Earth entered the inhibitor field before intelligence had evolved. When intelligence did emerge, it adapted to compensate for the field so that animals and human beings became about as intelligent as they would have done without the field. Then, when Earth left the field, their intelligence quantitatively increased to a qualitatively new level.
The opposite happens for intelligent beings whose planets enter the field. They are suddenly reduced to a sub-moronic level and probably do not survive. Because passage through the field benefits some species, including humanity, Nathan Lewis wonders whether there is a reason for all this but, if there is a reason, then it has to account for the bad effects as well.
At the end of Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time, Robert Anderson wonders whether time travellers from a far future travelled into the past to sow the genes that generated mutant time travellers. That is a better worked out "reason."
4 comments:
Yeah, but that's a "can't change the future" system of time-travel. Which makes no sense, IMHO.
I think it is the best kind of time travel! Because it involves travel to the real past.
Kaor, to Both!
Trying to make sense of time traveling hurts my head! (Smiles)
Ad astra! Sean
Paul: yeah, but if you study history in detail, it becomes obvious that it mostly consists of low-probability accidents bouncing off each other. So any change in the past would have enormous, ramifying effects no matter how trivial it was.
In fact, I don't think the Time Patrol stories make sense that way, except the last two, where a random chance upsets things.
Any major historical event is that way.
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