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Old 07-02-2021, 02:04 PM   #9
ericthered
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Join Date: Mar 2012
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Default Re: Alternate Versions of Inifinite Worlds

Recently I was trying to work out a version of time travel that preserved causality but spun off a finite number of timelines... and I would up with this set-up:


Time travel is only possible once every year, and it send you back in one year increments, to one of the moments when time travel is possible. There is only one timeline that distance back: everyone jumping back to it or ahead to it arrives in that timeline at the same time.

some results of this scheme:

  • It feels very much like alternate timelines rather than time travel, because once time travelers start messing with their own history, divergences kick in, and no new matching timelines are born.
  • The whole setting very much has a present "Now". You can go back and talk to your great grandfather, he's only really a diverged copy of your great grandfather. You can go back to the time of the dinosaurs, but you can't build an empire there for a hundred years without being noticed, because your peers are also experiencing those hundred years. You just went somewhere else, without really messing around with time.
  • You either have to have a "leading edge of time", a time where the first time traveler diverged everything, or you have to have this infinite history where time travel has always existed and the first time traveler happened an infinite amount of time in the future, and this implies this weird stable holding pattern in the flow of time and implies you either have access to infinite technology or that there are nations/things that guard the upper time lines.
  • The number of time lines and the number of chances to jump are directly proportional, which leads to either a huge multiverse or very few jump opportunities. 1 year was picked as a compromise.
Anyway, it was an interesting thought experiment, I'd thought I'd show it to you folks.
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