Most of them would have said "Who gives a shit?" And rightly so.
Then just stay away when people on this message board give a shit. But you can't. Why?
It's a valid point. Maybe 5% of the audience would have cared about the fine points of time vs reality travel (and that 5% is more like 100% here, but we're wildly unrepresentative of the general audience for the movie).
It's very considerate of Abrams & the gang to waste a few spare minutes trying to smooth this issue over for the likes of us, when they could have just said, frak it, the original reality is gone, deal with it, and still made their millions.
Would have been interesting to see. My guess is that, since people are used to the above mentioned time travel, most of them would have said that the original timeline where Spock Prime comes from is gone now.
Most of them (well, among those who understood the question) would not care that the original timeline was gone, since to them it's just a bunch of old crap they don't think about other than two hours every two years and that's if something better isn't playing at the multiplex.
^I love the way you say things like
Every reality has a unique timeline that does not imitate others 100% although there may be similarities.
Like it's irrefutable fact. We're talking about ill-defined ficticious concepts that can be (and have been) made to work however the writers want them to at the time.
Well of course we are. What the writers want to happen is really what is going to happen. I'm just proposing theoretical ways (which are based on theories proposed by real life scientists, and far less zany than many ideas in
Star Trek) for what they want to happen - the prime reality still exists, and this new one is carte blanche (within the bounds of what would be 'acceptible'
Star Trek, which is something they will define, but since they seem to have a reasonable sense of what
Star Trek should be, I'm not terribly concerned).
Just to reiterate what the REALITY of the situation is:
...our story is not based on the linear timeline of Einstein’s General Theory of relativity upon which most movies about time travel are based (like say, BACK TO THE FUTURE, or TERMINATOR, both of which I LOVE). The idea of a fixable timeline has been a wonderful staple of sci-fi since the 50’s, but in reading about the most current thinking in theoretical physics regarding time travel (Quantum Mechanics), we learned about the speculative theories that suggest that if time travel is possible, then the act of time travel itself creates a new universe that exists in PARALLEL to the one left by the time traveler. This is the preferred theory these days because it resolves the GRANDFATHER PARADOX, which wonders how a time traveler who kills his own younger grandfather would logically then cease to exist, but then he’d never be around to time travel and kill his grandfather in the first place. Quantum Mechanically based theories resolve this paradox by arguing that the time traveler, in killing his grandfather, would merely split a previously identical universe into a new one in which a man who is his grandfather in another universe is killed in the new one. The time traveler does not cease to exist, although he is no longer in his own original universe (where he is now missing). Or something. To summarize above on the time travel issue, going back in time is the equivalent of stepping into a parallel universe, according to current speculations based on Quantum Mechanics.
Starfleet and Spock, basing their decisions on this theory, would see that their is NO SUCH THING as “rectifying” the situation in a MULTIVERSE.
Them's the rules, like it or not.
So, Orci and Kurtzman intend their universe to be distinct from the Prime Universe. They are using real-world scientific theories as the basis for their ideas (I'm also extrapolating from those same theories). I might quibble with the idea that Spock's actions "created" the new reality, as opposed to that reality being pre-existing, but that's a debate that changes nothing in the story. However the new reality was made, it's here and it's going to be the topic of movies going forward for the indefinite future.
) "temporal protection" of the event horizon before Nero passed all the way through! I'm indebted to Set Harth for the inspiration.
