We are told that the Temporal language alone has tenses to deal with time travel and specifically with causality violations. Anderson, writing English, does generate contradictions. Should we say of a "deleted" timeline that it has ceased to exist or that it never existed? We are told both.
In any case, either, e.g., the "Carthaginian" timeline, in which Carthage won the Second Punic War and Hannibal sacked Rome, exists from the beginning to the end of its duration or it does not exist for any length of time. What it most certainly does not do is exist until some arbitrary moment in its history and then "blink out" of existence. (This phrase is used although, just on my way out the door, I am not going to seek out the page reference at this time.)
OK. We are reading English but the Time Patrollers speak Temporal.
Back here later on this timeline.
15 comments:
If there's a single timeline and time is mutable, existence is always conditional. You can just 'blink' out of existence at any time. This would be worrying...
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Very alarming! I prefer to think alternate timelines split off from one another without ceasing to exist.
Ad astra! Sean
I think that there can be a timeline in which I was born and exist or a timeline in which I was not born and do not exist but not a timeline in which I was not born but nevertheless exist and then, at some arbitrary moment, blink out of existence.
Paul: why not? If time travel is possible, causation is conditional.
But, in a timeline where I have not been born, I do not exist and therefore cannot cease to exist.
Paul: no, but a time-traveler's intervention could make you exist!
In fact, no matter how inconspicuous, a time-traveler would have some effect. Just walking down the street would delay or speed up specific acts of sexual intercourse which would produce specific people. You're the result of a particular sperm meeting a particular egg at a specific time -- because the genetic recombination that produces is a largely random process.
Eg., one of. my brothers has red hair and light-green-blue eyes and is over six feet tall. I have dark hair (tho' not when I was small) and brownish eyes with flecks of green (hazel is the term, IRCC) and my maximum height was 5ft8. My father had raven-black hair, high cheekbones and bright blue eyes. I'm similar enough in appearance to my eldest brother to have been mistaken for him sometimes (in person and on the telephone) and we both resemble our mother.
Sometimes, when discussing time travel, it seems that we have such different perceptions of the subject that we have difficulty understanding each other. I think (!) that I have made myself clear but then find someone else's points unclear.
I get it that it is at least arguable that, merely by being in the past, a time traveller will have small unintended effects without realizing it. He might, whether intentionally or unintentionally, prevent someone from being born. But my present point is only that, if someone's birth is prevented, then that person is prevented from coming into existence, not caused to "blink out" of existence - having somehow grown to adulthood before "blinking out"?
Paul: well, in timeline A (before the time traveler's intervention) you existed as an adult.
Then a time traveler from the future goes back before your conception, and something she does prevents you from being born.
That's Timeline B.
You -did- exist, and then you didn't... but in the same period of time.
From the time-traveler's viewpoint and duration-sense, you were there and now you're not.
Depending on the assumptions, that can result either in 2 timelines, one of which you exist in and one where you don't, or one timeline replacing another.
Sure. But, from my point of view, I don't find myself existing into adulthood, then suddenly fading out of existence. Some people think that that would happen.
Paul: no, from your viewpoint, you just cease to exist. Which is pretty much what death is, after all.
But, in the timeline where my parents meet, I am born and do not cease to exist whereas, in the timeline where my parents do not meet, I am not born and do not begin to exist so in neither timeline do I cease to exist.
Paul: that's a non-falsifiable hypothesis.
I think it logically follows. Timeline A: I am born and exist until death. Timeline B: I am not born and do not exist, therefore do not in any sense cease to exist. Point of view of a time traveller who crosses from A to B: He may well think and say that I have ceased to exist.
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