Did Spock purposely send himself back in time?

[kkozoriz1]

Hence, multiple methods of Time Travel = Multiple effects of Time Travel
Not every trip back in time will result in a new universe branching off.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I kinda like the idea that prior Trekkers simply didn't have a clue what they were really doing and left a shitload of alternate universes in their wake. Old Janeway in "Endgame"? She didn't save her Seven or Chakotay or Tuvok at all, she just created an alternate universe where quantum duplicates lived happily ever after. Barclay, Miral and Joe are still sitting there in the alternate future, wearing their fugly future-uniform PJ's and wondering what became of Kathryn after she flew into that vortex...

I think most if not all predestination paradoxes still work if you just assume we're seeing the next, slightly altered universe, ending with them beginning the next not-quite-identical one. I love how messy it all is.

But of course it's just a TV show, and I'm happy to pretend there's one timeline or infinite billions when the episode or film demands it.

 

[UFO]

It's just your statement made it seem non-branching methods of time travel have been confirmed and I think that's unclear.

In previous time travel episodes out heroes return to the same universe they left. In First Contact, the present changes due to the changes in the past. The Enterprise hadn't gone anywhere yet they saw the change on Earth. Once they went back and returned, the present was restored. They didn't return to the present where the Borg had taken over Earth. If the Borg going back in time had really created a new branch, the Enterprise would never have known it.

Oh I agree that past portrayals of time travel seem, at least sometimes, to be incompatible with my view of what the MWI, as presented in STXI, appears to imply. What I think is unclear is whether the writers have just drawn a line in the sand and rendered such past events within the same universe "impossible" from now on. Well, until someone, perhaps from a future incarnation, explicitly tells us why they aren't.