The bum who killed himself with McCoy's phaser in COTEOF could have subtly impacted the timeline. The two officers replaced in the line-up by Bashir and O'Brien in TAT could have been promoted sooner as their records wouldn't have contained a reprimand for the fight in TWT. I've long theorized that showing Cochrane the Enterprise could have changed some things like, for instance the NX-01 being named Enterprise instead of Dauntless. I've got a million of them.
There's no question that in theory, anyone can influence anything, but in COTEOF, Spock also talked about how the timeline could put them so close to McCoy. It was a theory that proved accurate. Clearly that bum who killed himself did not have any impact on the timeline. For all we know, he could have died that same night of natural causes. In the theory I discussed earlier, that bum was a pebble in the river, not a dam.
Cochrane could have been that dam, but Picard and crew got lucky.
I don't think paradox is the right term here because there is no predestination "paradox" in the movie. The events are intended to show that everything that happened in the past were always meant to happen in the past--the whales were about to be killed; Dr. Taylor must have just been listed as a missing person, etc. The ship even arrives back in the present prior to when they left. They didn't go back to fix an event in the timeline that had already happened; they just found a solution to a crisis that was happening in the present.
And nothing changed, right down to the dialogue.
I couldn't give less of a shit about "canon", I include books, comics, and games in my version of the Star Trek universe.
That's your way of looking at it, and I can't fault that, but it's not official.
Have you read the first Department of Temporal Investigations novel?
@Christopher comes up with a time travel system that includes both rewritten history and branching timelines. I thought worked pretty well with what we've seen in the shows and movies.
I have not. I usually stick to TOS stories when I do.
Often though, I find the book authors much more creative than any of the writers of the last 30 years.
If we're talking about real world theories, I've always preferred the idea that whatever you do is part of history, and no matter what happens you will always end up doing that thing. For example let's say you find out that you go back in time and kill someone, no matter how hard you try to avoid it, you will always end up in that place, at that time, and you will always kill the person the way that history says you did.
Why? What if in this pattern, you kill yourself instead?
Currently, all the most plausible fan explanations exist in the wave function. The most plausible fan explanations account for the most of the realities. If something is shown on screen, it collapses the wave function and locks us into a single explanation of canon. Until that happens, the most consistent and plausible fan explanation is the most likely reality.
The consensus of the fans outweights strict canonical constructivism.
Thing is, this implies that canon is a democracy. In the case of the Kelvin Universe, the writer had a perfect chance to explain it all, and CHOSE to make the dialogue such that the explanation we would hope for cannot be true. Even if the writer decides off screen to change his mind, like say in an interview, that could not contradict what's on screen.
If I travel back in time and change the timeline in any way, I have created an alternate reality. Creating an alternate reality does not mean that the original reality still exists. If I'm in another universe, then it does. If I'm in the same universe, like say, Marty McFly, then the original reality is gone.
Saying that there is an alternate reality does not answer the question of whether the original reality exists. In the absence of that, the only solution is to go with precedent, and in Star Trek, in every single venture into an alternate universe, it was crystal clear that going to another universe happened. The Mirror episodes and Parallels are perfect examples of that.
Parallels of course shows that you can destroy your reality and there will still be a universe virtually identical to the reality that you destroyed, but that's still just a copy.
It also has nothing to do with ST09.
As of now, there is no example of proof that shows the prime timeline still exists.
Think of the original timeline as history as it plays out without time travel altering it. If that is the case, there is a past, present and future, all having played out before it was altered. Let's say you travel to the year 1958. Everything in your future played out originally, until the end of time. But if you change something, everything after 1958 can be destroyed. It still happened originally, but the events are now erased from history.
So yes, Star Trek: Picard can exist, and while it's in the future from Spock and Nero's disappearance, these are stories before the timeline was erased. They happened, but Nero's actions erased them.
If you delete a file on your computer and create an altered version of the same file, that doesn't mean the original didn't exist ever.
It just doesn't exist now.
So as of now, using the rules of time travel as established by Star Trek, the prime timeline is gone.
However, that can be changed in canon, if they ever do a story that covers the topic.
