Thread:Elledy92/@comment-26838855-20190425183005/@comment-2106279-20190812142924

Darthvader779 wrote: What doesn't make sense to me is why Steve Rogers returned the Power, Space, Mind, and Reality Stones without encasing them in the Orb, Tesseract, Scepter, or liquifying the Reality Stone into the Aether. If Steve returned the Reality Stone to Asgard in its solid form, the Sacking of Asgard may not have played out as Malekith's goal was to obtain the Aether and spread its destructive powers across the Nine Realms in the Convergence. [...]

So technically, in the alternate timeline, the Infinity Stones are still active, Asgard and Xandar may have not been destroyed, and characters such as Ego, Ronan, Korath, Kaecilius, Hela, Erik Killmonger, Crossbones, Odin, Nova Corps, and the Ancient One could possibly be alive then? Yeah, that was weird that Cap returned them without their containment devices. As to the second point, mostly yes. Kevin Feige actually confirmed that we the fans would get to explore one of the alternate timelines; the Loki Disney+ show is confirmed to take place in the 2012 the Avengers created, where Loki escaped with the Tesseract. In all these other timelines the Avengers created in the Time Heist, things played out differently.

The Avengers were told by Hulk that they couldn't mess up their timeline, so the Avengers operated the Time Heist knowing they were creating alternate timelines. It wasn't 'til they all got back to 2023 that they found out, through Hulk, that they were to return the stones. Maybe if they knew beforehand, they would have done things differently. In any case, yeah, most of those characters could still be alive. Except Ancient One, I think the idea for her is that, like she said in Doctor Strange, her death was inevitable. And the Time Heist didn't change that. Those events with Kaecilius would stay play out, with Dormammu & the Dark Dimension.

Ego wouldn't have found Quill in the new timeline, so he'd be alive. Thanos is gone, so Nova Corps would not be destroyed in 2018. Killmonger, not sure. I think the events of Black Panther could still play out. Crossbones, probably alive. Odin wouldn't have gotten usurped in the fashion he did since Thor: The Dark World doesn't happen in the alternate timeline created in 2012, which means in that timeline, Hela most likely remained trapped. But there is an alternate 2013 timeline, where they got the Aether from, so that timeline's future is also unknown.