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Will Khan Still be From the 1990s?

Besides, the TV shows have never really been consistent about when the Eugenics Wars took place. DS9 even had a line saying they were in the 22nd century (which Ron Moore later admitted was a fuck up on his part).
 
I like to think Nero and Spock ended up in a parallel universe from the get go. Problem solved. Nothing they do in the Abramsverse affects anything that happens in the Prime timeline.

Now the film makers are free to do anything they like with their universe. I don't really care what they do, as long as it's entertaining.

It's not as if parallel universes were not precedented in Trek before Star Trek (2009).
 
I like to think Nero and Spock ended up in a parallel universe from the get go. Problem solved. Nothing they do in the Abramsverse affects anything that happens in the Prime timeline.

As shown in the concluding frames of IDW's "Countdown". Spock's ship has vanished into the black hole and yet the 24th century continues: a Soong-android called Captain Data (seemingly a combo of the B-4 and Data?), Ambassador Picard, and a gravely injured, but alive, Worf.
 
I would suggest that anyone interested in how two seemingly contradictory models of time travel ("time can be rewritten;" "going back in time creates an alternate branch history") could co-exist should read the two Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations novels, Watching the Clock and Forgotten History, by Christopher L. Bennett
 
I would suggest that anyone interested in how two seemingly contradictory models of time travel ("time can be rewritten;" "going back in time creates an alternate branch history") could co-exist should read the two Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations novels, Watching the Clock and Forgotten History, by Christopher L. Bennett

I haven't read those novels and am unlikely to have the opportunity so maybe I have over looked something but branching conquers all in my view (apparently the writers of STXI agree with me on this).

The reason being that branching is a fundamental quality of the universe so anything, including any form of time travel will result in a branching effect. Beats me how they can get round that. :)
 
I would suggest that anyone interested in how two seemingly contradictory models of time travel ("time can be rewritten;" "going back in time creates an alternate branch history") could co-exist should read the two Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations novels, Watching the Clock and Forgotten History, by Christopher L. Bennett

I haven't read those novels and am unlikely to have the opportunity so maybe I have over looked something but branching conquers all in my view (apparently the writers of STXI agree with me on this).

The reason being that branching is a fundamental quality of the universe so anything, including any form of time travel will result in a branching effect. Beats me how they can get round that. :)

It's and excellent novel, well worth a read. Very technical at points, merging real-life theories and science with Treknobabble to reconcile virtually every Trek time travel tale into a coherent whole. Here's a quote from the author's annotations page (HERE), about how the Star Trek (2009) timeline branches while others have been shown to overwrite the prior history:

Christopher said:
The discussion here is implicitly my explanation for how the alternate timeline established in the 2009 Star Trek feature film (ST'09) can coexist alongside the original timeline without eradicating it, even while other alternate timelines have been shown to replace the original one. Nero and Spock Prime made a one-way journey into the past, so there was no reciprocal exchange of matter, energy, or information. The "phase resonance" idea is a very simplified description of a concept derived from the Quantum Decoherence page at http://www.ipod.org.uk/reality/reality_decoherence.asp. In the "Decoherence in an Ensemble of Particles" section at the end of the article, it discusses how interference (interaction) between quantum states (timelines) is represented by the "off-diagonal" terms in the probability density matrix representing the two combined states, and shows how those off-diagonal terms average out to zero, meaning that the two states go completely out of phase. This is another way of expressing what I discussed above about divergent timelines continuing to diverge further until they're completely isolated from one another.
My thinking here is that if you go back in time and create a new timeline, you "imprint" your own timeline's phase on it just a bit. As you breathe, as you shed skin and hair and leave oils on the things you touch, you leave particles from your own timeline behind in the new one even if you return afterward. So the new timeline retains a slight entanglement with the old one and the off-diagonal phase terms don't go completely to zero because of the extra particles. So because the wave equation of the altered timeline retains a slight echo of the equation of the original one, there are resonances that cause the equations to evolve similarly -- i.e. events can happen similarly, the same people can be born, etc. This could explain some of the extraordinary coincidences in ST'09. But if there's a mutual exchange, then both timelines' equations contain phase terms from the other, so the resonance is mutual and causes a reinforcing feedback loop that draws the two timelines together.
 
I would suggest that anyone interested in how two seemingly contradictory models of time travel ("time can be rewritten;" "going back in time creates an alternate branch history") could co-exist should read the two Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations novels, Watching the Clock and Forgotten History, by Christopher L. Bennett

I haven't read those novels and am unlikely to have the opportunity so maybe I have over looked something but branching conquers all in my view (apparently the writers of STXI agree with me on this).

The reason being that branching is a fundamental quality of the universe so anything, including any form of time travel will result in a branching effect. Beats me how they can get round that. :)

It's and excellent novel, well worth a read. Very technical at points, merging real-life theories and science with Treknobabble to reconcile virtually every Trek time travel tale into a coherent whole. Here's a quote from the author's annotations page (HERE), about how the Star Trek (2009) timeline branches while others have been shown to overwrite the prior history:

Christopher said:
The discussion here is implicitly my explanation for how the alternate timeline established in the 2009 Star Trek feature film (ST'09) can coexist alongside the original timeline without eradicating it, even while other alternate timelines have been shown to replace the original one. ...

Thanks KingDaniel. If I understand that (to some extent) a branch or split always occurs but in some situations he postulates they will merge back together again. Sure wouldn't like to be around when that happens! :lol: Although presumably the child universe is effectively destroyed or just vanishes in the latter situations?
 
Yes, I believe so. The dominant timeline after such a merge will always be the one with the most entropy - i.e. the one which recieved the extra mass and energy in the form of the time travellers who have gone back and are making alterations.
 
Thanks KingDaniel. If I understand that (to some extent) a branch or split always occurs but in some situations he postulates they will merge back together again.

Specifically, if I understand things correctly, a branching independent timeline will be created if the time travel into the past is strictly one-way, but that the new timeline will tend to merge back into the original one if it's a two-way. Like a river tributary that merges back into the stream.

Sure wouldn't like to be around when that happens! :lol: Although presumably the child universe is effectively destroyed or just vanishes in the latter situations?

It's not that it just "vanishes," it's that it rejoins the original and then "over-writes" the quantum data of the original timeline. I think of it as being like over-writing a file when you save a new Word document with the same name.
 
Thanks KingDaniel. If I understand that (to some extent) a branch or split always occurs but in some situations he postulates they will merge back together again.

Specifically, if I understand things correctly, a branching independent timeline will be created if the time travel into the past is strictly one-way, but that the new timeline will tend to merge back into the original one if it's a two-way. Like a river tributary that merges back into the stream.

But hold on a minute. If you travel into the past and create a new universe, travelling into the future will not take you back to the old universe but to the future of the new one, right? Crossing between universes would seem to be a different breed of animal.

Sure wouldn't like to be around when that happens! :lol: Although presumably the child universe is effectively destroyed or just vanishes in the latter situations?

It's not that it just "vanishes," it's that it rejoins the original and then "over-writes" the quantum data of the original timeline. I think of it as being like over-writing a file when you save a new Word document with the same name.

Yes, I guess it would have to be something like that. But to say they merge gives me the impression of doubling up somehow. By the way, I got things round the wrong way in my previous post. As you say, the child (newly created) universe would "over-write" the parent (prime) universe.
 
Regarding the whale dilemma:

Yes, George and Gracie are "lost" to the prime timeline, but those two were hardly the last whales on Earth at that time or it would have been a very different movie.
It may be a little less convenient to find some other whales for NuKirk while PrimeKirk has pasta with Gillian Taylor, but not impossible.
 
UFO said:
But hold on a minute. If you travel into the past and create a new universe, travelling into the future will not take you back to the old universe but to the future of the new one, right? Crossing between universes would seem to be a different breed of animal.
That's when stuff like "Feynman Curves" come up. That, if slingshotting back through time, one has to exactly follow their trajectory, course and speed in a reverse course in order to return to the version of the future they left.

Spock Prime has no such option, since his travel method cannot be duplicated exactly.
 
Thanks KingDaniel. If I understand that (to some extent) a branch or split always occurs but in some situations he postulates they will merge back together again.

Specifically, if I understand things correctly, a branching independent timeline will be created if the time travel into the past is strictly one-way, but that the new timeline will tend to merge back into the original one if it's a two-way. Like a river tributary that merges back into the stream.

But hold on a minute. If you travel into the past and create a new universe, travelling into the future will not take you back to the old universe but to the future of the new one, right?

If it's a two-way link between the uptime and downtime points, then what will happen is, the new timeline you created downtime will have merged back in with your original timeline and then overwritten your original timeline's quantum information.

So, for instance, if you travel back in time and kill Zeframe Cochrane, a timeline in which Cochrane did not pilot the Pheonix will branch off from yours -- but then, by the time of your return to your original timeline, that branching timeline will have merged and overwritten your timeline, thus turning your timeline into one where Cochrane died.

On the other hand, if the link is purely one-way -- if you only go downtime and can't return back uptime -- then a new branching timeline is created and your original timeline is safe... but you can't access it ever again. (Which perhaps sheds some light on why Spock Prime doesn't make any effort to return to his timeline in ST09 -- he knows it is safe from the monumental changes brought about in 2233/2258 only so long as he doesn't try to return home.)
 
Time_Yarn3_3310.jpg
 
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