Building off dumb thoughts broken off of Trek 2009:

        All right, if Spock Prime finds that cave set that did such great
business in the boom years of Next Generation/Deep Space Nine/Voyager/
Enterprise, does he find Data's head there?  

        And if he doesn't, does that imply those weird lifeforce-eaters
just kept chomping down on humans in Vaguely 1890s San Francisco until
finally The Doctor got around to his Earth-Outside-Britain visit for that
season?  

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                                                                Joseph Nebus
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(Joseph Nebus) said:

In that vein, when, about 20 years after this story, the whale probe
arrives and Kirk & Co jump back to the mid-80s to get George and
Gracie, are they going to bump into Kirk Prime and Spock Prime on their
own mission to do the same thing?

Maybe they could use footage from STIV and insert the new guys, a la
Back to the Future II.

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Chris
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On 26 May 2009, nebu...@-rpi-.edu (Joseph Nebus) wondered:

Precedent when crossing between branching timelines:

In TNG, the alt-Tasha (20-year-war timeline "B") returns from 2365
with the Ent-C to c.2340 and lived into timeline "A".

In the DS9 novel _Time's Enemy_, a centuries-old version of the
_Defiant_ is found buried in a comet.  They manage to avert the events
that lead to that eventuality, but the derelict ship doesn't vanish.
Starfleet's temporal physicists shrug and conclude it had acquired
some kind of "temporal inertia" by being embedded in the past for so
long.

Timeline "A": Data goes from 2367 to 1890.  His body returns to 2367.
In 2387, the _Narada_ returns to 2233, causing timeline "C", in which
it's unlikely there will ever be a Data, or an encounter with the
Devidian Soul-Suckers.

So I'd say "yes."  Data's head will have arrived from a future that
will never occur, but because it existed for 340 years before the
branching event that would otherwise negate its existence, it
continues to exist anyway.

I think the season 3 DS9 two-parter "Past Tense" establishes that you
can return to the past, change the future, but part of the future will
remain for you to beam back to so long as it's wrapped in an
appropriate chroniton particle cloud.  Which is probably why the
landing part in TOS:COTEOF persisted while in the Guardian's vicinity,
but with more technobabble.

So if Data's head is here, then presumably Data arrived.  And if Data
arrived, so could his friends.  And if they're not still here, they
must have gone somewhere.  So either they weren't able to return (the
Devidian time-portal was suddenly one-way), or they returned to their
own future "A" instead of "C".

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