How Time Travel Works

[sir_razorback]

  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

Comments

[radiumhead]

I like the branch theory from the professor's blackboard in Back to the Future 2, i agree with that one. I think thats the one that applies to the new Trek movies. The new ones are branched off from the old ones but the old ones still exist.

[aaron_bourque]

Someone did a very very simple computer simulation on what would happen if you went back in time and killed your grandfather.

Answer?

Not much.

See?

[deleonjh]

But Marty shouldn't have existed even if he got his parents back together. They wouldn't have had sex at the exact same moment, eaten the exact same nutrients, exercised the exact same amount, and did all the other things that ensured that the egg and sperm that would combine to make Marty McFly would do so. That always kind of bugged me.

Also, the family of Marty's memories were essentially wiped out and replaced with a happier one. Years of conversations and experiences were erased and now he basically has a different family whose only connection to the originals are their names and appearances. I mean, they don't even have the same personalities.

[melisus]

Time travel in the new Star Trek is something that I just don't get why it has so many fans' panties in a bunch. Like you pointed out, alternate realities (like the mirror-verse) have been known to fans since the series' original run. So when it's said quite blatently that Nero's passing through the black hole and attacking the Kelvin created an alternate universe, people keep insisting that the new movie screwed up the timelines

[sianmink]

Not only did Nero traveling back in time create an alternate universe,

But mucking all that up created an alternate past. All the previous time travel adventures (some of which had significant affect on the timeline) suddenly didn't happen or happened differently. Archer still went back in time and fought nazis cause that already happened, but Kirk never went back to 1930, 1969 or 1968, or 1986 San Francisco like we remember, Cisco didn't go back to 2024 and take Gabriel Bell's place, Quark wasn't the real 1947 Roswell alien, The Enterprise E never went back to 2063, etc. Mind all these things *could* happen, but they aren't set in stone now, so human history all the way back to 1893 or so could be altered from Trek Prime's, and none of the events that happened in prime should be seen as inevitable.

[melisus]

That's true, but I don't think it destroys the entire Trek canon timeline. That's probably why in the new fandom as far as fic and whatnot goes I prefer the new reboot universe because there's so much that might and might not happen. Because there's only one movie and therefore one instance of events to go on, it allows you to explore new canon and, like with your examples, wonder what might happen and what might NOT happen now.

[sianmink]

Right, Trek Prime still exists in a side-branch, which Spock can now no longer return to without dimensional travel, since any direct link between his time and Trek JJA was obliterated.

Things could very well happen similarly, but this frees the JJA shard from previous canon and lets it do its own thing, which really is quite exciting.

[thokstar]

Given that we've never seen any evidence for time travel (and that the ability to time travel can propagate through the time stream, by let time travelers teach their ancestors about time travel if it's at all practical), any universe with viable time travel likely has different rules than ours.

That said, I prefer either Many Worlds (what you call multiverse, but with the idea that any time a choice is made, for each possible alternative a universe branches off; this is a useful model from dealing with variations of Quantam Mechanics even if you don't have time travel) or Predestination Paradox as personal preference. Basically I prefer all possible universes or 1 possible universe to universe satisfying some arbitrary set of unnatural conditions.

I also understand the number of good stories arising from variations on Timey Wimey Ball time travel is much higher than the number of good stories arising from any other form of fictional time travel.

[sianmink]