[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by mmartin798

You are correct in the BEM does perceive multiple pasts, but not infinite. Only the pasts that are created when he travels back to a previous point in a established worldline. The 1989 war is a case in point.

That was my point - not that he experiences infinite pasts, but rather that he experiences multiple pasts when your proposed multiversal theory claims only one past.

Originally Posted by mmartin798

So BEM only has one past to enter, though he knows there have been different ones.

But what is the mechanism of this? If there is only one "past" at a time, then when he goes backwards in time he creates a new past, so there are multiple, realized "pasts" even if only one appears accessible at a time.

Let's consider time travel between the years 1960, 1980, and 2000. If our intrepid traveler starts in 1980, the years 1960-1980 are that single, fixed past. If they then travel to 2000, all of 1960-2000 are now that single, fixed past. But when they travel back to 1960, any change means replacing all of that 1960-2000 past with some new past. The old past is not probability or theory, it actually existed and must now be replaced by something else that is, again, neither probability nor theory. This goes back to the Energy issue I raised earlier - collapsing probability is potentially a zero-energy issue, but replacing one concrete past with another isn't.

Originally Posted by mmartin798

When he goes into the future, he can only chose between ones that are most likely to happen, not go into ones that are highly unlikely, like the universe where all the world leaders simultaneously disintegrate from a statistical improbability of thermodynamics. It is this limitation that makes it impossible for him to go to a future where his family still exists. If he goes back and tries to stop the 1989 in a different way, he is still not assured that it would bring his family back, or that the Project would have more time to prepare or succeed.

This is the way I have structured time travel for my game and, just to mess with BEM, Krell has a slightly different way to messing with the future for his own ends.

I like the idea of probability influencing what he can do - just as it would take less energy to knock something balanced precariously on a perch than it would to do the same to something entrenched firmly in the ground, it makes sense that whatever energy Bruce gets to use would have the most effect spent in conjunction with "temporal potential" (to coin a term) than opposing it. But I am still not sure how that squares with the fact that the probability curves were already collapsed as soon as he traveled into the future in the first place.