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

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I would prefer that by the time someone figures out how to do time travel they have also figured out that time travel is so dangerous and vile that its purveyors and all blueprints for it must be annihilated.

Also a good plot for a TimeWatch game!

 

[Kichwas]

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

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.

You could go another way with that too.

A WWI style 'hopeless war for no reason' scenario.

Everyone always sets things in worlds AFTER the Time War, or where there's some Time Agency. But what about setting it in the final parts of a doomed time war where everyone is going to lose but they're still fighting anyway.

You're waiting on the edges of time unraveling for the end to come, still popping above the 'time trench' to try and take out the other guys because orders are orders and deserters get wiped from existence but you've also come to realize the war itself is going to wipe everyone from existence.

Into that bleakness, throw some angle that maybe you can trigger a reset into a reality where it's impossible for you to exist... But you have a gnawing sense that you've already tried this infinity-1 times before.

 

[Morrus]

The word "study" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

 

[Reynard]

Whatever timeline you are experiencing must be the final timeline from your perspective, unless there is some mechanism by which you could perceive a different timeline.

More likely, if time travel is possible, it is possible only through closed timelike curves and other artificial phenomena. And if they have not been invented yet from one's perspective, then there is no time travel in that time line.

 

[Morrus]

The timeline could be drastically and constantly altering multiple times a second as millions of time travellers swamp the entirety of history, but you'd never know it because at any given moment you only remember the current one. In half a microsecond, you'll be remembering an entirely different one because this one no longer exists. Or this one. Or this one.

 

[The Firebird]

Anyone else look at the paper? This about sums up the level of argument:

To consider the future of machine lifespans, it is useful to first consider the past. How has the useful lifetime of large
complex machines changed? Perhaps the closest analogy is cars: cars have – in the last 50 years – had their lifetimes
extended significantly, as technology has improved to enable them to keep running longer.

If these trends continue, in 1000 years or so, complex machines will have lifespans so long that they can be well approximated by saying they are infinite. This does not factor in potential breakthroughs in technological maintenance (e.g. mimicking how biological systems can repair and maintain themselves, allowing them to run indefinitely), just incremental improvements based on historical patterns.

 

[Morrus]

You're waiting on the edges of time unraveling for the end to come, still popping above the 'time trench' to try and take out the other guys

Time trenches sound like something straight out of Doctor Who.