How Time Travel Works
Ok, I'm a pretty big Trek fan and I really enjoyed the new movie. If you go read theofficial Trek forums though, there's a small civil war going on there. A vocal group of people who look on Gene's vision as a holy work that must not be ever tampered with make the entire comm hard to read. I got abit caught up in it and posted a huge message about my personal theories on Time Travel and how it applies to Star Trek XI. Now I know that NoScans is more geared to comics than Trek, but time travel is something that tends to come up in this medium too. That and this much stuff is just too big to lose in the annals of the cesspool which is StarTrek.com's message board.
We all know Star Trek and Time Travel are so intertwined it's like looking at a Kama Sutra manual. People have been saying that other timelines don't exist, that they do exist, that there can only be one timeline, that tribbles can't grow legs... bleh! It's enough to make a person's head spin. I'm going to lay out what I think of when it comes to time travel, and you folks can do the same.
The first theory is what I call the Prime theory, one that's explained in great detail in Back to the Future II. In it you can only have one viable timeline. Events in your present effect your future, so travelling to the future to undo something that caused a change in the past isn't possible. You would be travelling along the current, or *wrong* from the traveller's Point-Of-View, future. He even does a great little diagram of it, go check it out if your memory's abit fuzzy.
This is what more than a few folks around here have been saying, that the Trek we all know and love has been wiped from canon, it no longer exists. I only partially agree with this version of timelines, I'll get back to it later.
The next major theory could be called the Multiverse theory, in which any desicion made splits a timeline into two forks. You quickly get an infinite number of forks this way, kindof like the plasticware tray at KFC. No matter how many sporks yoiu pull out of it, more show up. Minor changes that have little to no effect on the world at large would be too weak to hold their own cohesion, and eventually meld back together. Would the universe really rotate around weather you had chocolate or strawberry milk? Probably not. A universe where Linclon wasn't assasinated though? You get the idea.
The third major theory is one Trek calls the Predestination Paradox. In this, the traveller is not moving on a forking timeline at all, but rather a lineal one. The events surrounding the Traveller's journey happen because he was there, with effect preceeding cause. This is very similar to the first theory, with the exception that the Traveller is seeing current events playing out as remembered history. The Quantum Leap episode involving the shooting of JFK is a great example of this.
You can probably think of variations on a theme, but I'm betting what you come up with could be considered one of these three major types of timeline resolution.
Now, for your typical traveller, the Prime Theory is what holds true. The reason for this is that it's simply impossible for a person to be aware of alternate timelines 5th dimensionally. If the 4th dimension is the timeline, the 5th dimension could be stated as the lateral distance between discrete timelines. We all live in Time, but we don't precieve the spaces between time. For a normal traveller, they don't exist.
As applied to Marty McFly in the first movie, he's on a mission to keep from no longer existing. He set a fork in motion that lead to him being born on time, and one that didn't. We all know how it ended, that he restored his birth with some changes in the way his family lives because he made his dad more confident. Making a new fork of it's own in the process.
What if he failed? He blinks out of existance, right? Wrong. From the point of view from everyone in that (the success) timeline he vanishes. From his point of view though he stands up. He looks at his photo. The images on it now reflect his family as they were at that instant the photo was taken. They're younger, they might not all be there, but he's still the same. He goes to Doc, shows him the photo, and they have to decide rather quickly what to do. Does he now stay in 1955, or go back to 1985 to an uncertian future? The point is there are two very distinct realities, but from their limited perception there is only one. Their relative *prime*.
Multiverses are Trek's stock-in-trade. You have the Mirror universe, the Enterprise-C episode, and too many Worfs for one shuttlecraft for examples. *These all disprove the Prime theory as true*.
Let's start with Enterprise-C, because this will be the most fun to explain. The episode starts off with our POV with the D. It's still normal, in what we regard as the Trek Prime timeline. All of a sudden the C enters the frame and everything changes. What alot of people take for granted now is that the D is in a changed timeline. It's *not*. The D is in it's normal timeline. *The C is the Prime.* It fell through an anomaly to go to the future in a 5th dimensional fashion. From our viewpoint, it has to go back because not doing so changes our focus from our normal Prime to the new Prime. This is how Tasha manages to come back from the dead, because she never was. It's a Tasha from a completely different timeline. From that D's point of view, the C went in the rift, and nothing changed. Our POV shifted back to the familiar, but if there had been a camera still onboard that D, we would have seen the aftermath. Actually, if you really want to know, go read Q-squared. One of it's timelines covers this exact setting.
The Mirror Universe is another example of alternate timelines, moreso because we've gone back to it several times. It wasn't a one-off possibility, we've seen it evolve. We know it's still there.
The Too-Many-Worfs episode introduces us to a way to actually measure the 5th dimension, because each Worf is eventually identified by his distinct quantum signature if I remember the treknology right.
Now, how does all this apply to Star Trek XI. That's what you're still reading for, how is all this relevant? The first question we want to answer is why are everybody's ages all wierd? The only way this can be explained really is the other major time-travel event in the timeline at this point, the Xindi Temporal War. Earth was attacked because of events altered from the future, and I think the number given was 6 million dead. This is going to cause a huge ripple effect, that could easily mess with when people are concieved in regards to what we think is normal. Like it or not, it did happen. Archer was even mentioned as an Admiral in the Fleet. So already we're off the established Prime into new territory. Maybe it's a new tactical way of thinking that a ship in construction on the ground is more defendable than one in space? Who knows.
Now Spock Prime falls back in time and causes another fork. From his point of view, the events of Trek XI happened. That is *his* new Prime. The line he came from still exists, but now it's on a fundamentally different 5th dimensional wavelength and there's no way he can return to it with 'conventional' means of time travel.
So in a nutshell, my opinion is that Star Trek XI happens in a different reality than what we're used to, and this is my reasoning for it. I'm not quite so sure why I like to think about unprovable, theoretical things like this so much, but it's a fun way for me to stretch my brain. I can accept this, and I'm looking forward to the next Trek outing Paramount has for us.