Time Travel, Alternate Timelines

[dupersuper]

But they didn't explain it, and they never showed the prime universe's fate

Picard showed its fate: it got really depressing.

Let's say you apply for a job and don't get it. In your head canon, you did. You're not getting the paycheck. It's nice to think about, and works logically for you, and that's great--but it's not official.

That's really not the same thing...and I'm not that hung up on what's "official"

Head canon is not a thing

Of course it is. I've got it right here in my head.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

That alone is not evidence. That could be the old timeline before Spock and Nero erased it. A timeline happens in the past, present and future before it is altered.

That doesn't make any sense at all. If the Prime timeline was erased when Spock & Nero went back into the past, then the Prime timeline would cease to exist at that moment. We've seen previous cases of alternate futures in Star Trek--"All Good Things," "The Visitor," "Children of Time," "Timeless," "Endgame"--but at no point do we keep seeing those futures play out after the timeline has been altered. But if something like Picard exists after the point when Spock & Nero went back, then it means that the Prime timeline still exists.

I guess you could argue about how the events of Picard would have always existed at least theoretically, in the same way that Captain Braxton's 29th century future seemed to exist for the Voyager crew because they felt the effects of it. In a world where time travel exists, the future always exists even if it hasn't actually happened yet. So, if the future did happen but then is changed so that it didn't happen anymore, that still means that it did happen at some point, even if it eventually didn't. In this respect, time isn't even relative, it's totally subjective! There's no such thing as one single timeline because the universe is completely dependent on the subjective perspective of the person observing it. Picard observes the events of Picard happening, the people of the Kelvin timeline observe events happening differently, and we observe both sets of observations, therefore, both happened. And, this is fiction, so really none of it ever happened anyway except to the extent that we do or don't consume the story.

I feel like we need a temporal equivalent of Descartes' "I think, therefore I am." Something like, "I observe, therefore it occurred."

 

[Tenacity]

Yoda: "Always in motion is the future.”