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No one wants to add to a time travel discussion? Anything at all? (Desperate)

Well, that depends on how you view it. Two different philosophies of how time-travel in the universe works. Both of them discredit the bad-movie idea that if someone traveled to the past and killed you in the past or stopped you from being born, then you would begin to disappear or bleep out of existence for no apparent reason (to you).

One philosophy says that going back in time and changing something does not alter the present that you come from, but creates a separate dimension in which things are changed due to what you altered.

The one that I think is most-likely true is that every event in time is set-in-stone and unchangeable. Even if you could go into the past, it would impossible to change anything. Even if you traveled into the past with intentions to kill your father and prevent your conception, you can't (you gun would jam, you'd miss, or any other possibility) because if you succeeded, you would not be alive to travel to the past and kill your father. Everything will occur how it is supposed to occur because it already has occured.

This philosophy is somewhat disturbing because it would mean that free will is an illusion. It doesn't state that an omnipotent being is instead controling your will (and that's not really what we're here to debate). It states that time (past, present, and future) in unalterable.

Under this version, imagine that I go into the future, video-record everything you do tomorrow from 5 to 6 PM, then come to the present and show you the tape, the first minute of which shows you looking pissed off and trying to grab the camera from me, after which I keep it from you and say "Hey! What's eating you?". You, out of an understandable human defiance, what to do something different than what the tape showed you. However, as 5:00 PM rounds around the next day, you, even with the intention to do something different, have, for whatever reason, found yourself in the same setting the camera showed you as my yesterday-self appears with the camera. You are pissed that you were unable to change what you saw and try to grab the camera away. I pull it from your reach and say "Hey! What's eating you?". The next hour goes exactly as you saw in the tape, even though you tried to change the happenings at every available opportunity.

I've been thinking about time travel for the past few days, so I'm kind of in a mood to talk about it.

Thinking of a better way to explain how your assassination of the Archduke would work under the Different Dimensions Theory, you wouldn't really be "changing time" or "returning to the present" so much as you would be setting a course of action that would take you to an alternate dimension where the history books say the Archduke was assassinated when you killed him (or saved him, I can't remember).

The big notion to keep in mind is that the original dimension from wence you came does not cease to exist after you time-traveled and did what you did.

People is general have a naive notion of how "altering the past" would work, which is in-of-itself a warped version of the Different Dimensions Theory. Their notions can relatively easily be shown false with this idea:

In the scope of eternity, someone, be it human or alien, past of future, probably invented a way to travel into the past (and when considered over eternity it's a pretty good chance. Admittedly not a non-zero chance, but a chance nonetheless). There is also the possibility that they affected something that affected our human history in a notable way. If such is the case, then under what people normally think of time travel, we would "see" the world change, if not multiple and random times. People would randomly phase out of existence, Marty McFly-style.

Question 1: Why haven't we experienced unexplained changes that are actually the result of beings altering the past? (This can always be revoked with the idea that no being, throughout all the history of the universe, was able to travel into the past, travel into our past, or cause a change that would be noticeable. Question 2 is the better, but #1 still applies).

Question 2: If your history was altered, how could you have memories from a version of history that no longer exists?

So yeah, it's hard to imagine that the traditional thinking of how time travel does/might work could be true.


But here's something really interesting. Time traveling can cause things to appear seemingly out of nothing. Take this mind-boggling scenario to heart:

There is a scientist (where, who, and when are irrelevant). Suddenly, a time machine appears, and a man who looks just like the scientist but a decade older steps out of the time machine. The time traveler says that he is the scientist, but from 10 years in his future. The scientist is amazed, and asks the time traveler how he invented the time machine. The time traveler says he doesn't know, but, ten years in *his* past, a time traveler from a decade in the future appeared before him and gave him the time machine.

Question 1: If the time traveler got the time machine when he was ten years younger, and it was given to him by a man that is himself but ten years older, who was given the time machine by himself from the future, who was given the time machine by himself from the future, WHERE did the time machine come from in the first place?

Under either of the Theories, the scenario can diverge [from this point].

With Different Dimensions Theory, the time traveler and the scientist can do whatever they wish. They can go where and when they want, together or separate, be it as it may. They can both travel back into the past at any point and round up any amount of themselves that the time machine can carry. The Different Dimensions Theory can explain the origins of the time machine by saying that there was an alternate dimension in which someone did build the time machine at some point.

With Set In Stone Theory: in ten years, the scientist (who is now "the time traveler") will travel ten years into the past to give his former self the time machine, whether he wants to or not, and the time traveler, whether he wants to or not, cannot come along for the ride, because there was not two time travelers to greet the scientist.

This is the conundrum for me. A well-known astrophysicist named Brian Greene explained a slightly different scenario in his book The Fabric of the Cosmos which things appeared out of thin air, but the difference was that I could conclude that this info rising from oblivion was simply a side effect of time traveling. With my scenario, however, things from nowhere can't be a side effect of time travel because my scenario doesn't require a time machine to me invented. "Things From Nowhere" can't be caused by time travel when the thing that comes from nowhere is the time machine itself.

I just don't have a clear answer for that one, which is a shame because I happen to believe in the Set In Stone Theory of time travel. However, this doesn't mean that no answer exists for it, only that I have yet to think of one. Maybe my future-self will come in a time machine and tell me the answer.