If we merely live in a mutable timeline...
Even if someone departs into the past intending to prevent our births, we here and now need not be concerned about this because, even if the time traveller succeeds, that timeline in which we were not born will exist in the future of the second temporal dimension but cannot affect us here and now.
If we merely live in a discontinuous timeline...
There may have been discontinuous events (quantum fluctuations, including time travellers arriving from nowhere and nowhen) in our past but they did not prevent us from being born or from existing here and now so they are not a cause for concern.
If we time travel in a mutable timeline...
We might travel into the past and return to an altered present. If we want to prevent this from happening, then we will need the Time Patrol.
If we time travel in a discontinuous timeline...
This is the real anomaly. Someone who does not time travel or at least who has not time travelled yet has authentic memories of his life to date. (As authentic as memories ever are but that is a different issue.) Someone who has just arrived in what he thinks is his past does not know whether his memories are authentic. He might be one of those quantum time travellers who arrive from nowhere and nowhen with inauthentic memories. The Time Patrol tries to prevent events like this from happening but there is still a massive conceptual problem about memories being authentic before we depart into the past but not necessarily being authentic when we arrive in the past.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
An intriguing thought. Theoretically, we could go into the past and somehow prevent our parents from having the children they would otherwise have, US. But that would have occurred in the second temporal dimension, not the one we remember.
Ad astra! Sean
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