but only under extremely unusual and improbable circumstances that negate the usual factors preventing it.
In this case, maybe Red Matter has some exotic property that generates uncancelled advanced waves, giving it a retrocausal influence that doesn't apply with more "normal" forms of time travel.
As a related side-note, one of the things I'm very much looking forward to with the Litverse now being able to deal with the Hobus supernova is finally getting some kind of in-depth "scientific" explanation for how Red Matter works, within the fictional framework of the Trek universe, with the greater depth a novel affords, compared to something like Countdown.
Sure, by any reasonable real-world screenwriting standards, it was a totally magical plot-MacGuffin that the movie's writers just concocted in order to create the alternate reality and move their storyline along, but after nearly a decade I'm hoping that whoever ends up writing those book(s) manages to also tackle this subject with some degree of reasonable in-universe plausibility in terms of the hard science involved.
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Maybe we can also get an explanation of how the supernova THREATENED THE ENTIRE GALAXY!!!
IIRC, @Christopher already touched on a Red Matter origin in Watching the Clock.
