star trek - Why didn't search party get affected after McCoy altered past?

In ST:TOS 1x28, the USS Enterprise followed time ripples to their source from millions of miles. McCoy injected himself a drug by accident and beamed down to the planet in an out-of-control situation.

Kirk, Spock and 4 more crew members also beamed down to search McCoy. On the planet's surface, they found an intelligent entity (The Guardian of Forever) which apparently was the source of the time ripples. It was a time and dimension portal. Suddenly, McCoy jumped into that to go to the Earth's past.

Instantaneously, the Enterprise went out of existence. They concluded that McCoy changed something critical in the past which undid all Enterprise-level technological achievements of humanity.

Provided, Enterprise didn't exist, how did the search party exist on that planet? Without the Enterprise, they would never have been able to trek to the planet.

I am not concerned about McCoy's existence because it's a paradox. I am asking why the crew wasn't wiped from existence.

Answer

The Guardian of Forever is seemingly a sentient being, able to control the time portal to some extent (such as when it pulled Kirk, Spock, and McCoy back at the end of the episode).

To borrow from its description on Memory Alpha:

It is apparently sentient, responding to external stimulus such as questions and actions, and can even somehow control the flow of time. It generates immense ripples in time that manifest themselves as spatial disturbances in the region around the planet where it is located.

This would seem to imply that the Guardian is actually preventing the time ripples from affecting the planet or anything on it. Orbit, however, seems to be fair game.

Likewise, after McCoy goes through, the Guardian comments:

"All that you knew is gone."

That further implies that the Guardian intentionally protected Kirk/etc so that they had a chance to restore the timeline.

Comments

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