"Here" means "this place." "There" may refer to any other place. "Now" means "this time." "Then" may refer to any other time. "When" may refer to a past, future or possible future time. "When I reach ninety..." turns out to be counterfactual if I do not reach ninety.
"This time" may mean "this moment" or "this period" and the period can be long, e.g., "Now, since the agricultural revolution..." or "Now, since life has emerged on Earth..."
Any place is "here" to someone standing in it. Any moment is "now" to a being that is conscious in that moment. Along my world-line, every waking moment between my birth and my death is perceived as "now" by me in that moment. There are many "nows" distributed along the world-line, not one "now" moving along it. If there were only one moment, then there would be no need to differentiate it as "now" because there would be no other moments to be referred to as "then." However, even if a single durationless instant were possible, there would no one to notice it or refer to it as "now."
Time must be clarified before time travel can be conceptualized.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I certainly agree on the necessity of clarifying and defining terms before such a discussion can proceed, in this and other types of discussion. And the Danellians and the Time Patrol worked out a special language, called Temporal, with the kind of tenses and linguistic structure needed to make discussion of the problems raised by time traveling comprehensible. Would Temporal still use Roman letters? What would a paragraph in that language LOOK like?
Sean
Sean,
We are at least told that timecycle control consoles use post-Arabic numerals. I would like to know what is better than Arabic numerals - which are piles better than Roman.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree, what on Terra are "post" Hindu/Arabic numbers? All of us are so used to such numbers that it's difficult to conceive of them being replaced. Nowadays Roman numbers are used mostly for things like texts which are not directly part of a book, prefatory material. Or for the ordinal numbers of popes and sovereigns. Or for clocks and watches.
Sean
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