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

[Umbran]

Everything we know about how time travel might possibly work requires huge amounts of energy at the very least. That is a thing that is true.

Yes, but everything we know about how time travel might possibly work also involves materials that don't exist, and/or that we cannot manipulate, in configurations that should not be physically stable. Like, infinitely long, rapidly rotating cylinders of neutronium.

How we think it "might possibly work" is irrelevant, unless you posit that we get it by incrementally improving our ability to do it by one of the methods we currently think it might possibly work.

If instead you posit we get it though some fundamentally new science, then the old considerations go poof.

If we assume a fantastical easy time travel

We are assuming fantastical things with ANY time travel. There is no time travel that is not fantastical.

 

[Reynard]

We are assuming fantastical things with ANY time travel. There is no time travel that is not fantastical.

Then there is no argument to be made. Time travel can be anything. It's pure fantasy. It only has value as philosophical discussions about what to do with it.

 

[The Firebird]

So...not science. Not really math, either. Kind of just half-assed metaphysics. Is that what "informatics" is?

It's a newer term encompassing anything data heavy in the sciences and elsewhere. In biology it goes by "bioinformatics", in chemistry "cheminformatics". But there is also some overlap with data science and computer science.

I don't know much about the particular informatics program but I wouldn't reject it on those grounds.

 

[GMMichael]

So, I skipped a few pages, but did we cover the angle about time being part of space, "spacetime," and therefore probably not separately navigable from space?

Or the quantum worlds angle of: everything happens, but we only see what's probable? So time travel is just not very probable?