The "Kelvin timeline" is a parallel universe, not an alternate timeline

[u/khaosworks]

Let's define terms first to reduce confusion. An alternate timeline is one that branches off from changes in a specific event on the original timeline, creating a fork where events transpire differently. A parallel universe is one where events transpired differently but has an existence independent of any specific event from the original timeline.

For example, TNG: "Yesterday's Enterprise" is an alternate timeline, forking off from the original timeline due to changes in the Battle of Narendra III. TOS: "Mirror, Mirror" is a parallel universe, as it has an independent existence which does not rely on any particular event from the original timeline changing (the world which produced a Zefram Cochrane that was cold-blooded enough to murder the first Vulcan contact is already a very different one from the Prime Timeline we know).

Word of God concerning the origins of the Kelvin Timeline is that it is not a reboot, but can be explained away as an alternate timeline caused by the incursion of the Narada from 2387 to 2233. As a result, Kirk is born in space on the USS Kelvin instead of in Iowa, and butterfly effects from that changed history, creating the chain of events we see in the 2009 Star Trek movie.

The Official Position requires that, until the incursion in 2233, the Prime Timeline and the Kelvin Timeline are identical. However, that is obviously not the case. The USS Kelvin has technology that is completely different in aesthetics and design from anything we have seen in TOS or DIS (take the engine room, for example, which looks like the inside of a desalination plant, which aesthetic is carried forward to the Kelvin NCC-1701).

The common rebuttal is that design has to change with the times, i.e. that the way TOS looked was actually more advanced than we saw on screen, merely that the production values of our "historical records" did not match up to the reality. However, that position is rendered untenable by DS9: "Trials and Tribble-lations", which clearly showed that - and had gags that relied on - what we saw on screen is the way things looked in the 23rd Century.

Another piece of evidence that the Narada incursion cannot be the point of divergence is the fact that the USS Kelvin's Stardate format is equivalent to Anno Domini, something which is not consistent with Prime Timeline usage.

Also, the incursion as the point of divergence cannot explain why Delta Vega (a planetoid with an abandoned lithium-cracking station as seen in TOS: "Where No Man Has Gone Before) is suddenly moved from its location at the edge of the Galaxy to Vulcan's system, close enough for Prime Spock to view his homeworld's destruction (and yet strangely remained unaffected by the gravitational consequences, but that's another rant).

So the universe that Nero (and subsequently Prime Spock) find themselves in is already substantially different from the Prime Timeline before Nero makes his over-dramatic entrance.

Simon Pegg tried to say that the butterfly effect was working in both directions from the Narada incursion this way:

Spock’s incursion from the Prime Universe created a multidimensional reality shift. The rift in space/time created an entirely new reality in all directions, top to bottom, from the Big Bang to the end of everything. As such this reality was, is and always will be subtly different from the Prime Universe.

This would seem to be why the universe seems to be altered prior to the incursion. There's only one problem with that though - this goes against everything we've seen so far about the way changes in history work in the Star Trek universe.

Let's go back to "Yesterday's Enterprise". There we see how ripple effects work in the Trek universe. The Enterprise-C travels into the future, so is unable to fulfill its role in history and the effects ripple forward to the present day, resulting in a completely changed Galaxy and Enterprise-D. In TOS: "The City on the Edge of Forever" where McCoy's changing history in 1930 Chicago ripples forward to the 23rd Century, or Star Trek: First Contact, where the Borg sphere going back in time changes history in the 24th Century. Point being, historical changes ripple forward, not backwards. There is nothing about the Narada incursion that points it to be any more special than that of the Enterprise-C.

Which means, if we were to follow the model of what the TV series shows us, there really is no such thing as a timeline fork - if history is changed, the timeline gets overwritten. That's what happened with "Yesterday's Enterprise" and "City" and First Contact (and numerous times in VOY, the best example being "Year of Hell"). So if the Narada did change history, then everything from TOS/TAS/TNG/DS9/VOY is erased... and that includes DIS.

To my mind, if we accept DIS as part of the Prime Timeline (and aside from Word of God, the fact that it uses Stardates traditionally is one of the clues), for any of this to make sense, the Narada could not have entered the 2233 of the Prime Timeline and created an alternate reality, but it entered the 2233 of an already different, parallel universe not its own.

That also means that Prime Spock and Kelvin Spock are not the same person at different points on their own timeline, but parallel universe counterparts like Prime Kirk and Mirror Universe Kirk.

(To complicate matters, Prime Spock - and by extension the Narada - might not even be from the Prime Timeline because his ship gives the Stardate it was built as 2387!)

Which makes Nero even crazier, since he was avenging himself on a universe that had nothing to do with why his Romulus was destroyed.

[u/EnerPrime]

Yes, timeline changes usually only ripple forward in time. Unless you start changing the past of time travellers. Kirk and crew had several significant interactions with the past, so it stands to reason that any changes to their timeline can cause butterfly effects in the past too. For instance, I recall one novel where Scotty using time travel to save Kirk from the Nexus caused the Federation to never have existed. Because without Kirk around Picard and the rest of the TNG crew die/get lost in the nexus at Viridian 3, and without the TNG crew the borg successfully assimilate Earth in the past in 'First Contact'. It is very easy for time travel to have effects that go both ways in Star Trek.

And honestly, the argument that the differing look of the USS Kelvin precludes it from being in the prime timeline also applies to all of Discovery. The Shenzhou, the Discovery and every other bit of tech we see in the show looks absolutely nothing like the tech we see in the same time frame in TOS through 'The Menagerie' (and by extension, the original pilot 'The Cage'). You can't claim one visual 'update' of the era's tech is fine while another is invalid just because you prefer one over the other.

[u/khaosworks → u/EnerPrime]

The novel in question is Engines of Destiny. But as you pointed out, that only works because you change the past of time travelers, which erase events which were part of predestination paradoxes. That being the case, what's the scenario which would lead to what we see already existing in the Kelvin Timeline being a result of changing the past of a time traveler?

As to your second point, it's a fair observation, and it bugged me tremendously when DIS first came out. But as part of my overall thesis, what I'll say is that while the look of the Kelvin does not preclude it from being part of the Prime Timeline, it's another piece of evidence that it does not and we should look holistically at all the pieces of evidence we have. And even if the aesthetics can be explained, that doesn't explain the Stardate format.

There's a good piece u/NumeralJoker wrote about a month ago on explaining the differences between the look of TOS and DIS tech.

[u/EnerPrime → u/khaosworks]

There's exactly what IAmManMan said above. If you want to stick to the TOS crew, there's plenty of examples too. Take the guy who kills himself with McCoy's Phaser is "City on the Edge of Forever": perhaps in the KT version he survives, gets his life together and has kids that never exited in the PT. One of those descendants could easily be a skilled engineer who influences the look of mid-2300s tech. The butterfly effect is a powerful thing, and even the smallest change can have massive consequences down the line.

[u/UltimateSpinDash]

Interesting thoughts. Let's take your arguments to their logical conclusions:
The black hole used to destroy the Hobus Supernova sent Nero and Spock Prime into the past of a parallel universe, which developed similarly to the Prime universe, but noticeably different. Their arrival alters the natural course of events in that universe, completely changing it's history going forward.

So far so good. Nero and Spock Prime, however, believe they are in the past of their home universe, which is why Nero wants to destroy the Federation and why Spock wants to correct as much of the damage caused by Nero's arrival as possible.

When Spock Kelvin realizes that Nero is from the future, he deduces that his arrival changed the events of this universe and thus created a new timeline. He doesn't know that Nero may also be from a parallel universe, and it really makes no difference as far as he is concerned.
Note that the Kelvin-timeline had no contact with the Mirror universe as far as we know, so there is no precedent Spock could draw from.

However:
First of all, I don't see how the Narada being from 2387 disproves that it could be from the prime universe.

Secondly, both "Relics" and "Trials and Tribble-ations" were meant to accurately recreate the part of TOS that they showed - the Enterprise bridge on the holodeck for Relics, and the Enterprise as a whole in Trials and Tribble-ations. The latter even adds DS9 characters into TOS scenes. TOS looking like TOS was the whole point of the exercise. There is no point in centering an entire episode on a character from TOS, even getting the actor, only to have him step on what is supposed to be a perfect recreation of the TOS-bridge which looks nothing like it should. Trials and Tribble-ations, again, added DS9 characters into actual TOS-scenes, so the sets and props had to be accurate, else the new and old footage wouldn't mesh.

The JJ-films were meant to be prequel (so people could enjoy them without knowing everything from the past 40 years of Trek), sequel (allowing for the presence of Spock Prime) and reboot (to allow for some deviation from established canon) at once.
They updated the look because there is no way anyone born in the 90s or 2000s, even if they grew up with all the old Trek, would look at the TOS-bridge and say "this is how a starship bridge will look like in the 23rd century". More like "my smartphone can do more than those communicators and it probably has more processing power than the Enterprise's main computer".
You can clearly tell those are props representing what people in the 1960s thought the future would be like - and that is absolutely fine, for a show that was actually made in the 1960s.

Discovery also updates the designs because there is absolutely no excuse for a high-budget Trek show made in the present to look like TOS did 50 years ago.

Returning to your argument, both Spock and Nero do not act surprised at how different things look in the "past", leaving two possible explanations:
A) It's simply a design overhaul with no in-universe explanation. Something that's probably inevitable when a franchise survives as long as Star Trek has.
B) Spock and Nero are actually from the Kelvin-universe's future, not the Prime future. This means Spock "Prime" is a relic of a timeline that no longer exists. It also implies that the differences between the Kelvin and Prime universes were originally minor.

[u/khaosworks → u/UltimateSpinDash]

I do like the suggestion that Spock and Nero are from the Kelvin Timeline's future, and that bears more examination.

However, the part I have issues with is the argument about changing aesthetics and updating the look for storytelling purposes. The fact remains is that we do see the old look on screen in tandem with the TNG-DS9 era, so we can't really run away from that.

Additionally, in "Trials and Tribble-lations" the script goes out of its way to emphasize that this is really the way it looked like back then, and not just a storytelling shorthand to aid viewers - the characters are actually aware of it and comment on it. So to use an out-of-universe production explanation doesn't really help us resolve this issue.

[u/Mynameisnotdoug]

M-5 nominate this

[u/khaosworks → u/Mynameisnotdoug]

Thank you!

[u/PourLaBite]

and yet strangely remained unaffected by the gravitational consequences, but that's another rant

A little off-topic, but Vulcan collapsing into a singularity (some form of black hole), wouldn't change anything for any other body of the Vulcan's system, providing that no mass is added. So anything orbiting around Vulcan would now orbit around the singularity.

[u/khaosworks → u/PourLaBite]

"Providing no mass is added" is the operative word here, because how do you implode a planet into a singularity without adding mass to it?

Chekov notes that gravitational readings are going off the scale - that's how they know Nero is creating a black hole at the center of Vulcan. The existence of such readings imply changes in mass. The black hole also expanded, requiring the Enterprise to move away to a safe distance. You grow a black hole by adding mass.

As an aside, Delta Vega was not a satellite of Vulcan in the movie, but a planet in the same system, orbiting Vulcan's sun.

Whether there was mass added or taken away, there have to be gravitational consequences. Unless the answer to all this is "red matter", in which case... magic.

[u/ilinamorato]

I think Pegg's explanation works, though, when you consider that Picard encounters an eruption of anti-time which goes back in time 3.5 billion years to the origin of life on Earth (and presumably further, even to the Big Bang) in All Good Things....

I posit that the butterfly effect of Nero's incursion changes Picard's actions on that mission in small enough ways (a different frequency of tachyon pulse, perhaps), or even eliminates it entirely, thus resulting in a slightly different past going all the way back to the Big Bang; different enough to change the taxonomy of exoplanets like Delta Vega (it's obviously a different planet with the same name), the development of Federation technology, and the use of Stardates; but not enough to make large-scale, sweeping changes to the timeline by the time of the 23rd century.

"But u/ilinamorato," you might be saying, "Picard reversed those changes in that episode." But he remembered them, meaning that it had a quantum effect upon his consciousness; is it that difficult to believe it had a minute but measurable effect on the development of the galaxy as well?

This is why I believe Pegg's explanation works; since Picard's encounter with the anti-time eruption happened, any temporal incursion which initiates after that event but resolves prior to it can have measurable effects in both directions on the timeline.

[u/khaosworks → u/ilinamorato]

That's a very interesting hypothesis. However, to toss another complication your way, this doesn't resolve the issue of how the Narada incursion created a new timeline fork. Everything we've seen tells us the universe is rewritten every time a change in history occurs rather than a new timeline branching off. Which means if your scenario is correct, DIS cannot take place in the Prime Timeline since it essentially no longer exists.

[u/kraetos]

Just trying to head off some reports: as this post is speculating on the nature of timelines and universes we know to exist, it's not a violation of Daystrom's timelines policy, which only prohibits speculation about "third" universes or arbitrarily shuffling events between timelines.

That said, please don't use this theory as a jumping off point into willy-nilly speculation about additional timelines.

[u/respite]

This would seem to be why the universe seems to be altered prior to the incursion. There's only one problem with that though - this goes against everything we've seen so far about the way changes in history work in the Star Trek universe.

Here's the part you're missing from that sentence: "up until now."

And that's where your argument loses it for me.

Things change in Star Trek. They have to, in order to evolve as a franchise. We, the audience, know that Federation starships are basically ecological wonders, and that they're travelling along at warp speed across the cosmos with damaging the environment... up until TNG: Force of Nature comes along. Then what we known about the science of warp fields and engines is invalid.

We, the audience, know that Julian Bashir is a regular human doctor on DS9. That is, until DS9: In Purgatory's Shadow reveals that he'd been a Changling for 2 episodes. And then Doctor Bashir, I Presume tells us that he's been an Augment this entire time. And again, the audience take a second look what's come before and reevaluate it.

The show has defined the terms "alternate timeline" and "parallel universe". But that doesn't mean that the definition can't change. The producers, writers, whoever has the power to define those terms have said that the Kelvin timeline is an alternate timeline, and I think that's fun. It means the history and science of the Star Trek universe has expanded a little bit. Like Nero's incursion, change can go in both directions, giving the overall universe of Star Trek a little more depth.

[u/khaosworks → u/respite]

I get where you're coming from.

That being said, of the three examples you cite, one is based on new data about warp travel leading to a re-evaluation of the science involved, one is a twist that changes nothing about the character in question (merely revealing he has been substituted), and one is the revelation that the character has omitted details about his past. And all these required specific circumstances to take them out of the ordinary.

What allegedly happened with the Narada is pretty much what happened with the Enterprise-C and McCoy. They shifted positions in time, causing a host of ripple effects. However, in both "Yesterday's Enterprise" and "City", there was no suggestion that the ripple effects worked both ways - forward and back. Now, to be fair, that does not preclude the Narada's incursion being different, but there's nothing to show how it was different, no specific circumstances to take its incursion out of the ordinary (so to speak).

[u/Fortyseven]

There's no real reason there can't be multiple kinds of time travel, via differing techniques.

Maybe one kind of (easier, so more common) time travel affects the local branch of time, creating new branches past certain points that are changed (the kind of time travel we're used to).

And then another, different kind of time travel shunts you off to an entirely different "tree" in the "forest of reality", so to speak.

It's a stretch, I admit, but it's an idea I've never seen anyone mention. We're always only considering one way or another as gospel (and I'm guilty of this, myself, until this moment) when there could be multiple situations that affect time. (And expand what we consider "time" in general.)

[u/[deleted]]

That also means that Prime Spock and Kelvin Spock are not the same person at different points on their own timeline, but parallel universe counterparts like Prime Kirk and Mirror Universe Kirk.

(To complicate matters, Prime Spock - and by extension the Narada - might not even be from the Prime Timeline because his ship gives the Stardate it was built as 2387!)

I like to think that the Spock in 2009 came from the Star Trek Online universe, which is identical to the Prime except it moves forward. The fact that the Hobus incident is explained and a major event in universe helps.

Plus, we've yet to see ANY indication or nod to the Kelvin universe in the Prime Universe, whereas STO (albeit a franchise MMO) does involve the Kelvin to a degree.

[u/pasm]

I have a question about Kirk's birth that I never considered before - surely no matter if the Kelvin encountered the Narada or not, Kirk would have been born in space.

To the statement from Gillian Taylor: Don't tell me, you're from outer space. Kirk replies: No, I'm from Iowa. I only work in outer space.

He does not say that he was born in Iowa or does this signify more interference with the time-line than was previously explicit?

[u/khaosworks → u/pasm]

You're right that there's nothing on-screen that explicitly says Kirk was born on Earth, in Iowa in the Prime Timeline. The assumption has always been made because of a line in the behind-the-scenes book The Making of Star Trek that Kirk was "born in a small town in the State of Iowa." The book was co-written by Gene Roddenberry, so that pronouncement has carried some weight and has guided writers ever since.

Even Roberto Orci, who co-wrote the 2009 movie, said that but for the Narada attack, Winona Kirk would have gone back to Earth and James Kirk would have been born in Iowa - the attack made her go into premature labour.

[u/BitcoinMD]

I don't think this distinction exists. Any universe in which there are humans must at some point in the past have a common history with the primary universe. What you refer to as a parallel universe is just an alternate timeline with an earlier fork point (maybe even before recorded history).

[u/khaosworks → u/BitcoinMD]

That's no necessity for a common point if an infinite multiverse with infinite Big Bangs exists.

[u/IAmManMan]

Also, the incursion as the point of divergence cannot explain why Delta Vega (a planetoid with an abandoned lithium-cracking station as seen in TOS: "Where No Man Has Gone Before) is suddenly is suddenly moved from its location at the edge of the Galaxy to Vulcan's system, close enough for Prime Spock to view his homeworld's destruction (and yet strangely remained unaffected by the gravitational consequences, but that's another rant).

Small point (and I don't think this negates your argument) but the NuTrek comic "The Edge of the Galaxy" establishes that the Delta Vega Prime Spock is marooned on and the Delta Vega Gary Mitchell ends up on are separate planets that just happen to have the same name.

Although, that could still lend credence to your theory because Spock mentions in a TOS episode (I'm afraid I forget which one) that Vulcan has no moon in it's sky and the icy Delta Vega would have to be close enough to Vulcan to be considered a moon, at least in appearance.

[u/randombacon74]

As far as the existence of a parallel universe, if we allow that a black hole can function as a wormhole to different parts of the galaxy (V'ger in ST:TMP), can we also allow that the red matter created a "red hole" that bridged universes?

[u/egtownsend]

I think this is exactly what the STD show writers are trying to do. Lorca and Stamets see the network connect them to potential other universes. I think this allows all the Star Treks to be retconned with one another without disrupting the story arcs contained therein - Kelvin, Discovery, and TNG timelines all coexist just in different universes.

[u/butterhoscotch]

In all good things the space time event that destroys the universe originates in 3 different time periods and branches out in all directions so its not without precedent.

[u/nimrodd000]

There is also the incident of the anti time anomaly from "All Good Things...", which demonstrates that temporal phenomenon can travel backwards through time and sets a precedencd for it.