This actually is a good timeline. And our timeline actually has been heavily altered by time travelers! People have actually tried and succeeded at changing the past.
But time travel isn’t like in movies. This isn’t one of those stories where you go back, change something, and then you come back and everything is a little different. No. In this version of time travel, we get maximum butterfly effect. Going years into the past doesn’t just alter history, it completely rewrites it. Go back a hundred years and hang out on a random spot in Antarctica for five minutes, never interacting with another living being? Your presence for that short time will be enough to subtly alter air flows, which will butterfly up to entirely different storms forming in different times and places. Which means that almost everyone born in the last 100 years simply never existed. An entirely new populace is born. No matter how trivial a change you make, any travel beyond a certain length of time into the past results in a complete historical reset.
This is fundamentally not something you can fine-tune. It’s not physically possible to go into the past and make a tiny alteration. Every trip is an entirely new spin on the historical roulette wheel. Every trip completely remakes the world.
As such, there’s only one practical application of time travel - preventing world-shattering disasters. For example, you could use it to undue a nuclear war. Going back to prevent this apocalypse will result in erasing everyone currently alive, but almost everyone is already dead, so little consequence. Same thing for species-destroying plagues, giant asteroid impacts, etc. Because every trip is a historical reset, it’s only useful for scenarios where you’re content on just wiping all current people from existence. Even the Holocaust doesn’t come remotely close to the level of calamity necessary to justify time travel.
No, I was implying that reality simply branched. Specifically when Bowie died, if you’re curious.
But back to your hypothesis: if all of the future is rewritten by travel into the past, then the travel to the past shall not have happened. How do you reconcile this paradox?
Christ, imagine this being the good timeline.
One head canon I like:
This actually is a good timeline. And our timeline actually has been heavily altered by time travelers! People have actually tried and succeeded at changing the past.
But time travel isn’t like in movies. This isn’t one of those stories where you go back, change something, and then you come back and everything is a little different. No. In this version of time travel, we get maximum butterfly effect. Going years into the past doesn’t just alter history, it completely rewrites it. Go back a hundred years and hang out on a random spot in Antarctica for five minutes, never interacting with another living being? Your presence for that short time will be enough to subtly alter air flows, which will butterfly up to entirely different storms forming in different times and places. Which means that almost everyone born in the last 100 years simply never existed. An entirely new populace is born. No matter how trivial a change you make, any travel beyond a certain length of time into the past results in a complete historical reset.
This is fundamentally not something you can fine-tune. It’s not physically possible to go into the past and make a tiny alteration. Every trip is an entirely new spin on the historical roulette wheel. Every trip completely remakes the world.
As such, there’s only one practical application of time travel - preventing world-shattering disasters. For example, you could use it to undue a nuclear war. Going back to prevent this apocalypse will result in erasing everyone currently alive, but almost everyone is already dead, so little consequence. Same thing for species-destroying plagues, giant asteroid impacts, etc. Because every trip is a historical reset, it’s only useful for scenarios where you’re content on just wiping all current people from existence. Even the Holocaust doesn’t come remotely close to the level of calamity necessary to justify time travel.
You don’t even need humans doing the travel. You just send a 10 kg rock on a one-way trip back and get all the same effects.
No, I was implying that reality simply branched. Specifically when Bowie died, if you’re curious.
But back to your hypothesis: if all of the future is rewritten by travel into the past, then the travel to the past shall not have happened. How do you reconcile this paradox?