Monday 27 July 2015

The End Of The History Of The Time Patrol

How should the History of the Time Patrol end? Two key events, not necessarily in this order, must be:

the death of the last surviving member of the last class to graduate from the Academy;

the beginning of the Era of Oneness that precedes the Danellians.

But there are other outcomes. I have argued before that, if a Time Patroller is stranded in the Carthaginian timeline, then that Patroller will live out the rest of his or her life in that timeline. Those Patrollers who have restored their own timeline may say that the Carthaginian timeline has never existed but, if there is anyone in that timeline, then they do regard it as existing.

Patrollers stranded in a "deleted" timeline will think that the Patrol has failed unless they reason as I do in which case they will realize that they do not know the outcome - and to them it does not really matter. Since I regard these various timelines as preceding and succeeding each other along a second temporal dimension, the question becomes whether the Danellian timeline is the last in the series. Does anyone know? And does that have to matter either?

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