I have been and always shall be a Trek fan….Alex

It follows he age old question of killing yourself in the past. If i go back in time and kill myself, then I am killing the future of an alternate reality of myself. This has no bearing on me going back in the first place since I have been transported to a new universe. On the other hand if I am transported to the same universe than I could never kill myself since I would have the memories of an lder version of myself trying to kill me and failing, hence completing the cycle of my going back in time in the first place. Since the ST 09 writers decided to go with the alternate universe theory, it is better to account for this new universe as one that always existed and not one that was created, even if they only differ at the point where nero intruded. It may be a little confusing but if you think about it, it makes more sense because then spock coming to the same alternate universe can be accounted for. Don’t confuse an alternate universe that has the same history as the “prime” universe with the “prime” universe otherwise the time line really does fall apart and makes no sense. Nero doesn’t create a new universe, but rather is the necessary change that makes this pre existing universe different from the “prime” universe.

As for if I liked the movie, (I also liked some of Spock’s early life on Vulcan, and I liked hearing Archer’s name one last time) It was a hard to accept the story, it was a series of irrational coincidental events that just seemed silly…
…and since everything else was crazy, the fact that Black Hole really didn’t act like a black hole isn’t such a bad issue relatively, so it might as well be an time portal or cross-universe cosmic anomaly as anything else…

Fun thoughts: (1) If the special red-matter Black Hole was responsible for the time travel, shouldn’t a supernova also be popping out into the past?
(2) If Nero was defeated by sending him into an other red-matter black hole, does that mean he’ll go back an other 100 years so Archer in the NX-01 can finish him off?
Just rhetorical question, I’m only joking.
…Actually that speculative joke can serve a purpose, if Nero goes into a time-travel back hole again at the end of Star Trek XI, and comes out further in the past… in his wrecked ship… if he fixes up his ship, he could change the time-line again, he could be off living in a 3rd time-line,
No one in time-line 2 would know about it…
…Maybe Nero could invade Earth in the year 2011 as a sequel….
…Maybe Nero could invade Earth in the year 2000 and run for President of the United States as a sequel…

Star Trek has handled time travel in many different ways, really if you create a new time-line and your in the new time-line, unless you have the power to cross over to alternate time-lines (to get back to your original time-line) you’d never know if your old time-line still existed or not.

Weather or not the universe was still there when the Guardian of Forever was used to change the time-line is a question of perspective, maybe it was a different type of time travel resulting in a different sort of paradox, or maybe the Guardian was only speaking about the observable universe when talking about how time was changed, a perspective only taking into account the observable universe the characters existed in at that time.
(and the unchanged universe might still exist, just not in a way the Guardian of Forever was designed to observe or interact with)

So what ever happened in this movie, the only issues I have with it is how ridiculous the story was, in it’s own universe it doesn’t affect the flow of any other series.
With out any new Star Trek canon, the novels while semi-apocryphal can continue on stories about time-line 1, while the movies can deal with time-line 2…
All my favorites, ENTERPRISE, NEXT GENERATION, and DEEP SPACE NINE are completely unchanged in time-line 1.
Actually, my personal favorite “Enterprise” isn’t affected ether way, it should be totally protected from the changes in the time-line anyway due to being before 2233… SO Enterprise exists in both time-lines…
And First Contact should be in both time-lines, however, the Enterprise-E in First Contact would be from an alternate future than the time-line of this new Star Trek movie series. (No problem, we’ve seen lots of alternate futures in Star Trek over the years)

Personally here’s the view on Star Trek time-line that I like.
http://www3.ns.sympatico.ca/jcfancy1/StarTrek-Pocket.html

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.