Time travel doesn't exist because time travel wiped out the timelines where it did

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

It's the weak anthropic principle in action, according to a new paper:

The Missing Time Travelers of 3025 Could Be a Real Scientific Problem

A new study explains that time travel itself eventually leads to a reality without it.

www.popularmechanics.com

In a new study, Andrew Jackson—a research associate from the School of Informatics—explores reasons beyond the scientific or technological as to why time travel appears to be impossible (at least, in this reality). Published in the preprint journal arXiv and titled “Where Are All the Tourists From 3025?,” the study posits that maybe time travel itself is a self-suppressing phenomenon.

“I conclude that, assuming my model, time travel is self-suppressing: the timeline is continually rewritten until it inevitably reaches a timeline with no time machines ever being constructed, “ Jackson wrote. “At this point, no further changes to the timeline are possible.”

Jackson illustrates this idea with what’s known as a Markov chain, named after Russian mathematician Andrey Markov, which describes a sequence of possible events wherein the probability of those events depends only on the current state. In the paper, Jackson shows that introducing time travel into any timeline would create dynamic instability that would eventually (at least, statistically) create a timeline where time travel was never invented, which is the most stable state for any timeline. The process of this continuous timeline change would, however, feel instantaneous to non-time travelers such as you and I.

Ironically, this would be a heck of a campaign frame for TimeWatch: Time travel exists, but is closely guarded, because eventually, it'll screw up the timeline so much that time travelers never get access to it.

 

[Laurefindel]

It's the weak anthropic principle in action, according to a new paper:

The Missing Time Travelers of 3025 Could Be a Real Scientific Problem

A new study explains that time travel itself eventually leads to a reality without it.

www.popularmechanics.com

Ironically, this would be a heck of a campaign frame for TimeWatch: Time travel exists, but is closely guarded, because eventually, it'll screw up the timeline so much that time travelers never get access to it.

Funny, I was just reading that…

 

[overgeeked]

It's the weak anthropic principle in action, according to a new paper:

The Missing Time Travelers of 3025 Could Be a Real Scientific Problem

A new study explains that time travel itself eventually leads to a reality without it.

www.popularmechanics.com

Ironically, this would be a heck of a campaign frame for TimeWatch: Time travel exists, but is closely guarded, because eventually, it'll screw up the timeline so much that time travelers never get access to it.

Or Doctor Who.

Could even run it after the horses have left the barn. Someone decides they’ve had enough of all this nonsense and starts removing time travel after it’s already in use.

 

[Umbran]

Hr. I'm not sure that logic works as well as the article suggests.

It says, "But maybe the biggest paradox of all is also the simplest one: If time travel were possible, wouldn’t we encounter these temporal tourists all the time?"

But, no! That's not a paradox! Paradoxes are things that are logically impossible, not just seemingly improbable or vexing.

Remember the famous Grandfather Paradox - if you travel back in time, and kill your grandfather before your father is conceived, you aren't ever born, and so cannot travel in time to kill him. A time traveler eliminating time travel is logically the same! If time travel removes time travel, then the time travel doesn't exist to eliminate itself!

If you are in a universe that does not allow paradoxes, then either time travel is just not possible, or it is otherwise impossible for you to enter the Grandfather Paradox. If you are in a universe that does allow paradoxes, then you travel in time, eliminate time travel... but you're still there, with your time machine, and haven't eliminated time travel!

 

[TwoSix]

I mean, I always thought that was kind of glaringly obvious.

If it is possible to travel back to the past, then every version of the timeline that could have played out, did play out, until we reached the timeline where it never happened or could happen.