Nevertheless, this alternate reality has opened an infinite number of doors to infinite possibilities.

Hopefully those possibilities will not lead to TNG, DS9, and Voyager.

I never did care much for those spinoffs, including Enterprise, and I never will.

Time travel via the Guardian of Forever is probably subject to all kinds of variables, as it appears to be a sentient being. In ‘Yesterday’s Enterprise’ we have what appears to be an alteration to the Prime timeline, but ultimately an individual from the alternate timeline causes changes to that Prime timeline, suggesting the Alternate timeline continued in some fashion (otherwise, why wouldn’t Alternate Tasha have simply winked out of existence?).

We have TOS episodes like ‘Tomorrow is Yesterday’, where a great deal of the time travel makes NO sense, even in a Star Trek context. How could the Enterprise have stopped themselves from crushing Col Ritchie’s aircraft without going back to a point *before* they did it and warning themselves not to? Why do they transport Ritchie into his own body? What happens to the other Col Ritchie that was already in the cockpit? Did they kill him? There still should have been a second Enterprise during those events. It makes no sense at all, if you think about it for too long.

Time Travel is madness I say, and there’s simply no sense in getting too worked about it either way.

On the other hand, in Back to the Future was talk of paradoxes and them destroying the universe. Thou a paradox of ST09 could just destroy the entire universe and maybe cause the Big Crunch…

If Kirk taking command of Enterprise earlier effects missions from TOS, Then who knows….

Maybe Space Seed would never happen. Khan’s ship just keeps on floating in space? Or Maybe Mirror, Mirror never happens?

Who knows…but I would like to think that knowing about supernova and Romulus being destroyed alters the timeline. Thus, it could preserve the Prime Universe.

Remember…Knowing is half the battle…

Nor does it need to. There are 52 stories prior to this one depicting time travel in the Star Trek Universe—all of which depict the effects in the same way. Why would the burden of proof be on the status quo? Should it not be on the proposed “retcon”?

“How do we know that the events in “The City On The Edge Of Forever” didn’t create an Alt time line that become the Mirror Universe(?)”

I’ll let the Guardian answer that:

“Your vessel, your beginning. All that you knew…is gone.”—describing the effects of McCoy’s time travel upon the timeline they know

“Time has resumed its shape; all is as it was before. Many such journeys are possible. Let me be your gateway.”—describing the effects of the repair job on the timeline

If the MWI theory were applied to TCOTEOF, when McCoy entered the Guardian and prevented Edith Keeler’s death, there would have been no effect upon the timeline in which Kirk, Spock, Uhura and Scotty existed. On the contrary, McCoy’s actions would have merely created a new timeline that ran “parallel” to that one.
Even Bob Orci acknowledges that MWI/QM doesn’t mesh at all with TCOTEOF, or any number of Star Trek time travel tales prior to this one.

He did say that, but as far as ‘canon’ is concerned, it is the context provided by the dialogue surrounding that which matters—-not Orci’s behind-the-scenes commentary on the subject.

“Spock:”Nero’s very presence has altered the flow of history, beginning with the attack on the USS Kelvin, culminating in the events of today, thereby creating an entire new chain of incidents that cannot be anticipated by either party.”

Uhura:”An alternate reality?”

Spock:”Precisely. Whatever our lives might have been, if the time continuum was disrupted, our destinies have changed.”

Within that context, the term “alternate reality” is synonymous with “alternate timeline”—not “parallel reality”. Nothing which is depicted onscreen suggests that at all.

I understand what you are saying. All I meant is that just because they travelled into a time where they already exist, doesn’t mean they replace their counterparts automatically.

I find Trek does different ways to time travel so I have no problems accepting that there are different consequences/results to them aswell depending on what happens in the past. So that is why we see different results in different episodes of what happens when you time travel. Again, just a thought.

again for me the Alt time line preserving the the Prime time line theory is good enough.

I am not telling anyone how to think I am just saying there are many, many ways to look at it.

#230 – you can’t cite TOS examples to prove ST09 and talk about being proven right as long as Orci is around. There is no on-screen evidence that there is an alternate universe in play here. There is ample evidence of time travel which has been shown consistently over and over in Trek. What you say about COTEOF may well be true, just like there well may be a Borg Earth created by FC. Indeed TNG:Parallels showed us that it’s quite likely.

The point is, if you accept Orci’s explanation of an alternate parallel universe here, you have to accept the baggage that goes along with it, which is, MWI QM. If the ST09 is an alternate universe like the Mirror universe, or those depicted in Parallels, then they cannot exist in ST09, because Orci’s use of MWI QM does not support communication between these universes, nor does time travel work the way it did which invalidates hours of canon.

“Prime” Trek operates under its own set of rules regarding parallel universes and time travel that do not conform to this film’s “official” philosophy. Therefore, nothing pertaining to Quantum physics in the “Prime” timeline can be used to explain anything in the “Alternate” timeline.

I doubt there will ever be any canon on the subject to prove anyone right or wrong. That is the only thing that can truly be said to be in question. Will they or won’t they. In the end, they have very little to gain by doing so and everything to lose.

Without knowing the nature of the “dead star” referred to in ENT, it is entirely possible that detonating a “tri-cobalt device” in its core would produce similar results, especially since we do not know what technology might have been combined with it (perhaps even “red matter”). Such a detonation in a white dwarf might have ignited its accretion disk into a supernova as well as causing it to collapse into itself, creating a black-hole singularity, thus producing the exact same conditions the red matter did in the Hobus star. Who knows, but the similarity is far closer than you deduced.

Either way, a man-made incursion into the Mirror Universe allowed not only inter-dimensional travel, but time travel as well. There is no reason to assume the red-matter could not create a similar, time-displaced intrusion into yet another “alternate” universe (and not time-travel alone), especially when the method is so similar. In fact it is not the similarities, but rather the subtle differences between the otherwise comparable results that takes Nero & Spock back in time to the ST09 universe, rather than the Mirror universe, which I think was the whole point of this theory to begin with: Precedence for traveling in time between alternate universes which otherwise behave exactly like the “Prime” universe but allow the “Prime” timeline to continue.