I wonder what would happen if the time traveler changes the time travel event of his past self so that the past self would depart sooner than point D.
A1-----B1 (original time)
C1/A2--B2--D1 (AB1 self makes self depart sooner than point D1 by suggesting a specific time)
C2--D2--- (AB2 self makes the same suggestion to CD2 self thus confirming the time)
Here I think time would continue onwards at point D1.
A1-->B1 (Original timeline)
C1=A2-->B2, (AB1 self causes CD1 self to depart prematurely; CD1 self is a different person)
This becomes very complicated. Assuming the traveler from B2 arrives at the exact same instant as the traveler from B1, they should both arrive; one should displace the other spatially, so they should arrive next to each other. The B1 departure has not yet been erased, so the C1 arrival is not yet erased either. However, if the AB1 traveler does not send the AB2 traveler back from B2 on schedule, the second anomaly goes bad. The AB2 traveler would have to cause the CD2 traveler to make that same trip to resolve it.
All of which then means that if it resolves at D2, the CD2 traveler, who has already been the CD1 traveler resolving his anomaly, must now make the trip from D1 to C1 or the AB1 traveler vanishes and history must replay without him. However, if the AB2 traveler took over the job of causing the CD2 traveler to make the trip and that decision is not dependent on the presence of the AB1 traveler, then we don't revert to point A1 because the history of the second anomaly intervenes. Thus we have an EF1 timeline in which no traveler arrives from D1 but a traveler does arrive from D2, and if that traveler stabilizes history then we get past D2 with the same traveler leaving and E1 without a traveler leaving. One of the anomalies has been completely erased from reality leaving as a trace only the other anomaly, which can't be traced back to it because it fully supports itself.
I think.
Let me take the copy example and try to make it work.
Your copies don't really get you any advantage, they only complicate the problem.
If you make the copy of Abe 1 and send the copy instead of Abe 1, then the copy becomes the time traveler. If just before D1 you copy Abe 2 and send him back instead of Abe-1-Copy, then at D1 Abe 2 and Abe-1-Copy both exist into the future and Abe-2-Copy travels to the past in place of Abe-1-Copy.
If you send Abe 1 and then copy him upon his arrival, keeping the copy in complete stasis and sending it back from D1 to be revived upon its arrival completely unaware that it is a copy, while at the same instant making a copy of the copy, then at D1 Abe 2 and Abe 1 both exist, but Abe 2 is different from Abe 1 (never having been copied), and since Abe 1's existence is based on his life in history AB he ceases to exist. He would be replaced by Abe-1-Copy, but that Abe-1-Copy now was never created from Abe 1, who never existed, so he, too, must cease to exist. I think you've created a sawtooth snap in which each copy must cease to exist because he no longer has ever had an original from which to be copied. For the copy to exist, the original must have existed, and your system always destroys the original.
You get nothing more from making a copy than you would from having a twin, and you lose too much with it; the copy is not the original, but it is dependent upon the original, so for the copy to exist the original must exist. Your copy only works if it is a copy of the existing original once everything settles, which means either you must copy Abe 2 before point D1 and send his copy to the past (Abe 2 and Abe-2-Copy then replacing Abe 1 and Abe-1-Copy respectively), or you must send Abe 2 from point D1 and have him copied in the past, but you still must send Abe 3, not Abe-2-Copy, to the past from point E1.
1) What happens now will affect all the future instantly so travel to future would always go to rewritten version. This universe would live in determinism until an outside force alters it. This outside force includes time travel but I am not sure if an indig could time travel if the universe does not determine that the indig would do so unless some outside forces intervenes.
I don't like the word "determinism" in this context, but my best answer is yes, by the definition that matters those in the CD history are living in a deterministic world, exactly as those in the AB history were. This gets into my personal views of free will and determinism, which are a bit complex but are necessary to the understanding of the theory.
A decade or so back I was in a different office, and it happened that there was a space between my computer desk and a cabinet in which I kept files which was just wide enough for one shoe. When I took my shoes off at night I dropped them into this space. The next day I would don the top shoe first, and then the bottom one, almost every time.
I was perfectly free, of course, to choose to don the bottom shoe first; but I would need a reason to do so. That's the critical point: something has to cause me to do something differently, or I will do it the same.
That applies when time rewinds. If we suppose that I the top shoe first in the AB history, and we rewind far enough that my shoes are back where I placed them, In the CD history I will don the top shoe first unless something is different enough to cause me to don the bottom shoe first. That means something that the time traveler did would have to impact me in some way.
- He might have come into my room and moved my shoes. That's rather a direct approach, and very hazardous, because his counterpart won't know that he did it. If he did it because there was a reason for me to don my shoes in the other order, then he has probably undone that reason so that his counterpart won't know to do it, and we'll have an infinity loop. If he did it because he wanted to mess with me and reverse the order in which I donned my shoes that morning, then his counterpart probably will do it again if he doesn't do something else to change that, and we'll have an N-jump.
- He might have communicated to me something that made me feel self-conscious about the matter, or otherwise think about it and decide to reverse the order myself. That, though, again means he had to do something that would interfere.
- He might have interfered accidentally. He rerouted a heavy truck past my house which caused the shoes to shift in such a way that when I picked up the top shoe it slipped from my fingers and, being the basically lazy person that I am, I picked up the other shoe which was still within reach and put it on first, and then chased after the errant one. It is still his fault, the consequence of something he did, although it was not intentional and assuming he does not otherwise derail his own anomaly when he leaves from point D he will cause the same truck to create the same vibrations which lead once more to my same clumsiness.
Note that not even the winds nor the flaps of butterflies wings will change unless something in the chain of causes leading to them changes.
Whatever I do and whatever I choose to do and whatever I do accidentally in the CD history will be exactly the same as I did in the AB history, not because my acts in the CD history are in some peculiar way determined but because they are determined in exactly the same way that they were in the AB history. I think about my options or I don't. If I do, my thoughts follow patterns based on causes and effects within my mind, knowledge and ignorance, logic and error, reason and emotion, that are all part of who I am. Based on who I am, whatever I choose to do is ultimately the only thing I could have chosen--not because some outside force is controlling what I do, but because what I do is controlled by who I am. Outside forces will influence my thoughts, choices, and actions, but if we replay history and those outside forces are not in any way altered, my thoughts, choices, and actions will not be altered either.
Temporal anomalies assume that you will do the same things the-same-way-you-did-the-first-time every-time-it-is-the-first-time. If the forces that cause you to choose as you do have not changed, what you do will not change either. You could make a different choice based on different information, but you cannot have different information if nothing has changed. You can make a different choice based on different feelings, but you cannot have different feelings if nothing has changed. For everyone not impacted by the acts of the time traveler, the second time through is the first time through, and they will do the same thing the second first-time-through that they did the first first-time-through, because it is, after all, the first time through.
2) The final time line is the only one that is "real" and the original time line have been undone or only exist metaphysically. This would imply that the nature of time to be static unless there are changes from outside forces which is why outside forces could manipulate the time for better or for worse.
I concur.
3) Time travel to past could only be "real" if time stabilizes because if it is not stable it would not become the final time line which is why the future for non-stabilize time would not exist.
I'm thinking that your definition of "real" in this context means something that I would not have meant.
Let's suppose that Marty McFly in his trip to 1955 failed to unite his parents. That would undo his existence and so undo his trip to 1955; that would undo his interference with his parents and cause them to unite without him. That would bring him back into existence and send him to the past where he would interfere with their meeting and fail to reunite them, and we would have an infinity loop. The trip from point C to point D in this story is undone by the failure to make the same trip from point D, but it is still a very real trip both at the end of the AB timeline when he departs and the beginning of the CD timeline when he arrives. He really does travel from one version of history to the other. His trip ceases ever to have existed when we hit point D and revert to point A, but it comes back into existence when we hit point B and revive point C.
So I think I don't know what you mean when you say the trip isn't "real". What prevents time from continuing from point B is that the AB history is erased by the creation of the CD history when the traveler departs from B to C; what prevents it from continuing from point D is that the CD history is erased when the time traveler fails to depart from point C and arrive in point D. Thus the moment past point B/D cannot exist because point B cannot exist if the traveler departs from it and point D cannot exist if the traveler does not depart from it, so the next moment in time cannot exist because the previous moment in time no longer does.
4) The sawtooth snap happens if the time traveler changes something that affects his past self but still let the time travel event happen.
Yes, or if his acts in history will cause changes that will in turn cause him to take different acts that cause different changes.
5) Infinity loop happens when the time traveler prevent their own travel to the past.
Yes, or if the time traveler makes the trip to accomplish the opposite of what he intended in the original history. If I travel to the past to prevent Bush from beating Gore and succeed, and then I make the exact same trip to prevent Gore from beating Bush, I'll have created an infinity loop in which the success of Bush means the success instead of Gore, and the success of Gore means the success instead of Bush.
There might be a way to prevent it if the time machine sends an observer outside the universe which is not constrained by that universe time and then chooses time to go to the past after the observer have been sent. The time machine would contact this observer before initiating time travel to make sure that this is not a loop before initiating travel but I wonder if this act is feasible in that universe in the first place.
Yeah, I wonder, too. It seems to me that if you first send someone to another universe and then contact that person by sending him a message, you make the two universes sequence-linked, and an anomaly in one could create an anomaly in the other. In this case, we assume that at point B the time machine sends a message to Outsider and sends Traveler to the past, and so Outsider gets the message; but Traveler undoes the time trip, and so the time machine is never activated, never sending Traveler to the past and incidentally never sending the message to Outsider. Outsider is now trapped in a temporal anomaly in which he both does and does not receive the message, and his infinity loop has a temporal length of zero in his world because the passage of time in the other world is not linked to his and no events have to occur in his time for the state to change.
Now, lets try to examine fluid time theory (or river of time). I am not sure if this is the same theory or only similar to the one that is suggested by Sergiy Koshkin but anyways this is what I concluded from it.
1) The nature of time is dynamic like the flow of river. This can be perceived as a static time line if there is no time travel or outside forces. After a time travel event or outside forces intervention, the time line would appear dynamic.
2) "Now" could be represented by a dye in the flow of the river which means that it goes forward according to the speed of the river.
3) The change to the future will propagate forward according to the speed of river.
4) Any changes made to the past would be rewritten by much further past. That would mean that the time traveler would only change a single point of history at a time. If the source of the river are halted from changing the history that the time traveler had changed, the time traveler could rewrite more than a point. This however would require the time traveler to use more energy to manipulate the flow and move forward to future.
5) This would mean that the "now" perceived by the person send by the time traveler would not change if the time traveler does not block the flow of the source which will stop the flow of time in the future where the time traveler came from. This could be resolved by blocking before point of arrival of time traveler and after point of departure of time traveler. After the time traveler arrive at the point of departure, the block at the point of departure would be lifted to let the time traveler continue forward.
6) Universe that uses this theory uses the history that is perceived by "now" because each "now" might have different history according the the point that "now" have pass. The future might be different according to the flow of the river. If a time traveler choose to vanish then reappear according to the speed of the flow then the time traveler would arrive in the changed future but if the time traveler choose to reappear faster than the speed of the flow then the time traveler would arrive in the unchanged future but this takes more energy than going to the changed future.
I've responded to Koshkin in a separate web page. As I note there, such a theory suggests that time travel to the new future is probably impossible. It also means that time travel from the old future to the old past is similarly impossible. Time becomes something of a house of cards: if someone of whom I am completely unaware traveled from 2005 to 2000 changed history such that Gore, not Bush, became President, and then in 2010 I traveled to 2004, I would find myself in the universe in which Gore was running for re-election even though I left from a future in which Bush had served two terms. That, though, means (as I discuss in Bender's Big Score part 9: the Gorey details) that it is entirely unlikely that Obama was elected in 2008, and that the past to which I traveled cannot be the history of the future from which I came, and all the causes of my own existence have already been undone, yet I still exist.
I find that absurd. You can be confident that if I am your referee, time will never work that way in your worlds.
I did think about getting caught in an infinity loop that lasts a nanosecond or less (which I think would be a good prison for a verser) as one of result of the skill botch. However, I did not intent for the skill to destroy anything in the past but only use the explosion energy as a fuel to go to the past. If the explosion have the power to destroy everything then infinity loop does not sound too bad.
As Scott has, I think, attempted to clarify, chemical energy is the potential behind a potentially explosive reaction and can only be released through that reaction. You have the peculiar complication that the reaction is happening in extreme slow motion relative to you (because you have been hyper-accelerated), but there isn't much you can do to rearrange that energy release because the chemistry is all in time.
As far as the extent of the explosion, Scott has very wisely decided not to reveal the rolls which control that. I can tell you that there is one chance in a thousand that it will be smaller than a cubic inch and one chance in a thousand that it will extend through the entire universe, that there is one chance in a thousand that it will be a harmless pop and one chance in a thousand that it will multiply obliterate all matter within its area of effect, and that those variables are entirely independent of each other so that there is one chance in a thousand thousand, that is, a million, of each of the four results of a small pop inside a one inch sphere, a completely obliterative blast inside a one each sphere, a small pop through the entire universe, and the complete obliteration of the entire universe.
I do not know whether you either have or can develop the tools to anticipate the answers to those questions before they occur. However, I tend to think that an infinity loop is even more destructive than a universal multiple obliterative blast--at least time, space, dust, and residual energy remain after the explosion. If you end the world in an infinity loop, there is no such thing as "after".
--M. J. Young