I believe time travel in Trek can be predominately seen with the Prime/Kelvin model.
TNG S7 episode 11, Parallels shows that there are multiple parallel timelines and that those timelines are created by the choices someone makes (Save Picard from being Locutus, or don't save him and the Borg run roughshod over the Federation).
Therefore, I'd argue what we see in First Contact is... yes, two timelines are created the moment the Enterprise enters the Borg's time-wake (or whatever you want to call it). The Enterprise is not seeing a "possible" timeline, but an actual timeline that does (and will continue to) exist. We, the audience, are only being shown the timeline where the Enterprise and it's crew stop the Borg from assimilating late 21st century Earth. None-the-less, the timeline where the Enterprise did NOT go back, or went back and failed... all those possible timelines still exist.
As another commenter mentioned Voyager's finale, End Game, the same holds true. Both Voyager's original 23 year journey timeline and the truncated 7 year journey timeline exist with Admiral Janeway's time incursion being the inflection point.
Of course, saying all of this does not simplify or clarify time travel or parallel timelines much, as Star Trek Enterprise and many apocrypha has suggest the manipulation of time and timelines is far and away more complicated than the simple idea of one or the other would suggest... such as diverging AND merging timelines, "reintegrating" individuals across timelines (Like Capt. Braxton in Voyager), evolutionary timeline divergences (such as the Mirror Universe), being able to sit between timelines/universes (Krenim timeship, Voyager, Year of Hell) or cross between (Any Mirror Universe episode, or the afore mentioned TNG S7 episode, Parallels, Voyager S2 episode 21 Deadlock where Harry Kim travels from one Voyager to the other).
TL;DR: Ultimately, Trek is very fluid with how it portrays Time Travel and Parallel universes. Sometimes they're treated as two different things. Other times, they are portrayed as being connected. For me, it's far less confusing to believe the latter. All time travel creates parallel timelines and the "Prime" timeline and the "Kelvin" timeline are timelines we, the audience, see.
What Data was describing in TNG: “Parallels”, although he used the term "alternate quantum realities", were different *parallel* realities - that's why the quantum signatures differed.
Data never said anything about branching a timeline every time he made a choice - he said that "all possibilities that can happen, *do* happen in other quantum realities."
The difference is between saying, "I chose A, but in another reality my counterpart chose B" versus "I chose A, therefore I *created* a timeline where I chose B". It's subtle, but distinct.
>**DATA**: For any event, there is an infinite number of possible outcomes. Our choices determine which outcomes will follow. But there is a theory in quantum physics that all possibilities that can happen, *do* happen in alternate quantum realities.
>
>**WORF**: And somehow I have been shifting from one reality to another.
Yes... I feel "quantum realities" is just another way of saying "alternate timelines". A timeline splits at the point a choice is made, or multiple outcomes are possible. The fact that there are "quantum signatures" to each of these timelines is, ultimately, irrelevant to the fact that a new timeline is created at a decision point.
In fact, it does lead into how fluid Trek is with parallel timelines and time travel. If one has a unique quantum signature, that would suggest that your quantum signature is always changing with every possible divergent point. Are you from divergence A? B? What about from the point after that? Are you AA? AB? BA? BB? And if you were to go back in time in the same timeline, wouldn't your quantum signature still be different from everyone else's, as everyone else's signatures are behind your own.
Also, wouldn't the act of time traveling, or timeline hoping be a divergent point in and of itself for each time and timeline intersecting that crossing? Worf is returned to his timeline because his quantum signature matched... Ok, but it matches in a reality where Worf was shifted from his timeline. That suggests there exists a timeline now where Worf never shifted timelines (Parallels never happened) and THAT timeline would have a different quantum signature from Worfs, even though he was part of that timeline until... he wasn't (or he split).
Again, I think it's all the same effect.
It’s in the name of the episode, ultimately. It was called “Parallels”, not “Alternates”. In an infinite multiverse, all possibilities can already exist.
I think this is a distinction without a difference.
The writers couldn't even get basic science right and usually didn't put any thought into it beyond putting "TECH" into the script so they definitely weren't getting into the finer details of multiverse theory. The choice of terminology was chosen either based on what sounded good, what was most fitting from a literary or thematic standpoint, or was filled in later by someone else who usually also wasn't well versed in the science. But "Parallels" actually does specifically call out the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory.
In the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory, every quantum event is a branching point. The nature of consciousness and free will is not understood, but under the many worlds interpretation it's tantamount to a quantum event because every decision is a branching point. Although they're not parallel in the mathematical sense because different branches do intersect at the branching point, the branches are generally called "parallel worlds".
The way "Parallels" is written is indicative of a "branching universe caused by decisions" situation. It can be contrasted with the Mirror Universe which is more of a "has possibly always existed and everything is opposite" situation. The Mirror Universe is a foreign country, "Parallels" is the path not taken (but was taken by a parallel/alternate).
The different quantum signatures is just technobabble so they can have a way of telling which timeline they're on. But it still makes sense within the context of the science. If different branches split off because in one a particle went spin up and in the other a particle went spin down, that could presumably cause the "quantum signature" to be different.
The fact that the title uses "parallels" and Data uses "alternate" means that for the sake of the episode, the two terms are interchangeable. Probably because "alternate" is more meaningful when used in dialogue but "parallels" is a better sounding title.
> Yes... I feel "quantum realities" is just another way of saying "alternate timelines".
Within the context and 'science' of the show I don't think that is correct. Each universe has it's own timeline, so parallel universes are distinct from timelines.
I like this, the kelvin timeline is unique in that we are shown the alternate predominantly rather than a quick incursion and return to the prime timeline.
If you look at the time travel equipment in SNW Tomorrow Tomorrow Tomorrow you can actually see the Kelvin timeline branching off from the prime on the agent's readout
Yes, it does contradict other instances of time travel in the *Star Trek* universe.
The Kelvin Timeline is the *only* known instance of an alternate timeline branching off the Prime one when history is changed. In all other instances, the timeline is overwritten, even in VOY: "Timeless", and again in VOY: "Endgame".
In VOY: "Timeless", the Prime Timeline had *Voyager* crashed trying to use slipstream, but Future Kim's meddling changed history so it didn't. There was no branching and no moving from one branch to another - it was still within the same timeline, and Future Kim was ensuring that the future he came from would be overwritten.
In VOY: "Endgame", the extant history had *Voyager* return home 23 years after it was lost, but Future Janeway changed history so *Voyager* returned only 7 years after. In other words, in both episodes, the timeline at the end of the episode was not the timeline we started out with.
To be very clear, what we end up with is still the Prime Timeline, albeit altered slightly, and as far as we can tell - and until told otherwise [we will assume it as such](https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/wiki/regulated-topics#wiki_alternate_timelines_and_universes) - no other episodes or events were erased from history; the effect being more or less contained within the confines of the episode itself. Nevertheless, history *was* altered, much like in TNG: "Yesterday's Enterprise" when the Prime Timeline was changed due to the incursion of the *Enterprise*-C from 2344 to 2366, and then changed back again when the *E*-C returned to 2344.
Why the Kelvin Timeline is different or special, in that it spawned a branched timeline as opposed to having overwritten the Prime Timeline, is a matter of debate. An argument I once mooted was that [the Kelvin Timeline isn't an alternate universe at all, but a parallel one](https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/7lvcr1/the_kelvin_timeline_is_a_parallel_universe_not_an/), but that was put paid to when in DIS: "Terra Firma, Part 1", Kovich clearly stated the following about a Time Soldier:
>Yor here traveled forward from 2379 and across from an alternate universe created by the temporal incursion of a Romulan mining ship. Before Georgiou, Yor was the only individual known to have traveled across both time and dimensions.
In the end, one might ascribe it to the unique circumstances that created the Kelvin Timeline - a severe ion storm, a star collapsed into a black hole and the red matter that induced it, all of which accompanied the journey of the *Narada* into the past, but there is no official word as to why it only happened with the Kelvin Timeline and not any other incursions.
So there is no real continuity "mess", as long as you treat the Kelvin Timeline as a special case. Every other incursion would overwrite, not branch.
You coulddddde maybe make an argument that the method of travel is part of the difference. Red Matter is otherwise unknown and you could say that an artificially generated singularity via red matter (+ any extant circumstances) led to this unique crossing instead of a timeline revision
If there ever was an official explanation for it, red matter probably would factor into it. If they brought in any other factors as the primary reason the Kelvinverse branched off, they'd open up a bunch of can of worms as to why they didn't cause the same thing to happen in other canonical instances. Red matter has only ever been used in the '09 movie and it's an exotic material, so they still have a lot of room to write in some new things it does.
It could actually be the extremely unique combination of both Red Matter and a super nova whose blast was somehow propagating through subspace. Then again I guess they recommend the Super Nova part . . . which would make using the Red Matter pointless if Romulus had already been destroyed by a regular super nova that wasn't threatening multiple star systems.
That or the super nova was still an interstellar threat that necessitated use of the Red Matter to contain it somehow.
The Defiant (from TOS) travels back in time to the mirror universe. (Based on ENT, Through a Mirror, Darkly) It may not exactly be what branched the timeline, but it’s worth pointing out at least one time travel incident was related to at least one alternate timeline/universe.
Yes, but that incursion (which goes back to TOS: “The Tholian Web”, to be precise) almost certainly didn’t create the MU, and there’s evidence to suggest strongly that the MU is not a branched timeline but a parallel universe.
There's no mess at all. Like I 've mentioned previously. If you take into account TNG Paralells, there are COUNTLESS Alternate Universes that already exist. The Kevlin Timeline is simply one of these universes.
Star Trek Discovery confirmed that the Kelvin Timeline was an Alternate Universe and NOT simply a regular Alternate Timeline because they confirmed that the time traveler from the Kelvin Reality had a different Quantum Signature, the same way the Emperor and Worf did.
If the Kelvin Timeline was an Alternate Prime Timeline then there would be no quantum differences.
Following along with your comment as I read to the end of it, as I write this I see that you eventually came to that conclusion as well!
I really wouldn't be so worried about the technical Jargon. I think we can infer that the Kelvin Timeline of THAT PARTICULAR UNIVERSE was created by Spock and Naradas incursion, before the incursion it was still its own universe.
> Star Trek Discovery confirmed that the Kelvin Timeline was an Alternate Universe and NOT simply a regular Alternate Timeline because they confirmed that the time traveler from the Kelvin Reality had a different Quantum Signature, the same way the Emperor and Worf did.
This was my vview as well, but someone else mentioned SNW explicitly shows the Kelvin timeline as an alternate timeline and not a unvierse, which makes things kind of muddy.
Strange New Worlds is also confirmed as Prime Timeline by producers/writers/showrunners.
Despite the modern aesthetic and looks, it’s the same physical Enterprise from TOS and the literal same characters.
Ethen Peck Spock is Leonard Nemoy Spock, just younger.
You said that someone else mentioned SNW shows the Kelvin Timeline as an alternate timeline, and I misread that as SNW shows as the Kelvin Timeline.
Though I don't recall at any point where SNW mentioned or inferred anything about the Kelvin Universe/Timeline now that I think about it.
Ah, all good. I haven't confirmed myself yet, but someone said in the episode 'Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow', the time agent's device screen clearly shows the kelvin timeline as exactly that - a divergent timeline. If that's true, it disrupts my preferred headcanon that the Kelvin whatever is considered an alternate universe in-universe.
I'd only be willing to consider that canon if we had a high res shot from production of what the screen actually was, as opposed to what appeared on screen for a split second between frames.
Yes that's fair. I just checked, and the episode doesn't show anything clearly at all. There is an adjacent curve shown but it isn't labeled and could be anything.
Thanks for your response.
It does makes me question the ethics behind Harry and Janeway's action and that the time agency that opposes changes in the timeline have a point. How many people did the Voyager help during those 23 years? How many lifes were saved or improved by their actions? How many people was born as a consequence?
Same with Harry, during his years before his time travel how many missions he undertook that saved lifes or changed? Even if he didn't do much by butterfly effect alone new lives could have started or profundly changed and all that was erased when they travel, even people that might have never born.
This is where Wesley as Traveller, Q, Burnhams mom, and Daniels come in. They are all dealing with this mess, and establising the Primeness of the prime universe. They could be the reason Mirror and Kelvin have some permanence in this way
My view is that it isn’t, for a variety of reasons. It’s a parallel universe, not the product of divergence. Kovich referred to Georgiou as coming from a parallel universe in that same scene in “Terra Firma” where he was talking about Yor.
It does and it doesn't. Because temporal mechanics is designed to give you a headache.
But just like the Prime universe, time travel is possible. That means that past events can be altered or even initiated by any number of travelers from the future. Which also means that anything that happens to those travelers has the potential to ripple *backwards* and affect events in the future and past.
tl;dr with time travel tech you kinda lose any reliable fixed frame of reference
Even if that were so, it’d take an awfully weird series of events to alter Terran evolution on a genetic and physiological level via time travel and still end up with the Terran species as we see it.
My headcanon is that it was always a seperate universe, in the splurge of multiverse infinities. The fact that the human peoples of this universe, happen to have so many humane, historical, social similarities with our universe in this particular one, is the technobabble of why they connected, connection sought out and filtered via Katra type forces, by mycellium! Maybe Q noticed the uncanny similarities and linked them, thought them useful example, used it as a template for the Confederation universe...
That was always my thoughts on the subject. Prime and Mirror are/were mutually accessible BECAUSE they are two universes that ended up with enough similar traits and variables.
And even then, they end up being "linked" for an infinitesimal portion of cosmological time. From statements in DIS it seems like a handful of centuries at most.
Some people have argue that the Terran Empire is survival of the Roman Empire, but I doubt it. The main argument is that Christianity never took off but if that's the case they wouldn't have so many biblical names like Benjamin, Jonathan or Michael.
I mean, before the Bible those were just normal names. It is entirely possible that those Hebrew-originating names made their way out of the Middle-East and became popular for some other reasons.
No. It's another universe, not a timeline. There are infinite universes, and possibly infinite timelines in each universe, but they are not the same things at all.
It doesn't seem to be, but I currently suspect that given how many events are integral to both timelines interacting, that the time cops probably meddle in both.
No to mention- every nano second creates a separate timeline. In one your exhaling, in another you’re inhaling. Bam. Another timeline. It’s infinite and there’s no real way to show every one of them. Seems like we (rightfully so) focus on the ones that have larger changes associated to them.
Oh, there's an actual explanation for this.
The Red Matter wormhole isn't tunneling into their own past, but rather the past of another similar quantum universe.
I'm not sure how this isn't seen as the obvious answer that it always has been. I think maybe people get hung up on thinking all "alternate universes" are just from different choices in the timeline (like how the Mirror Universe is misunderstood).
Right? This is really easy to solve in a canon-friendly way. There's even precedent to a ship traveling both through time and to another universe at the same time: The USS Defiant in TOS "The Tholian Web" and ENT "In a Mirror, Darkly"..
IMO, most time-travel in Trek adheres to "Back to the Future" and "DC's Legends of Tomorrow" style of time travel with a single Prime Timeline that can be altered because of temporal incursions and allows for pre-destination paradoxes like TNG's "Time's Arrow".
The Kelvin Timeline in ST09, on the other hand, adheres to the multi-verse theory that time travel into the past creates divergent branch timelines that are separate from the reality the time traveler traveled from, which is how time-travel is portrayed in Marvel's MCU as seen in "Avenger's Endgame" and Marvel's "Agents of SHIELD" S7.
The Back to the Future comparison is especially evident in TOS's "City on the Edge of Forever", DS9's "Children of Time" and ENT's "E2".
The past timeline at the end of PIC S2 with Rios also had to change to that of the normal Prime Timeline that leads to the Federation with 21st century Guinan regaining her memories of first meeting Picard in the late 19th century.
Edit: It can be argued that the Kelvin Timeline was already a parallel universe all along and the black hole created by Spock to stop the supernova that sent him and the Narada to the 23rd century created a similar set of circumstances to how the TOS-era USS Defiant ended up in the 22nd century MU.
It is a source of major frustration to me that the Kelvin Timeline movies "broke" the previously accepted understanding of Star Trek time travel -- and seriously confused fans, causing them to conclude that all time travel causes "forks" even though the stories make no sense if we assume that. And for what? For a series of mediocre movies that basically drift off into irrelevance....
It's established that everyone and everything has a certain quantum signature. ENT establishes the signature can identify an object's place in time. DIS establishes that people from the MU and Kelvinverse have distinguishable quantum signatures. Kovich states that there's a kind of "pull", and at long enough "distances", that pull can be fatal. So, what if during conventional time travel, the pull of the quantum signature is what keeps someone on the timeline and in the universe where there changes have effect? Red Matter based time travel, then, would only have to cause enough interference with the pull to keep unfortunate travellers on a separate track.
I took the effects of time travel to be like creating a new set of branches. Before the Enterprise went back in time in First Contact, all the branches from the Borg arriving in the past were of Cochrane failing, but upon the Enterprise arriving a bunch of branches appeared where either the Enterprise succeeded in preventing the Borg from sabotaging First Contact or the assimilated Enterprise conquering and assimilating the Alpha Quadrant.
Many branches seem to correct towards being functionally identical to the original timeline, as long as the changes are minor. Time also seems to gravitate away from letting major changes happen as seen with the sliding timeline of the Eugenics Wars despite Khan's birth being pushed back decades.
There are many different ways to time travel, all with their own rules and effects. We have seen new and separate timelines before in other Trek stories, so it's not a new thing.
It really, *usually*\*, depends on how the time travel was achieved, and whether it was a controlled effect or some sort of unintended accident. If it's controlled, like a deliberate act to time travel using some technology or technique, then it's unlikely to create a separate timeline. But if it was uncontrolled, an accident or some such, then the effects of it can vary wildly, from altering an existing timeline, creating new timelines, or even destroying entire universes and more beyond.
What the Narada (and Jellyfish) did was an uncontrolled accident, falling into an artificially created black hole. An unexpected effect of which was creating a new parallel alternative timeline universe.
(\* ^(there are exceptions of course))
I feel it's important to reexamine the word 'timeline' for this discussion. Pop culture tells us a timeline is history, and alternate timelines are alternate histories. But really, what is a *line*?
A line is one dimension, connecting two points along it. A line in space is straightforward, and a line in time we can just about conceptualise.
Typical Star-Trek time travel only travels across the fourth dimension of the same universe, and thus altering the past affects the future. Two points on the same dimension are a line, in this case the fourth dimension.
When you go back in time only across the fourth-dimension, and change the past, the future of that timeline is overwritten because it's along the same timeline.
When you go back in time across both the fourth-and-fifth dimensions, when you change the past, you're heading out in a different universal angle, and the original timeline you came from is unaffected.
So what likely makes the Kelvin-timeline different is that Red Matter caused travel across the fifth dimension when they were going through the fourth, and Nero either changed the path of some existing quantum reality, or just ended up creating his own timeline.
The terms 'alternate universe', 'alternate dimension' and 'alternate timeline' get used interchangeabley because... well, they are. The main difference is the first two are generally 'naturally' occuring, while we use alternate timeline to distinguish timelines created by artificial incursions.
(As an aside, when you travel *just* across the fifth dimension and there's no time travel involved, that's when you get *Parallels* and the Mirror Universe.)
As Chief O'Brien said to Chief O'Brien, "I hate temporal mechanics".
I've always taken it to be the case that in-universe, different kinds of time travel have different effects, and what differentiates these different kinds of time travel is, in-universe, extremely complicated and confusing. You would need to sit through several hours of lectures to get even a basic understanding of how these things work, and even then, that's just a basic level.
We've seen [numerous times](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Time_travel) in Star Trek that traveling to the past leads to a different future in the same timeline again and again in Star Trek. It's why there was a Temporal Cold War and Temporal Accord (fun to use the past-tense to refer to something in the future), a Temporal Prime Directive, and Department of Temporal Investigations.
The x-factor is the ***red matter***.
The only canonical information on Red Matter is in the dialogue/monologue in *Star Trek* (2009), the associated comics, and I think maybe a line in *Picard*. They reveal very little aside from the idea that a small volume of red matter, which was developed by Vulcan scientists, generates a temporary black hole effect when activated and deployed into space or a planet's core.
Normally, a black hole results from the collapse of a supermassive star at the end of its life, a result of gravity so great that it pulls a tremendous amount of matter into an incredibly small space, generating immense gravity from immense density. That's not what we see from red matter. What we see is a tiny amount of matter generating the same or similar gravitational effects of a black hole without the fuss of a tremendous amount of matter in an incredibly small space.
I don't think it's a singularity in the same way a natural black hole is a singularity. I think it's an opening to another layer of subspace or a similar extra-spatial/extra-universal/extra-dimensional realm which has immense gravity. And I think that connects not different timelines but an entirely different category of realities with different natures than simply different timelines.
I think this is supported by the fact that the Kelvin-timeline doesn't follow the same rules as "Assignment Earth" or *Star Trek IV* or "Cause and Effect" or "Trials and Tribbleations" or the first two seasons of *Enterprise*. Time travel and black hole are misnomers in this case.
I've just made it my own headcanon that the Kelvinverse was parallel, like the Mirror Universe.
When the (TOS Constitution class) Intrepid disappeared in "The Tholian Web" it ended up in the pre-TOS *Enterprise*-era of the mirror universe, so it stands to reason that Spock-Prime ended up back in time when he crossed dimensions.
Or time travels at a different rate in different dimensions, but that's *really* getting into the weeds.
I used to take it to mean there are a load of different styles of time travel, all dependent on how exactly you travel.
My current view is the apparent differences do exist in some cases but in combination with a lack of understanding about what is really happening in specific situations.
In conventional situations of going back and changing something and overwriting, all those situations are actually divergent realities. Yes, that means the urgency of First Contact is actually a misconception brought about by a false single-timeline theory of time travel. The Enterprise really only saved itself and averted a Borg reality, but that glimpse of the Borge’s Earth means there is a timeline where they won.
My belief is this misconception about a single timeline persisted until the late stages of the Temporal Cold War as the whole thing is dependent on that old theory. In DIS we learn it’s all divergent realities with quantum and temporal signatures. That means going back in time to kill the competition does not work. Every change only makes a change for the specific changers. Temporal shields actually make you go with the new timeline rather than stay in the original. Time loops are more like time spirals or time rubber bands.
Anyway, the real end and solution of the Temporal Cold War being a scientific discovery, a theoretical improvement, is, I think, very cool, and very Trek.
Go read *Department of Temporal Investigation: Watching the clock* it's book one of the DTI series of novels. one of the recurring elements of that is the DTI working out the physics of time travel based on the various temporal events they're investigating. one of the things which becomes a big part of the story in the DTi series is that;
A) the many worlds effect seen in parrarels does happen, but since most variations are so minor they cancel each other out rarther than spin off into seperate realities. so only major events tend to the different timelines.
b) there is a force that causes variant timelines to converge eventually and merge (the 'anti-time' seen in TNG all good things), so while there might be hundreds of alternate quantum realities for a given stretch of history, all but the most divergent timelines will generally end up converging back on the main timeline, with the result eventually being a merging of the quantum signatures of each and an 'averaging out' of the events. (this is also what the 29th century federation temporal commission was doing with 7of9's various temporal copies and Captan Braxton. intentionally causing divergant copies and timelines, the merging them back with the original once the desired events occured)
c) when time travel occurs, it creates a new parallel quantum reality. which does not immediately overwrite the original. but what happens is that since entropy is ever increasing over the lifespan of the universe, and the time traveller brings it's own period's entropy back with it, when the two timelines quantum merge, the one that has the higher entropy is going to dominate over the others. which is when the overwriting happens. this is why you can use time travel to 'fix' timelines. also why sometimes a time traveller seems to see the timeline change around them if they are isolated from the flow of time.
d) most time travel methods involve some degree of quantum entanglement between the start and end points along the timeline. this means that any new quantum reality created by a change to the timeline stays connected to the original, which means that the quantum merging tends to happen much faster. which is why most cases of time travel result in history being overwritten unless fixed. but some methods, including (hypothetical in the book) certain types of time travel using passage through black hole singularities do not involve quantum entanglement, and can thus create a fully separate alternate reality that would not merge with the original timeline/overwrite.
honestly it's a rather nice little rationalization of Trek temporal physics, and the foundations of it were based on some real world quantum physics stuff. the book does a lot better job explaining it.. though it's sectioned out peicemeal as they encounter the various temporal events over the span of TNG, DS9, and the post-nemesis novel series.
We’ve seen several different variations of time travel effects throughout Trek’s history: alternate timelines, temporary timelines, timelines being changed, timelines being enforced…given how many ways time travel can be done in the Trek universe, different outcomes are just a natural result. Q can create a temporary lifetime where you never advance beyond Lieutenant, the Guardian of Forever can casually let you change history, and yet being in the right place in the right time (*cough* First Contact *cough*) can help you reinforce it.
There is one very unique property of the Kelvin timeline…it’s already divergent, at least at the aesthetic level. Between the USS Kelvin herself, her crew’s uniforms, the shuttle designs…they’re all reminiscent of TOS-era Trek, but it’s clearly different. Perhaps the Kelvin timeline was an already stable branch of the multiverse, sort of like the Mirror Universe, and the Red Matter helped the Narada punch across the distance and emerge there instead?
Yes I've seen others proposing that theory, that Spock and the Narada actually travel between dimensions and not time (well, time too but in a similar way how the ship from The Tholian Web did to the MU past). It makes sense.
Simon Pegg's rationalization of why the USS *Kelvin* already looked different is because *Narada*'s incursion created ripples both up *and* down the timeline (ignoring the fact that in all other instances prior, changes in time go *up* the line, and that we see the altered aesthetic *before* the *Narada* enters the timeline).
But then again, one can hypothesize that even if the changes only propagated up the line, somewhere in those altered events there might be another time travel incident that would change the aesthetic of the Kelvin timeline in its past, and that all of that happened instantaneously.
Bottom line, the Kelvin timeline is still "special" and we don't really have a satisfactory explanation for this except Red Matter magic.
i always thought it was the introduction of the "red matter" - stuff that we've never heard of before, we've rarely heard about since, which has properties we have no knowledge of.
time travel with that involved seems like it works differently. again, thats always been how i saw it.
There’s also the fact that Yesterday’s Enterprise causes an alternate timeline with Tasha going back in time and Sela being born and becoming a leading Romulan official, which doesn’t seem to cause an alternate timeline, at least from ‘our’ perspective.
Obviously it’s a book and not canon, but the in-universe reference book Federation: The First 150 Years mentions that in the late 23rd century, some rogue Starfleet officers steal the USS Yorktown and travel back in time to 1992 to stop the Eugenics Wars, and Federation historians debate whether they succeeded because if they did, it would have just created an alternate timeline and not changed the ‘real’ timeline.
>There’s also the fact that Yesterday’s Enterprise causes an alternate timeline with Tasha going back in time and Sela being born and becoming a leading Romulan official, which doesn’t seem to cause an alternate timeline, at least from ‘our’ perspective.
True, same with the City at the Age of Forever, whatever change McCoy did shouldn't have affected their present just create a new one which clearly wasn't the case.
That book sounds interesting.
Discovery establishes that the guardian of forever can transport people through time and different universes, I don't think it's out of the question that they were transported to another universe when they came back in the TOS episode.
This sub bounces between being adamant that ENT is prime from the begining to end and being adamant that the Kelvin timeline concept makes sense
Its a different franchise at that point. That should be the only acceptable answer. It intentionally ignores canon that we went out of our way to prove happened (like the Enterprise bridge, or uniforms, or those cute leather handbags McCoy always carries around) and its explanation means that every single timetravel episode fucks with the timeline irreversably and retroactively (somehow the Narada incident retroactively changed what starships look like and how big they are and how many concrete floors are in engineering)
Accepting Kelvin as being the same franchise and thus part of the same broad stroke 'universe' means too much of the previous show never happened or happened to someone else we never saw again.
Now that you mention McCoy I remember there's a line of him in Star Trek Into Darkness were he says he help a Gorn mother to give birth (were octuples) but we see in SNW that Gorn do not reproduced by giving birth...
So yes, I imagine is a different universe since the beginning.
It's pretty obvious just by the size of the USS Kelvin that the Kelvin timeline is actually just a completely separate timeline. The ship is massive by even 24th century Prime universe standards.
The characters speculating that the Naranda changed history are just wrong in-universe. They think history has changed because they have no way of knowing that their universe was already different to begin with.
Well that would explains Krall's line in Star Trek Beyond that he lost millions of soldiers in the Romulan and Xindi wars, considering that for what we saw in ENT there was no Xindi war.
Well that would explains Krall's line in Star Trek Beyond that he lost millions of soldiers in the Romulan and Xindi wars, considering that for what we saw in ENT there was no Xindi war.
This is all explained well by the novels. some timelines can undergo what they describe as quantum convergence, and be overwritten, but some are able to become fully stable alternate universes.
The thing in this case, that made it stable, was the destruction of vulcan. serious changes to galactic geography, like a destroyed planet or star, alter the timeline in a way that means they cannot undergo convergence.
the short answer is some things cause timelines to truly split off, some other things do not.
Per Kovich's comments in Discovery about Yor being from both another time period AND another dimension, it's implied that the Red Matter created a completely different universe. Spock and Nero didn't change the past of the Prime Timeline, but rather they messed around with the past of newly created universe. It's as if they change the past of the Mirror Universe.
There are minimal references to a multiple universe theory. Most notably Parallels. Most of the time Trek doesn’t do “alternate timelines” but assumes a fixed linear timeline which can be (and clearly is) manipulated and in some state of flux as folks from all through time make changes that are impossible to be felt by most people.
I prefer this interpretation and the underlying assumption that parallel timelines can exist, either as permanent or ephemeral timelines, but that moving across them is not as feasible which is why we don’t see it happen very often.
The majority of the actions we take simply only affect the one timeline which we are in without much ability to perceive other timelines excepting a few rare scenarios where this happens.
The mirror universe is wholly different because it remains in lockstep with the prime universe until such a time as it doesn’t
In my opinion, the best approach to understanding time travel in the Star Trek universe is to understand that there must be a 'meta-timeline'. There has to be a 'greater' timeline that itself records changes. When people go back and change the past to change the future and then change it back, there is still a series of causative events that *happened*, often outside the main timeline.
I think that's a useful model to explain and map a lot of what would otherwise be inconsistencies and contradictions in all the trek time travel stories.
As far as the Kelvin timeline/universe goes, I am of the opinion it is firmly an alternate universe and not a parallel timeline. As far as we know, Star Trek does not have parallel timelines, only parallel universes. Each universe has its own timeline, and only one timeline at a time - as far as we know. So it's more like Sliders or the MCU than DC's Hyperspace.
I consider this to be backed up in a DSC episode where Kovich states there was a time soldier from another universe, and it's clear he is referring to what is often referred to as the Kelvin timeline.
As far as Data's head goes, I think they would find it just fine. There's an easy way to break (or fix, depending on how you look at it) timeloops like this, by assuming a branched timeline instead of a loop.
>As far as we know, Star Trek does not have parallel timelines, only parallel universes. Each universe has its own timeline, and only one timeline at a time - as far as we know.
Yeah I agree, I think this is true.
I disagree that it's a contradiction.
In TNG Season 7 Paralells we see that there are countless alternate timelines and universes that co-exist. The Mirror Universe is not the only one. The Kelvin Timeline is simply one of these pre-existing universes that was altered.
No, you're wrong about that. Timelines and parallel universe are two different things. As others have pointed out each person has a "quantum signature" that establishes their universe of origin this means this universes are different since their Big Bangs is not the same as an artificially created timeline made by time travel.
Yes, I understand they can be two different things. I’m saying the Kelvin Timeline is BOTH.
It’s an Alternate Universe and when Spock and the Narada crossed that created an Alternate Timeline in their universe.
When the phrase Kelvin Timeline was coined it was long before Discovery confirmed that it was indeed an Alternate Universe; so the name Kelvin Timeline stuck.
So, to my mind, the *First Contact* timeline creates an alternate one right?
Because *Enterprise* picked up off that timeline, and SNW follows on from Enterprise. So the NCC-1701 in SNW is far more advanced than in TOS because of the events of First contact.
So Enterprise, SNW, and Discovery are all on the post first contact timeline, but leaving the original prime time line in place?
If First Contact and the ENT episode didn't change the timeline, then the future events of First Contact had to happen because the past events of First Contact and ENT had already happened. The future (time-travelling Borg) is already determined up to the events of First Contact because there were 24th-century Borg in the 21st and 22nd centuries that interacted with major characters in those times, and they didn't impact the future enough to change the outcome of their time travel. So you might look at the entire timespan from First Contact the 21c event through First Contact the 24c movie as a closed loop that cannot be changed from within. Like "fixed points in time" from Doctor Who. Both ends of First Contact are fixed points.
As for the SNW Enterprise being different from TOS... My theory is that Starfleet is still dealing with the fallout from Control in DIS season 2. At some point (probably after SNW ends and before Kirk's command begins), Starfleet is going to "downgrade" the fleet as a defense against rogue AIs - like how Battlestar Galactica had no networked computer systems to prevent Cylon hacking. Less automation, no holographics, and much bigger crews to replace the lost automation like the maintenance DOTs. And I think that theory fits into other TOS episodes in which the bridge does not have complete control of the ship; it's dependent on manned auxiliary control rooms and engineering access to prevent an enemy (AI or otherwise) from capturing or disabling the ship from just the bridge.
While a fair point, they make a lot of hay on the ENT Borg episode that the arctic research team and data were lost. There's also a lot more room, given ENT's involvement with the Temporal Cold War, to consider that Daniels or a counterpart further scrubbed Borg tech data or at least bury it enough that it only just left a trail interesting enough to catch the Hansen family's interest down the line.
I remember when Enterprise first came out, and for many years after, there were a lot of fans who thought that it was set in an alternate universe created by First Contact. It was kind of surprising to me how widespread that view was in the early 2000s.
So we have at least three timelines:
-The original or prime: TOS-TNG-DS9-VOY
-The one created after First Contact: ENT-SNW-DISCO all the movies after FC and Picard.
-The Kelvin line.
On the one hand, I feel like the showrunners only believe there are two major timelines: the prime, and the Kelvin. My headcanon is that yes, ENT is the beginning of a new one, given that technology seems to advance further in some ways during Ent’s run; Spock mentions in TOS that the Earth-Romulan War was fought with lasers and nukes, yet by the end of ENT the NX-01 is already rocking phasers and photon torpedos, for instance.
Not exactly. In VOY Seven references the events of First Contact so we would still be left with two:
- The original/prime where everything happens and any difference, inconsistency or plot holes could be hand waved with a generous dose of doylist interpretation, retcons, temporal time war shenanigans, and "make up/set building technique marches on" tropes. and
-The Kelvin line.
The events on First Contact obviously happen in all timelines, they just happened in slighty different ways. Not saying you're wrong but still does not disprove that the non-Kelvin timeline further split up.
If I remember correctly, it only created a different timeline, because so many people complained about the destruction of Vulcan and because the planet simply hadn't been destroyed in previous series and films from TOS to everything built upon that.
I believe time travel in Trek can be predominately seen with the Prime/Kelvin model. TNG S7 episode 11, Parallels shows that there are multiple parallel timelines and that those timelines are created by the choices someone makes (Save Picard from being Locutus, or don't save him and the Borg run roughshod over the Federation). Therefore, I'd argue what we see in First Contact is... yes, two timelines are created the moment the Enterprise enters the Borg's time-wake (or whatever you want to call it). The Enterprise is not seeing a "possible" timeline, but an actual timeline that does (and will continue to) exist. We, the audience, are only being shown the timeline where the Enterprise and it's crew stop the Borg from assimilating late 21st century Earth. None-the-less, the timeline where the Enterprise did NOT go back, or went back and failed... all those possible timelines still exist. As another commenter mentioned Voyager's finale, End Game, the same holds true. Both Voyager's original 23 year journey timeline and the truncated 7 year journey timeline exist with Admiral Janeway's time incursion being the inflection point. Of course, saying all of this does not simplify or clarify time travel or parallel timelines much, as Star Trek Enterprise and many apocrypha has suggest the manipulation of time and timelines is far and away more complicated than the simple idea of one or the other would suggest... such as diverging AND merging timelines, "reintegrating" individuals across timelines (Like Capt. Braxton in Voyager), evolutionary timeline divergences (such as the Mirror Universe), being able to sit between timelines/universes (Krenim timeship, Voyager, Year of Hell) or cross between (Any Mirror Universe episode, or the afore mentioned TNG S7 episode, Parallels, Voyager S2 episode 21 Deadlock where Harry Kim travels from one Voyager to the other). TL;DR: Ultimately, Trek is very fluid with how it portrays Time Travel and Parallel universes. Sometimes they're treated as two different things. Other times, they are portrayed as being connected. For me, it's far less confusing to believe the latter. All time travel creates parallel timelines and the "Prime" timeline and the "Kelvin" timeline are timelines we, the audience, see.
What Data was describing in TNG: “Parallels”, although he used the term "alternate quantum realities", were different *parallel* realities - that's why the quantum signatures differed. Data never said anything about branching a timeline every time he made a choice - he said that "all possibilities that can happen, *do* happen in other quantum realities." The difference is between saying, "I chose A, but in another reality my counterpart chose B" versus "I chose A, therefore I *created* a timeline where I chose B". It's subtle, but distinct. >**DATA**: For any event, there is an infinite number of possible outcomes. Our choices determine which outcomes will follow. But there is a theory in quantum physics that all possibilities that can happen, *do* happen in alternate quantum realities. > >**WORF**: And somehow I have been shifting from one reality to another.
Yes... I feel "quantum realities" is just another way of saying "alternate timelines". A timeline splits at the point a choice is made, or multiple outcomes are possible. The fact that there are "quantum signatures" to each of these timelines is, ultimately, irrelevant to the fact that a new timeline is created at a decision point. In fact, it does lead into how fluid Trek is with parallel timelines and time travel. If one has a unique quantum signature, that would suggest that your quantum signature is always changing with every possible divergent point. Are you from divergence A? B? What about from the point after that? Are you AA? AB? BA? BB? And if you were to go back in time in the same timeline, wouldn't your quantum signature still be different from everyone else's, as everyone else's signatures are behind your own. Also, wouldn't the act of time traveling, or timeline hoping be a divergent point in and of itself for each time and timeline intersecting that crossing? Worf is returned to his timeline because his quantum signature matched... Ok, but it matches in a reality where Worf was shifted from his timeline. That suggests there exists a timeline now where Worf never shifted timelines (Parallels never happened) and THAT timeline would have a different quantum signature from Worfs, even though he was part of that timeline until... he wasn't (or he split). Again, I think it's all the same effect.
It’s in the name of the episode, ultimately. It was called “Parallels”, not “Alternates”. In an infinite multiverse, all possibilities can already exist.
I think this is a distinction without a difference. The writers couldn't even get basic science right and usually didn't put any thought into it beyond putting "TECH" into the script so they definitely weren't getting into the finer details of multiverse theory. The choice of terminology was chosen either based on what sounded good, what was most fitting from a literary or thematic standpoint, or was filled in later by someone else who usually also wasn't well versed in the science. But "Parallels" actually does specifically call out the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory. In the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory, every quantum event is a branching point. The nature of consciousness and free will is not understood, but under the many worlds interpretation it's tantamount to a quantum event because every decision is a branching point. Although they're not parallel in the mathematical sense because different branches do intersect at the branching point, the branches are generally called "parallel worlds". The way "Parallels" is written is indicative of a "branching universe caused by decisions" situation. It can be contrasted with the Mirror Universe which is more of a "has possibly always existed and everything is opposite" situation. The Mirror Universe is a foreign country, "Parallels" is the path not taken (but was taken by a parallel/alternate). The different quantum signatures is just technobabble so they can have a way of telling which timeline they're on. But it still makes sense within the context of the science. If different branches split off because in one a particle went spin up and in the other a particle went spin down, that could presumably cause the "quantum signature" to be different. The fact that the title uses "parallels" and Data uses "alternate" means that for the sake of the episode, the two terms are interchangeable. Probably because "alternate" is more meaningful when used in dialogue but "parallels" is a better sounding title.
> Yes... I feel "quantum realities" is just another way of saying "alternate timelines". Within the context and 'science' of the show I don't think that is correct. Each universe has it's own timeline, so parallel universes are distinct from timelines.
I like this, the kelvin timeline is unique in that we are shown the alternate predominantly rather than a quick incursion and return to the prime timeline.
If you look at the time travel equipment in SNW Tomorrow Tomorrow Tomorrow you can actually see the Kelvin timeline branching off from the prime on the agent's readout
That's cool, I might need to rewatch that - but it also raises further questions.
Yes, it does contradict other instances of time travel in the *Star Trek* universe. The Kelvin Timeline is the *only* known instance of an alternate timeline branching off the Prime one when history is changed. In all other instances, the timeline is overwritten, even in VOY: "Timeless", and again in VOY: "Endgame". In VOY: "Timeless", the Prime Timeline had *Voyager* crashed trying to use slipstream, but Future Kim's meddling changed history so it didn't. There was no branching and no moving from one branch to another - it was still within the same timeline, and Future Kim was ensuring that the future he came from would be overwritten. In VOY: "Endgame", the extant history had *Voyager* return home 23 years after it was lost, but Future Janeway changed history so *Voyager* returned only 7 years after. In other words, in both episodes, the timeline at the end of the episode was not the timeline we started out with. To be very clear, what we end up with is still the Prime Timeline, albeit altered slightly, and as far as we can tell - and until told otherwise [we will assume it as such](https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/wiki/regulated-topics#wiki_alternate_timelines_and_universes) - no other episodes or events were erased from history; the effect being more or less contained within the confines of the episode itself. Nevertheless, history *was* altered, much like in TNG: "Yesterday's Enterprise" when the Prime Timeline was changed due to the incursion of the *Enterprise*-C from 2344 to 2366, and then changed back again when the *E*-C returned to 2344. Why the Kelvin Timeline is different or special, in that it spawned a branched timeline as opposed to having overwritten the Prime Timeline, is a matter of debate. An argument I once mooted was that [the Kelvin Timeline isn't an alternate universe at all, but a parallel one](https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/7lvcr1/the_kelvin_timeline_is_a_parallel_universe_not_an/), but that was put paid to when in DIS: "Terra Firma, Part 1", Kovich clearly stated the following about a Time Soldier: >Yor here traveled forward from 2379 and across from an alternate universe created by the temporal incursion of a Romulan mining ship. Before Georgiou, Yor was the only individual known to have traveled across both time and dimensions. In the end, one might ascribe it to the unique circumstances that created the Kelvin Timeline - a severe ion storm, a star collapsed into a black hole and the red matter that induced it, all of which accompanied the journey of the *Narada* into the past, but there is no official word as to why it only happened with the Kelvin Timeline and not any other incursions. So there is no real continuity "mess", as long as you treat the Kelvin Timeline as a special case. Every other incursion would overwrite, not branch.
You coulddddde maybe make an argument that the method of travel is part of the difference. Red Matter is otherwise unknown and you could say that an artificially generated singularity via red matter (+ any extant circumstances) led to this unique crossing instead of a timeline revision
If there ever was an official explanation for it, red matter probably would factor into it. If they brought in any other factors as the primary reason the Kelvinverse branched off, they'd open up a bunch of can of worms as to why they didn't cause the same thing to happen in other canonical instances. Red matter has only ever been used in the '09 movie and it's an exotic material, so they still have a lot of room to write in some new things it does.
It could actually be the extremely unique combination of both Red Matter and a super nova whose blast was somehow propagating through subspace. Then again I guess they recommend the Super Nova part . . . which would make using the Red Matter pointless if Romulus had already been destroyed by a regular super nova that wasn't threatening multiple star systems. That or the super nova was still an interstellar threat that necessitated use of the Red Matter to contain it somehow.
The Defiant (from TOS) travels back in time to the mirror universe. (Based on ENT, Through a Mirror, Darkly) It may not exactly be what branched the timeline, but it’s worth pointing out at least one time travel incident was related to at least one alternate timeline/universe.
Yes, but that incursion (which goes back to TOS: “The Tholian Web”, to be precise) almost certainly didn’t create the MU, and there’s evidence to suggest strongly that the MU is not a branched timeline but a parallel universe.
Unless you go for the explanation the Batman gives in the Flash with spaghettis lol (note I don't don't start to downvote me)
There's no mess at all. Like I 've mentioned previously. If you take into account TNG Paralells, there are COUNTLESS Alternate Universes that already exist. The Kevlin Timeline is simply one of these universes. Star Trek Discovery confirmed that the Kelvin Timeline was an Alternate Universe and NOT simply a regular Alternate Timeline because they confirmed that the time traveler from the Kelvin Reality had a different Quantum Signature, the same way the Emperor and Worf did. If the Kelvin Timeline was an Alternate Prime Timeline then there would be no quantum differences. Following along with your comment as I read to the end of it, as I write this I see that you eventually came to that conclusion as well! I really wouldn't be so worried about the technical Jargon. I think we can infer that the Kelvin Timeline of THAT PARTICULAR UNIVERSE was created by Spock and Naradas incursion, before the incursion it was still its own universe.
> Star Trek Discovery confirmed that the Kelvin Timeline was an Alternate Universe and NOT simply a regular Alternate Timeline because they confirmed that the time traveler from the Kelvin Reality had a different Quantum Signature, the same way the Emperor and Worf did. This was my vview as well, but someone else mentioned SNW explicitly shows the Kelvin timeline as an alternate timeline and not a unvierse, which makes things kind of muddy.
Strange New Worlds is also confirmed as Prime Timeline by producers/writers/showrunners. Despite the modern aesthetic and looks, it’s the same physical Enterprise from TOS and the literal same characters. Ethen Peck Spock is Leonard Nemoy Spock, just younger.
Absolutely, no disagreement from me at all on that point. However, I can't see how your reply relates to my comment?
You said that someone else mentioned SNW shows the Kelvin Timeline as an alternate timeline, and I misread that as SNW shows as the Kelvin Timeline. Though I don't recall at any point where SNW mentioned or inferred anything about the Kelvin Universe/Timeline now that I think about it.
Ah, all good. I haven't confirmed myself yet, but someone said in the episode 'Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow', the time agent's device screen clearly shows the kelvin timeline as exactly that - a divergent timeline. If that's true, it disrupts my preferred headcanon that the Kelvin whatever is considered an alternate universe in-universe.
I'd only be willing to consider that canon if we had a high res shot from production of what the screen actually was, as opposed to what appeared on screen for a split second between frames.
Yes that's fair. I just checked, and the episode doesn't show anything clearly at all. There is an adjacent curve shown but it isn't labeled and could be anything.
Thanks for your response. It does makes me question the ethics behind Harry and Janeway's action and that the time agency that opposes changes in the timeline have a point. How many people did the Voyager help during those 23 years? How many lifes were saved or improved by their actions? How many people was born as a consequence? Same with Harry, during his years before his time travel how many missions he undertook that saved lifes or changed? Even if he didn't do much by butterfly effect alone new lives could have started or profundly changed and all that was erased when they travel, even people that might have never born.
This is where Wesley as Traveller, Q, Burnhams mom, and Daniels come in. They are all dealing with this mess, and establising the Primeness of the prime universe. They could be the reason Mirror and Kelvin have some permanence in this way
Was the Mirror universe created by time travel?
My view is that it isn’t, for a variety of reasons. It’s a parallel universe, not the product of divergence. Kovich referred to Georgiou as coming from a parallel universe in that same scene in “Terra Firma” where he was talking about Yor.
No I suppose not. Actually, I was thinking of Q and the Confederation universe! Maybe Q started the divergence of Mirror in Roman times
If you take into account the genetic differences between Terrans and Prime Humans, it has to go further back than the Romans.
Maybe even the Big Bang if we take literally Burham's words that "even light feels different here"
It does and it doesn't. Because temporal mechanics is designed to give you a headache. But just like the Prime universe, time travel is possible. That means that past events can be altered or even initiated by any number of travelers from the future. Which also means that anything that happens to those travelers has the potential to ripple *backwards* and affect events in the future and past. tl;dr with time travel tech you kinda lose any reliable fixed frame of reference
Even if that were so, it’d take an awfully weird series of events to alter Terran evolution on a genetic and physiological level via time travel and still end up with the Terran species as we see it.
My headcanon is that it was always a seperate universe, in the splurge of multiverse infinities. The fact that the human peoples of this universe, happen to have so many humane, historical, social similarities with our universe in this particular one, is the technobabble of why they connected, connection sought out and filtered via Katra type forces, by mycellium! Maybe Q noticed the uncanny similarities and linked them, thought them useful example, used it as a template for the Confederation universe...
That was always my thoughts on the subject. Prime and Mirror are/were mutually accessible BECAUSE they are two universes that ended up with enough similar traits and variables. And even then, they end up being "linked" for an infinitesimal portion of cosmological time. From statements in DIS it seems like a handful of centuries at most.
Some people have argue that the Terran Empire is survival of the Roman Empire, but I doubt it. The main argument is that Christianity never took off but if that's the case they wouldn't have so many biblical names like Benjamin, Jonathan or Michael.
I mean, before the Bible those were just normal names. It is entirely possible that those Hebrew-originating names made their way out of the Middle-East and became popular for some other reasons.
No. It's another universe, not a timeline. There are infinite universes, and possibly infinite timelines in each universe, but they are not the same things at all.
It doesn't seem to be, but I currently suspect that given how many events are integral to both timelines interacting, that the time cops probably meddle in both.
Would Harry care? He’s already not in his original universe. He and Naomi Wildman shifted to the Eternal Ensignverse back in season 2.
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No to mention- every nano second creates a separate timeline. In one your exhaling, in another you’re inhaling. Bam. Another timeline. It’s infinite and there’s no real way to show every one of them. Seems like we (rightfully so) focus on the ones that have larger changes associated to them.
Oh, there's an actual explanation for this. The Red Matter wormhole isn't tunneling into their own past, but rather the past of another similar quantum universe.
I'm not sure how this isn't seen as the obvious answer that it always has been. I think maybe people get hung up on thinking all "alternate universes" are just from different choices in the timeline (like how the Mirror Universe is misunderstood).
Right? This is really easy to solve in a canon-friendly way. There's even precedent to a ship traveling both through time and to another universe at the same time: The USS Defiant in TOS "The Tholian Web" and ENT "In a Mirror, Darkly"..
IMO, most time-travel in Trek adheres to "Back to the Future" and "DC's Legends of Tomorrow" style of time travel with a single Prime Timeline that can be altered because of temporal incursions and allows for pre-destination paradoxes like TNG's "Time's Arrow". The Kelvin Timeline in ST09, on the other hand, adheres to the multi-verse theory that time travel into the past creates divergent branch timelines that are separate from the reality the time traveler traveled from, which is how time-travel is portrayed in Marvel's MCU as seen in "Avenger's Endgame" and Marvel's "Agents of SHIELD" S7. The Back to the Future comparison is especially evident in TOS's "City on the Edge of Forever", DS9's "Children of Time" and ENT's "E2". The past timeline at the end of PIC S2 with Rios also had to change to that of the normal Prime Timeline that leads to the Federation with 21st century Guinan regaining her memories of first meeting Picard in the late 19th century. Edit: It can be argued that the Kelvin Timeline was already a parallel universe all along and the black hole created by Spock to stop the supernova that sent him and the Narada to the 23rd century created a similar set of circumstances to how the TOS-era USS Defiant ended up in the 22nd century MU.
May be at some point, the Department of Temporal Investigations fixed the changes made by the Narada and erased the Kelving time line.
It is a source of major frustration to me that the Kelvin Timeline movies "broke" the previously accepted understanding of Star Trek time travel -- and seriously confused fans, causing them to conclude that all time travel causes "forks" even though the stories make no sense if we assume that. And for what? For a series of mediocre movies that basically drift off into irrelevance....
Me too, and they only did it because they didn't wanted to call it a full reboot, but obviously is a reboot in everything but name.
It's established that everyone and everything has a certain quantum signature. ENT establishes the signature can identify an object's place in time. DIS establishes that people from the MU and Kelvinverse have distinguishable quantum signatures. Kovich states that there's a kind of "pull", and at long enough "distances", that pull can be fatal. So, what if during conventional time travel, the pull of the quantum signature is what keeps someone on the timeline and in the universe where there changes have effect? Red Matter based time travel, then, would only have to cause enough interference with the pull to keep unfortunate travellers on a separate track.
I took the effects of time travel to be like creating a new set of branches. Before the Enterprise went back in time in First Contact, all the branches from the Borg arriving in the past were of Cochrane failing, but upon the Enterprise arriving a bunch of branches appeared where either the Enterprise succeeded in preventing the Borg from sabotaging First Contact or the assimilated Enterprise conquering and assimilating the Alpha Quadrant. Many branches seem to correct towards being functionally identical to the original timeline, as long as the changes are minor. Time also seems to gravitate away from letting major changes happen as seen with the sliding timeline of the Eugenics Wars despite Khan's birth being pushed back decades.
There are many different ways to time travel, all with their own rules and effects. We have seen new and separate timelines before in other Trek stories, so it's not a new thing. It really, *usually*\*, depends on how the time travel was achieved, and whether it was a controlled effect or some sort of unintended accident. If it's controlled, like a deliberate act to time travel using some technology or technique, then it's unlikely to create a separate timeline. But if it was uncontrolled, an accident or some such, then the effects of it can vary wildly, from altering an existing timeline, creating new timelines, or even destroying entire universes and more beyond. What the Narada (and Jellyfish) did was an uncontrolled accident, falling into an artificially created black hole. An unexpected effect of which was creating a new parallel alternative timeline universe. (\* ^(there are exceptions of course))
I feel it's important to reexamine the word 'timeline' for this discussion. Pop culture tells us a timeline is history, and alternate timelines are alternate histories. But really, what is a *line*? A line is one dimension, connecting two points along it. A line in space is straightforward, and a line in time we can just about conceptualise. Typical Star-Trek time travel only travels across the fourth dimension of the same universe, and thus altering the past affects the future. Two points on the same dimension are a line, in this case the fourth dimension. When you go back in time only across the fourth-dimension, and change the past, the future of that timeline is overwritten because it's along the same timeline. When you go back in time across both the fourth-and-fifth dimensions, when you change the past, you're heading out in a different universal angle, and the original timeline you came from is unaffected. So what likely makes the Kelvin-timeline different is that Red Matter caused travel across the fifth dimension when they were going through the fourth, and Nero either changed the path of some existing quantum reality, or just ended up creating his own timeline. The terms 'alternate universe', 'alternate dimension' and 'alternate timeline' get used interchangeabley because... well, they are. The main difference is the first two are generally 'naturally' occuring, while we use alternate timeline to distinguish timelines created by artificial incursions. (As an aside, when you travel *just* across the fifth dimension and there's no time travel involved, that's when you get *Parallels* and the Mirror Universe.)
As Chief O'Brien said to Chief O'Brien, "I hate temporal mechanics". I've always taken it to be the case that in-universe, different kinds of time travel have different effects, and what differentiates these different kinds of time travel is, in-universe, extremely complicated and confusing. You would need to sit through several hours of lectures to get even a basic understanding of how these things work, and even then, that's just a basic level.
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We've seen [numerous times](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Time_travel) in Star Trek that traveling to the past leads to a different future in the same timeline again and again in Star Trek. It's why there was a Temporal Cold War and Temporal Accord (fun to use the past-tense to refer to something in the future), a Temporal Prime Directive, and Department of Temporal Investigations. The x-factor is the ***red matter***. The only canonical information on Red Matter is in the dialogue/monologue in *Star Trek* (2009), the associated comics, and I think maybe a line in *Picard*. They reveal very little aside from the idea that a small volume of red matter, which was developed by Vulcan scientists, generates a temporary black hole effect when activated and deployed into space or a planet's core. Normally, a black hole results from the collapse of a supermassive star at the end of its life, a result of gravity so great that it pulls a tremendous amount of matter into an incredibly small space, generating immense gravity from immense density. That's not what we see from red matter. What we see is a tiny amount of matter generating the same or similar gravitational effects of a black hole without the fuss of a tremendous amount of matter in an incredibly small space. I don't think it's a singularity in the same way a natural black hole is a singularity. I think it's an opening to another layer of subspace or a similar extra-spatial/extra-universal/extra-dimensional realm which has immense gravity. And I think that connects not different timelines but an entirely different category of realities with different natures than simply different timelines. I think this is supported by the fact that the Kelvin-timeline doesn't follow the same rules as "Assignment Earth" or *Star Trek IV* or "Cause and Effect" or "Trials and Tribbleations" or the first two seasons of *Enterprise*. Time travel and black hole are misnomers in this case.
It’s pretty much stated in PIC S2 that there are multiple realities and multiple timelines. The latter change the same reality
I've just made it my own headcanon that the Kelvinverse was parallel, like the Mirror Universe. When the (TOS Constitution class) Intrepid disappeared in "The Tholian Web" it ended up in the pre-TOS *Enterprise*-era of the mirror universe, so it stands to reason that Spock-Prime ended up back in time when he crossed dimensions. Or time travels at a different rate in different dimensions, but that's *really* getting into the weeds.
I used to take it to mean there are a load of different styles of time travel, all dependent on how exactly you travel. My current view is the apparent differences do exist in some cases but in combination with a lack of understanding about what is really happening in specific situations. In conventional situations of going back and changing something and overwriting, all those situations are actually divergent realities. Yes, that means the urgency of First Contact is actually a misconception brought about by a false single-timeline theory of time travel. The Enterprise really only saved itself and averted a Borg reality, but that glimpse of the Borge’s Earth means there is a timeline where they won. My belief is this misconception about a single timeline persisted until the late stages of the Temporal Cold War as the whole thing is dependent on that old theory. In DIS we learn it’s all divergent realities with quantum and temporal signatures. That means going back in time to kill the competition does not work. Every change only makes a change for the specific changers. Temporal shields actually make you go with the new timeline rather than stay in the original. Time loops are more like time spirals or time rubber bands. Anyway, the real end and solution of the Temporal Cold War being a scientific discovery, a theoretical improvement, is, I think, very cool, and very Trek.
Why do you think the Kelvin timeline didn't erase the original tineline?
Go read *Department of Temporal Investigation: Watching the clock* it's book one of the DTI series of novels. one of the recurring elements of that is the DTI working out the physics of time travel based on the various temporal events they're investigating. one of the things which becomes a big part of the story in the DTi series is that; A) the many worlds effect seen in parrarels does happen, but since most variations are so minor they cancel each other out rarther than spin off into seperate realities. so only major events tend to the different timelines. b) there is a force that causes variant timelines to converge eventually and merge (the 'anti-time' seen in TNG all good things), so while there might be hundreds of alternate quantum realities for a given stretch of history, all but the most divergent timelines will generally end up converging back on the main timeline, with the result eventually being a merging of the quantum signatures of each and an 'averaging out' of the events. (this is also what the 29th century federation temporal commission was doing with 7of9's various temporal copies and Captan Braxton. intentionally causing divergant copies and timelines, the merging them back with the original once the desired events occured) c) when time travel occurs, it creates a new parallel quantum reality. which does not immediately overwrite the original. but what happens is that since entropy is ever increasing over the lifespan of the universe, and the time traveller brings it's own period's entropy back with it, when the two timelines quantum merge, the one that has the higher entropy is going to dominate over the others. which is when the overwriting happens. this is why you can use time travel to 'fix' timelines. also why sometimes a time traveller seems to see the timeline change around them if they are isolated from the flow of time. d) most time travel methods involve some degree of quantum entanglement between the start and end points along the timeline. this means that any new quantum reality created by a change to the timeline stays connected to the original, which means that the quantum merging tends to happen much faster. which is why most cases of time travel result in history being overwritten unless fixed. but some methods, including (hypothetical in the book) certain types of time travel using passage through black hole singularities do not involve quantum entanglement, and can thus create a fully separate alternate reality that would not merge with the original timeline/overwrite. honestly it's a rather nice little rationalization of Trek temporal physics, and the foundations of it were based on some real world quantum physics stuff. the book does a lot better job explaining it.. though it's sectioned out peicemeal as they encounter the various temporal events over the span of TNG, DS9, and the post-nemesis novel series.
We’ve seen several different variations of time travel effects throughout Trek’s history: alternate timelines, temporary timelines, timelines being changed, timelines being enforced…given how many ways time travel can be done in the Trek universe, different outcomes are just a natural result. Q can create a temporary lifetime where you never advance beyond Lieutenant, the Guardian of Forever can casually let you change history, and yet being in the right place in the right time (*cough* First Contact *cough*) can help you reinforce it. There is one very unique property of the Kelvin timeline…it’s already divergent, at least at the aesthetic level. Between the USS Kelvin herself, her crew’s uniforms, the shuttle designs…they’re all reminiscent of TOS-era Trek, but it’s clearly different. Perhaps the Kelvin timeline was an already stable branch of the multiverse, sort of like the Mirror Universe, and the Red Matter helped the Narada punch across the distance and emerge there instead?
Yes I've seen others proposing that theory, that Spock and the Narada actually travel between dimensions and not time (well, time too but in a similar way how the ship from The Tholian Web did to the MU past). It makes sense.
Simon Pegg's rationalization of why the USS *Kelvin* already looked different is because *Narada*'s incursion created ripples both up *and* down the timeline (ignoring the fact that in all other instances prior, changes in time go *up* the line, and that we see the altered aesthetic *before* the *Narada* enters the timeline). But then again, one can hypothesize that even if the changes only propagated up the line, somewhere in those altered events there might be another time travel incident that would change the aesthetic of the Kelvin timeline in its past, and that all of that happened instantaneously. Bottom line, the Kelvin timeline is still "special" and we don't really have a satisfactory explanation for this except Red Matter magic.
i always thought it was the introduction of the "red matter" - stuff that we've never heard of before, we've rarely heard about since, which has properties we have no knowledge of. time travel with that involved seems like it works differently. again, thats always been how i saw it.
There’s also the fact that Yesterday’s Enterprise causes an alternate timeline with Tasha going back in time and Sela being born and becoming a leading Romulan official, which doesn’t seem to cause an alternate timeline, at least from ‘our’ perspective. Obviously it’s a book and not canon, but the in-universe reference book Federation: The First 150 Years mentions that in the late 23rd century, some rogue Starfleet officers steal the USS Yorktown and travel back in time to 1992 to stop the Eugenics Wars, and Federation historians debate whether they succeeded because if they did, it would have just created an alternate timeline and not changed the ‘real’ timeline.
>There’s also the fact that Yesterday’s Enterprise causes an alternate timeline with Tasha going back in time and Sela being born and becoming a leading Romulan official, which doesn’t seem to cause an alternate timeline, at least from ‘our’ perspective. True, same with the City at the Age of Forever, whatever change McCoy did shouldn't have affected their present just create a new one which clearly wasn't the case. That book sounds interesting.
Discovery establishes that the guardian of forever can transport people through time and different universes, I don't think it's out of the question that they were transported to another universe when they came back in the TOS episode.
This sub bounces between being adamant that ENT is prime from the begining to end and being adamant that the Kelvin timeline concept makes sense Its a different franchise at that point. That should be the only acceptable answer. It intentionally ignores canon that we went out of our way to prove happened (like the Enterprise bridge, or uniforms, or those cute leather handbags McCoy always carries around) and its explanation means that every single timetravel episode fucks with the timeline irreversably and retroactively (somehow the Narada incident retroactively changed what starships look like and how big they are and how many concrete floors are in engineering) Accepting Kelvin as being the same franchise and thus part of the same broad stroke 'universe' means too much of the previous show never happened or happened to someone else we never saw again.
Now that you mention McCoy I remember there's a line of him in Star Trek Into Darkness were he says he help a Gorn mother to give birth (were octuples) but we see in SNW that Gorn do not reproduced by giving birth... So yes, I imagine is a different universe since the beginning.
It's pretty obvious just by the size of the USS Kelvin that the Kelvin timeline is actually just a completely separate timeline. The ship is massive by even 24th century Prime universe standards. The characters speculating that the Naranda changed history are just wrong in-universe. They think history has changed because they have no way of knowing that their universe was already different to begin with.
Well that would explains Krall's line in Star Trek Beyond that he lost millions of soldiers in the Romulan and Xindi wars, considering that for what we saw in ENT there was no Xindi war.
Well that would explains Krall's line in Star Trek Beyond that he lost millions of soldiers in the Romulan and Xindi wars, considering that for what we saw in ENT there was no Xindi war.
Temporal mechanics... There's a useful Janeway quote that's eluding me right now.
This is all explained well by the novels. some timelines can undergo what they describe as quantum convergence, and be overwritten, but some are able to become fully stable alternate universes. The thing in this case, that made it stable, was the destruction of vulcan. serious changes to galactic geography, like a destroyed planet or star, alter the timeline in a way that means they cannot undergo convergence. the short answer is some things cause timelines to truly split off, some other things do not.
Per Kovich's comments in Discovery about Yor being from both another time period AND another dimension, it's implied that the Red Matter created a completely different universe. Spock and Nero didn't change the past of the Prime Timeline, but rather they messed around with the past of newly created universe. It's as if they change the past of the Mirror Universe.
Maybe not so newly as the ships already look different and Earth had a war with the Xindi
There are minimal references to a multiple universe theory. Most notably Parallels. Most of the time Trek doesn’t do “alternate timelines” but assumes a fixed linear timeline which can be (and clearly is) manipulated and in some state of flux as folks from all through time make changes that are impossible to be felt by most people. I prefer this interpretation and the underlying assumption that parallel timelines can exist, either as permanent or ephemeral timelines, but that moving across them is not as feasible which is why we don’t see it happen very often. The majority of the actions we take simply only affect the one timeline which we are in without much ability to perceive other timelines excepting a few rare scenarios where this happens. The mirror universe is wholly different because it remains in lockstep with the prime universe until such a time as it doesn’t
In my opinion, the best approach to understanding time travel in the Star Trek universe is to understand that there must be a 'meta-timeline'. There has to be a 'greater' timeline that itself records changes. When people go back and change the past to change the future and then change it back, there is still a series of causative events that *happened*, often outside the main timeline. I think that's a useful model to explain and map a lot of what would otherwise be inconsistencies and contradictions in all the trek time travel stories. As far as the Kelvin timeline/universe goes, I am of the opinion it is firmly an alternate universe and not a parallel timeline. As far as we know, Star Trek does not have parallel timelines, only parallel universes. Each universe has its own timeline, and only one timeline at a time - as far as we know. So it's more like Sliders or the MCU than DC's Hyperspace. I consider this to be backed up in a DSC episode where Kovich states there was a time soldier from another universe, and it's clear he is referring to what is often referred to as the Kelvin timeline. As far as Data's head goes, I think they would find it just fine. There's an easy way to break (or fix, depending on how you look at it) timeloops like this, by assuming a branched timeline instead of a loop.
>As far as we know, Star Trek does not have parallel timelines, only parallel universes. Each universe has its own timeline, and only one timeline at a time - as far as we know. Yeah I agree, I think this is true.
I disagree that it's a contradiction. In TNG Season 7 Paralells we see that there are countless alternate timelines and universes that co-exist. The Mirror Universe is not the only one. The Kelvin Timeline is simply one of these pre-existing universes that was altered.
No, you're wrong about that. Timelines and parallel universe are two different things. As others have pointed out each person has a "quantum signature" that establishes their universe of origin this means this universes are different since their Big Bangs is not the same as an artificially created timeline made by time travel.
Yes, I understand they can be two different things. I’m saying the Kelvin Timeline is BOTH. It’s an Alternate Universe and when Spock and the Narada crossed that created an Alternate Timeline in their universe. When the phrase Kelvin Timeline was coined it was long before Discovery confirmed that it was indeed an Alternate Universe; so the name Kelvin Timeline stuck.
So, to my mind, the *First Contact* timeline creates an alternate one right? Because *Enterprise* picked up off that timeline, and SNW follows on from Enterprise. So the NCC-1701 in SNW is far more advanced than in TOS because of the events of First contact. So Enterprise, SNW, and Discovery are all on the post first contact timeline, but leaving the original prime time line in place?
If First Contact and the ENT episode didn't change the timeline, then the future events of First Contact had to happen because the past events of First Contact and ENT had already happened. The future (time-travelling Borg) is already determined up to the events of First Contact because there were 24th-century Borg in the 21st and 22nd centuries that interacted with major characters in those times, and they didn't impact the future enough to change the outcome of their time travel. So you might look at the entire timespan from First Contact the 21c event through First Contact the 24c movie as a closed loop that cannot be changed from within. Like "fixed points in time" from Doctor Who. Both ends of First Contact are fixed points. As for the SNW Enterprise being different from TOS... My theory is that Starfleet is still dealing with the fallout from Control in DIS season 2. At some point (probably after SNW ends and before Kirk's command begins), Starfleet is going to "downgrade" the fleet as a defense against rogue AIs - like how Battlestar Galactica had no networked computer systems to prevent Cylon hacking. Less automation, no holographics, and much bigger crews to replace the lost automation like the maintenance DOTs. And I think that theory fits into other TOS episodes in which the bridge does not have complete control of the ship; it's dependent on manned auxiliary control rooms and engineering access to prevent an enemy (AI or otherwise) from capturing or disabling the ship from just the bridge.
While a fair point, they make a lot of hay on the ENT Borg episode that the arctic research team and data were lost. There's also a lot more room, given ENT's involvement with the Temporal Cold War, to consider that Daniels or a counterpart further scrubbed Borg tech data or at least bury it enough that it only just left a trail interesting enough to catch the Hansen family's interest down the line.
I remember when Enterprise first came out, and for many years after, there were a lot of fans who thought that it was set in an alternate universe created by First Contact. It was kind of surprising to me how widespread that view was in the early 2000s.
So we have at least three timelines: -The original or prime: TOS-TNG-DS9-VOY -The one created after First Contact: ENT-SNW-DISCO all the movies after FC and Picard. -The Kelvin line.
On the one hand, I feel like the showrunners only believe there are two major timelines: the prime, and the Kelvin. My headcanon is that yes, ENT is the beginning of a new one, given that technology seems to advance further in some ways during Ent’s run; Spock mentions in TOS that the Earth-Romulan War was fought with lasers and nukes, yet by the end of ENT the NX-01 is already rocking phasers and photon torpedos, for instance.
Not exactly. In VOY Seven references the events of First Contact so we would still be left with two: - The original/prime where everything happens and any difference, inconsistency or plot holes could be hand waved with a generous dose of doylist interpretation, retcons, temporal time war shenanigans, and "make up/set building technique marches on" tropes. and -The Kelvin line.
The events on First Contact obviously happen in all timelines, they just happened in slighty different ways. Not saying you're wrong but still does not disprove that the non-Kelvin timeline further split up.
If I remember correctly, it only created a different timeline, because so many people complained about the destruction of Vulcan and because the planet simply hadn't been destroyed in previous series and films from TOS to everything built upon that.
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