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As someone who has spent a lot (I mean a LOT) of time thinking about the working mechanics of time travel, and will generally give any time travel story/book/movie a fair shake, I will say this about how Abrams handled it: 1) Time travel via black hole is silly, but I'll let it be seeing as how the original Kirk managed to take a Klingon Bird of Prey for a ride around the sun to go back in time... and 2) If you forget about the method, the actual WAY it was handled makes complete, utter, and total sense.

You have to alter how you think about time. Back to the Future treated time as a linear thing.... you would go back and forth on this line, and any changes you make would then propagate forward, irrevocably changing your future. You go back and give a sports almanac to a psycho, for instance, and when you return to the future, events have taken place in a vastly different fashion, meaning your original time no longer exists...unless, of course, you just went even FURTHER back and stopped it all from happening... etc, etc, etc. Worked well enough for the movies, but the flaw here is thinking of time as a line you travel back and forth on. It doesn't work that way... not according to Einsteinian physics, anyway. Going forward in time is easy - get on a ship and haul ass away from the planet at as close to light speed as you can, then turn around and come on back - presto, you're in the future. Time has sped up, due to the time dilation effect of traveling at near-light speed. Doesn't exactly work in reverse.

Quantum theory, on the other hand, gives us a slightly different way of looking at time travel... it's not actually moving back and forth on some imaginary line, but going to an alternate universe. Another dimension, really. The theory works like this: there are innumerable universes existing in innumerable dimensions, where every possible outcome of every possible action has in fact taken place. In some cases, these dimensions can be wildly different - universes where Hitler won WWII, or where the Soviet Union took over the United States. (Yeah, I watched a lot of Sliders.) The interesting thing is, that because of these infinite permutations, universes exist that are in the EXACT state of the past of your OWN universe. So somewhere out there, there would be a universe that is CURRENTLY an exact copy of any moment in history. This concept was played around with in Timeline, which despite being a terrible movie, was actually a pretty good book. (It's Crichton - that's usually how it works.)

The long and the short of it is this - under quantum physics, traveling in time is an action that is more like SPACE travel than time travel. You're going to another universe, one that is IDENTICAL to a previous time in history. The upshot of this is that it's nondestructive... assuming you could control the movement to and from the destination universe (instead of being sucked into a black hole), you could in fact travel back to your own "time" and nothing would have changed. This is the model used by Star Trek, and frankly, I'm ecstatic that this is how they did it.

The reason? Nothing is predictable. "Spock Prime" is not in his own past, but is actually in another universe... one that began to differ from his original timeline the second Nero's vessel came out the other side. Every event that took place from then on served to alter the future irrevocably. Cause and effect don't apply here... young Spock and "Spock Prime" are two different individuals, and nothing "Spock Prime" does is in any danger of causing paradoxes, or altering timelines... in short, you CANNOT know what to expect from this series of movies. In this universe, nothing that happened in any existing Star Trek show or film can be counted on as "future canon". It will not happen the way it did originally.

Now, my dad was a little upset about this, because he thought that this essentially meant that "everything we knew was erased and essentially never happened." Not so... not only did it happen, but the original, "Prime" Star Trek universe continues to exist - it's just now short one Ambassador Spock. :) These things happen.

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Originally posted by Peulsar5:
As far as the more advanced Enterprise, you left out the events of ST: First Contact, where Zephram Cochran and his team would be influenced by interacting with 24th century explorers in their subsequent ship designs. This is one of the explanations why ST: Enterprise had some technology that seemed more advanced than the original series (smaller communicators, glowing nacelles, etc)

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Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:

Whoa! What? Time changes alter the ORIGINAL timeline??? I guess I've missed out on Star Trek canon - when was this explained? This is the first I've heard of such a thing, anywhere. This would mean ST:TOS is now deleted. it also means this film is false, as soon as the Narada changed Kirk's life, Spock would have already known of his "new" beginnings with Kirk, and not been surprised that Kirk was not Captain.
I would need to see where this is proclaimed.

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Originally posted by Storymark:
However, if one changes over to a parallel universe in the course of the time travel, which is essentially the case here, then time can be changed without effecting the original timeline. Thus, TOS and this film can co-exist.

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Originally posted by Storymark:

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Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:

Whoa! What? Time changes alter the ORIGINAL timeline??? I guess I've missed out on Star Trek canon - when was this explained? This is the first I've heard of such a thing, anywhere. This would mean ST:TOS is now deleted. it also means this film is false, as soon as the Narada changed Kirk's life, Spock would have already known of his "new" beginnings with Kirk, and not been surprised that Kirk was not Captain.
I would need to see where this is proclaimed.

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Well, yeah, that's been the premise behind most Trek time-travel stories, most notably in The City of the Edge of Forever, Voyage Home and First Contact. But, there are also parallel universes, as was pointed out. So, they are not mutually exclusive concepts. Yes, changing the past can effect the original timeline, as long as the time travel is within the same universe. However, if one changes over to a parallel universe in the course of the time travel, which is essentially the case here, then time can be changed without effecting the original timeline. Thus, TOS and this film can co-exist.

"I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him."

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Originally posted by Fremdfirma:
Actually, one niggling little detail of the movie bothers me.

Did or did not captain pike very specifically name KIRK to be his first officer, prior to leaving the ship ?

I do believe he did, didn't he ?

So why the fekk did Spock not follow the chain of command as presented to him by a superior officer ?

Seriously, that gave me a sense of WTF??!! for like, a half hour of the whole flick, I just couldn't wrap my brain around *everyone* pretending they hadn't heard that.

-F

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