Logic And Myth

See Continuing A Combox Discussion.

The idea that someone can both experience an event and set out to bring it about that that event has never occurred in any sense whatsoever is part of the mythology of time travel and we need to appreciate the power of the myth while questioning its logic.

One of the sources of Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series was L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall. In that novel, other people had disappeared into the past before Martin Padway, who initiates a divergent timeline. Maybe some previous time travelers had also caused such alternative timelines and maybe some of those travelers had thought that, by creating these divergent realities, they had prevented their original timeline from ever having existed. However, it did exist when they departed from it and still existed later when Padway departed from it. There is plenty of room for the original and alternative histories either to coexist or to succeed each other if we assume more than the four dimensions of spacetime.