The base timeline cannot be changed.
There is no need for a Time Patrol to prevent causality violations in the base timeline.
In that timeline, one theory of "time travel" might be that it is an elaborate form of suicide and should therefore be discouraged or even prevented for that reason. However, once a time traveller has departed, nothing further can be done.
Of course we know that the first departures into the past coincided with the outbreak of a civilization-destroying nuclear war so maybe that is the end of the matter in any case?
Is there a cosmic evolutionary process whereby intelligence that is about to make itself extinct in one timeline creates and escapes into an alternative timeline?
Fly in the ointment: Fuchs, the inventor of the temporal displacement apparatus, has a real, not duplicate, dolabra (Roman soldier's entrenching tool). Has his apparatus reached into the past and extracted this tool? Or has someone travelled into the past and brought the tool with him on returning to the present? - thus upsetting my carefully constructed theory that all "time travel" is into an alternative timeline? Time travel is a very difficult concept to discuss consistently.
Returning to my theory for the time being, if time travel is invented later in the alternative timeline, then that timeline becomes the base timeline for a second alternative timeline. And so on.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Is it really possible to make theoretical sense of time traveling? If tine traveling is possible and real, then some kind of theory should be possible. But I am totally unsure--nor do I pretend to understand it.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Each story has its own premises and struggles to be consistent with them.
Paul.
Conveniently, the American time-travelers don't know what the time machine could do -- could it take them to anywhere but 165 CE? And they don't know its limits.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: At least Anderson was better at trying to make sense of time traveling than almost everyone else.
Mr. Stirling: Because Artorius and his grad students were Classical historians, linguists, or specialists in how "obsolete" tech works. Not physicists.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yes. Conversely, their educations are more useful in 165 CE than a physicist would be!
"could it take them to anywhere but 165 CE?"
The specific dates of arrival for both the American & Chinese Time Travellers, make me think Fuchs' machine can only move an integer number of years. Perhaps a time machine set up on Mars could only go an integer number of Martian years.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Jim!
Mr. Stirling: That's exactly why Herr Doktor Fuchs lured Artorius & Co. to Austria.
Jim. I did wonder a little bit like that.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment