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A question about time travel
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<blockquote data-quote="Bohandas" data-source="post: 8124098" data-attributes="member: 7015707"><p>Amnyway, I like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle" target="_blank">Novikov's Self-Consistency Principle</a>, which basically posits that the past can't be changed even if it can be entered and interacted with; Events will conspire to produce the same timeline that has always existed. </p><p></p><p>The standard example is a ball traveling towards a wormhole on a trajectory such that if it continued its present course it would hit itself and prevent itself from entering the wormhole. Under the self-consistency principle it would strike itself not at the angle that one would naively expect from the starting conditions, but at a new angle that is exactly the angle its past self would need to be struck at to emerge at the new angle.</p><p></p><p>It would be a nightmare to run in a game but has great potential for stories. And not just stories about people trying to change thing and failing either. If we look at the situation four dimensionally, we can see how if time travel were convenient enough it would actually cause those with access to it to have good luck. It's incorrect to look at as time running past to future and then someone going back to create a new but somehow consistent timeline, there only was, is, and will be the one original timeline. And so, while one way for the timeline to remain consistent would be for events to conspire to prevent the traveler from making a desired change, an equally plausible one would be for events to conspire so that the thing that they would try to change simply doesn't happen in the first place. And so a time traveler would experience extremes of luck, the only bad things that would happen would be those that they couldn't plausibly change in a convenient fashion (with what is "plausible" and "convenient" depending on the extent and soundness of the wormhole network and other inter-temporal infrastructure, the time traveler's personal resources, and their proficiency, cleverness, and industriousness in dealing with this sort of logic; ideally there would be multiple failsafes in place to prevent weird interfering coincidences - or worse, failure of the time travel infrastructure - from being the path of least resistence for self-consistency*)</p><p></p><p>*Theoretically this could actually be why time travel doesn't exist; it might not be impossible per se, it might just be that the easiest and most probable way for things to stay consistent is for it not to happen.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Bohandas, post: 8124098, member: 7015707"] Amnyway, I like [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle]Novikov's Self-Consistency Principle[/url], which basically posits that the past can't be changed even if it can be entered and interacted with; Events will conspire to produce the same timeline that has always existed. The standard example is a ball traveling towards a wormhole on a trajectory such that if it continued its present course it would hit itself and prevent itself from entering the wormhole. Under the self-consistency principle it would strike itself not at the angle that one would naively expect from the starting conditions, but at a new angle that is exactly the angle its past self would need to be struck at to emerge at the new angle. It would be a nightmare to run in a game but has great potential for stories. And not just stories about people trying to change thing and failing either. If we look at the situation four dimensionally, we can see how if time travel were convenient enough it would actually cause those with access to it to have good luck. It's incorrect to look at as time running past to future and then someone going back to create a new but somehow consistent timeline, there only was, is, and will be the one original timeline. And so, while one way for the timeline to remain consistent would be for events to conspire to prevent the traveler from making a desired change, an equally plausible one would be for events to conspire so that the thing that they would try to change simply doesn't happen in the first place. And so a time traveler would experience extremes of luck, the only bad things that would happen would be those that they couldn't plausibly change in a convenient fashion (with what is "plausible" and "convenient" depending on the extent and soundness of the wormhole network and other inter-temporal infrastructure, the time traveler's personal resources, and their proficiency, cleverness, and industriousness in dealing with this sort of logic; ideally there would be multiple failsafes in place to prevent weird interfering coincidences - or worse, failure of the time travel infrastructure - from being the path of least resistence for self-consistency*) *Theoretically this could actually be why time travel doesn't exist; it might not be impossible per se, it might just be that the easiest and most probable way for things to stay consistent is for it not to happen. [/QUOTE]
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