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Old 12-25-2018, 08:12 PM
cosmicfish cosmicfish is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tsofian View Post
The implications for this in terms of Bruce's free will are concrete. If it is a closed time loop Bruce has no free will. He goes through time and performs the actions at specific points in time/space that he performs. His actions are immutable. If Time is a loop there is no past or present there are only events and these events that occur and exist at specific fixed points along the loop.
The existence of a loop does not preclude free will, it simply implies that the individual is for one reason or another unable to change their mind.

Quote:
Originally Posted by tsofian View Post
For those of us living within the loop it means that all of our actions are fixed. It doesn't matter what we (or in this case a character) chooses to do.
Again, no it doesn't, it just means we don't get do overs.

Quote:
Originally Posted by tsofian View Post
For multiple time streams all actions can happen, all events have implications for other changes.
Certain actions become easier with multiple time streams, that doesn't mean that other things cannot happen in a single time stream.

Two of the biggest issues in time travel (besides it being impossible so far as we know) are the basic issues of Foundation and Energy.

Foundation is the idea that information does not randomly occur, nor does it occur when it is already known to exist. That is to say, if something is to be created, someone must create it from scratch at some point without said creator being able to point at an existing example. This idea of Foundation is used in a number of paradoxes, including Bootstrap and Grandfather. Note that Foundation is based on the idea of Linear Time, which in turn is required for adjacent time steps to be on a "reasonable" energy scale - if time is not locally linear then there arise massive questions in how large time steps account for the energy difference between temporal states.

Energy is the idea that the conservation of matter and energy does not cease to apply in the case of time travel, that transferring between two identical energy states cannot physically be lossless, and that this energy difference must somehow be accounted for. If you are in the world of Jan 1 2020 and see a nuclear hellscape and want to change that, doing so must require an amount of energy equivalent to putting all those molecules and quarks and rays and waves into new places for the corresponding times, and that is a TON of energy. Alternately, you can create a whole new future/universe (which requires even MORE energy while failing to erase the old one), or step into an existing similar universe that is more agreeable (requiring perhaps very little energy but again leaving the original universe to burn).

So let's consider 4 options: Infinite universes, finite universes, single universe, and no time travel.

1) Infinite universes. Everything happens somewhere. Time travel as we consider it may not be even be possible in this scenario, nor recognizable when it happens. Foundation and Energy are not problems because there are always universes where the ideas are created from scratch and the universe you want already exists for free - you just need to step into it, knowing that there is already another one that is exactly identical save for the fact that you never entered that one.

Unfortunately, this also renders everything morally meaningless. If the universes are infinite, then so are your potential choices. You've lived your life as a saint? Well, out there are universes where you just this second became the worst human being ever imagined. You've lived a lifetime of evil? There are universes where you are about to have a radical change of heart.

With infinite universes, the moral decisions are not about saving anything. Nothing can be saved. Everything is always saved in some universes and destroyed in others, and those universes will always be there. All individuals can do is make choices knowing that their decisions are morally inconsequential, and that would likely be ruinous.

2) Finite universes. This gets tricky because it depends on how many universes there are and how similar to ours they would be. Energy becomes a big deal here in just understanding the mechanism - were there always a large number of universes, each developing separately, or are existing universes split at different points? If the former, are there even humans in any universe but our own? If the latter, how does the split work - does the universe get copied or cut down the middle?

Even stepping past how the universes came to be, time travel becomes a huge Energy problem. There are likely no conveniently similar universes to step into, so you either need to recreate the universe (or some part of it) or shift the existing version... which puts you back into the Foundation problem.

Finite universes provide no moral quandaries, and Foundation is not necessarily an issue... but getting over that Energy problem can be huge.

3) Single universe. In this case, Foundation and Energy both rule and morality remains constant - one universe, so no escaping consequence. Time travel may be possible, provided that Foundation is preserved and Energy managed, and indeed, the Energy problem may not even be one.

One of the common problems in applying mathematics to physics and chemistry is that there are some times when the mathematics suggest multiple solutions where the physics or chemistry permit only one. You see this frequently in circles and triangles, where one solution is imaginary, or where what initially appear to be two solutions are revealed to be identical. So it may that you don't really have free will in a sense meaningful to time travel. Or it may be that the stable solution is the one where you always were going to go back in time and either fail or simply choose to avoid directly replacing any instant of your experience.

You go back in time to kill Hitler... and fail. Or you go back in time and kill Hitler... but it wasn't Hitler, the "real" Hitler simply assumed the identity. Or you do go back in time and kill Hitler and save all the Jews, but you pull a Millennium and maintain the illusion of the Holocaust until you return to the present to avoid paying the unimaginable energy cost of rewriting history when you can simply add a footnote for much less.

4) No time travel!

Okay, this isn't like the other scenarios at ALL, but it is worthwhile discussing. Time travel is not actually required for the Project. What is required? The actuality of the war, the technology to survive the it hidden, and the ability to recruit people. Time travel explains the latter two, but it is not the only explanation and is only really necessary for specific cases.

If fusion power and cryogenic storage of living beings can be produced with (for example) 80's technology then they just need people to invent them, by brilliance or luck. No other technology is really vital (and even they aren't, technically), so you only need time travel for the story if there is no other way to conceive of and create a vital technology.

As to people, I think we could all imagine a sufficiently charismatic leader convincing tens of thousands of people during the Cold War to go underground against a "certain" nuclear holocaust. Again, it becomes more about the details - convincing "top-shelf" candidates would require the kind of certain proof that perhaps only clearly defined time travel could provide, but if you lower your standards enough you can staff the Project with only the illusion of time travel or simply with strong rhetoric.

And do you need the war to be certain, from the perspective of the early Project? The war needs to happen, or at least something that looks like the war*, but the organizers could have been guessing or even running some long con with the expectation that the war would never happen.

Depending on the reality of the universes (i.e., options 1-3 above), this may be the actual solution even if Bruce really does travel in time. Maybe the war he sees is in another universe and he knows nothing about what will happen in this one. Maybe he brings back fusion power from another universe but it is already being invented by someone here. Maybe the reality of BEM's time travel is like crossing a time zone, a formality with no real physical significance.

Anyway, just a few thoughts that (obviously) snowballed on a sleepy Christmas evening.

*: E.g. the "war" is really aliens attacking, or some large meteorite bombardment, or was accidentally or intentionally initiated by the Project itself!.
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