Time Cruising

[Siege]

It's funny how, on further inflection, it would appear that the possibility of time-travel and its implications for reality force those who can develop it to use it. If they were to forbid its use and smash their tele-time-machine, you might think that would prevent their own erasure by mistake... Except it does not guarantee in any way whatsoever that people in the future will be similarly inclined, so they might do time-travelling of their own and totally fuck you over.

The only way, then, to be safe is to (A) not go back in time, (B) prevent time-machines from ending up in the hands of people who might violate (A), and (C) police your own future to the best extent possible, so that people won't ever travel back in time. Time-cops wouldn't police the past, they'd police the future so that the folks up ahead in the time-stream don't screw around with times and dates before some arbitrary point in history, let's say the invention of the first time machine or the dispatch of the time-cops.

Again the implications are pretty awesome - build an illegal time-machine in the 25th century and a guy might pop up trying to kill you with a gunpowder weapon! It'd be like a federal agent showing up today with flintlocks and an Old English accent!

Of course it's also pretty much impossible to police the full entirety of the future, which complicates matters, but they might still try... And if a temporal agent becomes an uncaused cause on his first trip through the machine he can simply, once he first notices his reality has changed, travel to the point in the universal past (but his future) point where time travel was used to change things, and whack the guy who does so before he gets a chance to muck things up. So it's at least conceivable that such a 'future police' could keep things reasonably orderly for quite some time.

[Shroom Man 777]

If someone killed George Washington to prevent America from being born, some of these "time cops" could conceivably be nomads who travel time at regular intervals to monitor the regular timeline alterations (or there could be other nomads in other space-times who use superphones to communicate with each other). By using TIME DETECTIVE skills to figure out HOW the timeline was altered (killed George Washington), these "time cops" could use TIME TRAVEL to pre-emptively stop (kill) those people who killed George Washington from killing George Washington, or they could have a fridge full of inflatable George Washington replacements.

These time cops would HAVE to be uncaused cause to monitor the changes they perceive and to determine what caused it and how to stop it or correct it via time travel.

But if they killed the guys who killed George Washington before they killed George Washington, those guys ALREADY killed George Washington anyway and they (the bad guys) end up being uncaused causes. They might end up going after the time cops to stop the time cops from stopping them.

So the time cops must end up stopping the bad guys before the bad guys kill the time cops!

Jesus Christ, it'll descend to these nomad uncaused causes - of various factions out to change or unchange or rechange the past/present/future - going out throughout space and time trying to ASSASSINATE each other! Not just each other, but each others' various space-time incarnations too! Like, a temporal battle royale where Jason Statham is trying to kill all the Jet Li's from becoming The One, but Jet Li is nobody's bitch and for every Jet Li that gets killed, the other Jet Lis end up hunting down Jason Statham!

Wow.

It gets worse because not all the Jet Lis are evil, and some of them might side with Jason Statham to stop their Evil Parallel Dimension Counterparts. But then, some of the Jason Stathams might also have Parallel Dimension Goatees and would be partners with the Evil Jet Lis!

Oh mang.

One of the Jet Lis might decide to wipe out ALL the Jason Stathams, and the Jason Stathams might decide that to stop Jet Li from committing Stathamicide he has to kill all the Jet Lis as well. But a buddy cop couple of Jet Li and Jason Statham - a buddy couple who've been TO THE END OF TIME AND SPACE and BACK! - have grown literally TOO OLD FOR THIS SHIT and must band together to save ALL the Jet Lis and Jason Stathams and restore ORDER TO THE OMNIVERSE!

Yes.

[Acatalepsy]

It's funny how, on further inflection, it would appear that the possibility of time-travel and its implications for reality force those who can develop it to use it. If they were to forbid its use and smash their tele-time-machine, you might think that would prevent their own erasure by mistake... Except it does not guarantee in any way whatsoever that people in the future will be similarly inclined, so they might do time-travelling of their own and totally fuck you over.

It gets even better when you realize that your own timeline might not only need to be protected from time travelers, it could very well be the result of time traveling shenanigans from your own future or from an alternate future that created yours. If you don't develop and use time travel, you might go "poof" regardless of what you do from "additional" time traveling. If you do develop time travel, then you almost certainly will go poof from your own meddling in one way or another. All it takes is one person, somewhere on the 'first' timeline and there goes all of reality as we know it from the cascade effects.

Since you can't avoid going poof, the best you can do is create a sort of meta-stable timeline that keeps really bad shit from happening - like planet depopulating bombs, and whatnot.

The only way, then, to be safe is to (A) not go back in time, (B) prevent time-machines from ending up in the hands of people who might violate (A), and (C) police your own future to the best extent possible, so that people won't ever travel back in time. Time-cops wouldn't police the past, they'd police the future so that the folks up ahead in the time-stream don't screw around with times and dates before some arbitrary point in history, let's say the invention of the first time machine or the dispatch of the time-cops.

Actually, the best way to accomplish that is to create a world state with the ubiquitous surveillance and a cap on the sophistication of civilian technology. Still, your method sounds awesome...but rather than going "ahead" with actual agents, it would probably be better just to send a message to the police of the offending timeline, letting them know that shit is/was hitting fan in your own time. You don't even need a time machine to do that, just a time capsule. Although a time machine would certainly be safer, and less prone to being destroyed by the future-people.

Again the implications are pretty awesome - build an illegal time-machine in the 25th century and a guy might pop up trying to kill you with a gunpowder weapon! It'd be like a federal agent showing up today with flintlocks and an Old English accent!

Of course it's also pretty much impossible to police the full entirety of the future, which complicates matters, but they might still try... And if a temporal agent becomes an uncaused cause on his first trip through the machine he can simply, once he first notices his reality has changed, travel to the point in the universal past (but his future) point where time travel was used to change things, and whack the guy who does so before he gets a chance to muck things up. So it's at least conceivable that such a 'future police' could keep things reasonably orderly for quite some time.

They could, but ultimately it is pretty futile. Any single timeline is pretty much screwed, but again a sort of metastable state is possible. Now, it can be metastable because the Earth's been depopulated or metastable because a sort of watchdog agency that exists between timelines is keeping an eye on things, whichever comes first. Fortunately omnicidal maniacs with access to both planet depopulation bombs AND time machines are rare.

Stuff

Man, I got to find where you get those 'shrooms you're using. Unless it's natural. In which case I need to eat your brain.

[Shroom Man 777]

It is natural. Brought about from sleep deprivation and my own beautiful mind!

If these uncaused-cause space gypsies end up causing too much trouble for their worth, it could cause the creation of an INTERDIMENSIONAL TIME HITLER who'd outlaw gypsies and go around genociding them!

Maybe Hitler actually meant time travelers when he was ranting about the Eternal Jew, and when a time-traveler co-opted the USA and sent it against Germany and Hitler lost, he had to initiate an EMERGENCY TEMPORAL SHIFT (and faked his death).

Shortly afterwards, that other time-traveler followed suit, with his own time machine built into his... wheelchair.

As Hitler runs through the psychadelic time tunnel, Franklin Delano Roosevelt pursues him on the wheels of his wheelchair, rolling after Hitler on his wheelchair and with a gun in his hand. Hitler trips on a Time Rock, and soon FDR has rolled right on top of him - crushing him with his wheels until he is reduced to timeroadkill.

YESSSSS MEIN FUHRER

[Siege]

It gets even better when you realize that your own timeline might not only need to be protected from time travelers, it could very well be the result of time traveling shenanigans from your own future or from an alternate future that created yours. If you don't develop and use time travel, you might go "poof" regardless of what you do from "additional" time traveling. If you do develop time travel, then you almost certainly will go poof from your own meddling in one way or another. All it takes is one person, somewhere on the 'first' timeline and there goes all of reality as we know it from the cascade effects.

I thought you were going with the theory that grandfather paradoxes go out the window? In that case, if someone went back in time to caused the current day, he doesn't have to go back anymore, because he already did. Going back again is just doing things twice for no particularly good reason...

Actually, the best way to accomplish that is to create a world state with the ubiquitous surveillance and a cap on the sophistication of civilian technology. Still, your method sounds awesome...but rather than going "ahead" with actual agents, it would probably be better just to send a message to the police of the offending timeline, letting them know that shit is/was hitting fan in your own time. You don't even need a time machine to do that, just a time capsule. Although a time machine would certainly be safer, and less prone to being destroyed by the future-people.

In some cases the future people may very well not care, as they might be having problems of their own. Like, some dictator's regime is in danger of being toppled, and he wants to go back in time to wipe out his enemies before they incite the popular uprising that's knocking at his palace door... A guy like that isn't going to be deterred by a politely worded message from the past. You'd have to send guys over to take him out, coincidentally helping the uprising a hand by sparing them the trouble of having to convene a kangaroo court!

Amusingly enough if you police your own future (rather than past) you'd also be free to, let's say, intervene in case future humanity is going to be wiped out by some plague -- by intervening in that future humanity's past, but your own future. You'd be free to act there, whereas future time cops wouldn't. Of course you'd run the risk of erasing said future time cops, but hey...

They could, but ultimately it is pretty futile. Any single timeline is pretty much screwed, but again a sort of metastable state is possible. Now, it can be metastable because the Earth's been depopulated or metastable because a sort of watchdog agency that exists between timelines is keeping an eye on things, whichever comes first. Fortunately omnicidal maniacs with access to both planet depopulation bombs AND time machines are rare.

Well, any timeline might be screwed eventually but that probably won't stop the people living in it from trying to stop anyone from unexisting them... And future policing seems like the best way to manage that.

[Acatalepsy]

It gets even better when you realize that your own timeline might not only need to be protected from time travelers, it could very well be the result of time traveling shenanigans from your own future or from an alternate future that created yours. If you don't develop and use time travel, you might go "poof" regardless of what you do from "additional" time traveling. If you do develop time travel, then you almost certainly will go poof from your own meddling in one way or another. All it takes is one person, somewhere on the 'first' timeline and there goes all of reality as we know it from the cascade effects.

I thought you were going with the theory that grandfather paradoxes go out the window? In that case, if someone went back in time to caused the current day, he doesn't have to go back anymore, because he already did. Going back again is just doing things twice for no particularly good reason...

And therein lies my problem. I want to create a situation where time travel is very dangerous, but useful and even necessary. As you correctly pointed out, as I currently postulate the rules there is no reason to really protect one's own past because it has effectively already happened. I do like the idea of future cops though, and those will definitely be in. I'm trying to figure out a sort of meta-time system so that multiple divergent timelines can exist and interact with each other to a certain extent without creating a situation where every time someone travels in time it creates a new timeline. Because then you can't actually do anything, at best you're creating your own pocket universe.

I may give up on the idea of making protecting the past necessary - after all, there are plenty of other possibilities, and time travel is still useful for all sorts of fun things. I still want to make sure under my rulesets those nine way gun battles can still break out. Perhaps each time travel event doesn't create just one timeline, but a range of quasi-real timelines who can only interact in the area around the time travel event, and which one becomes real depends on the outcome of that event? But I can't see a way to make that one work either.

[Siege]

Building on the idea that grandfather paradoxes do not exist because if you'd gone back in time you already did and therefore don't have to do it again... I'm trying to wrap my head around the possibility that the past needs to be protected because current reality is the result of all changes made to history so far, which means it's imperative no-one else goes back to change anything more. If they did, the current reality would vanish, to be replaced by another one which is composed of every change made to history that gave rise to the previous, plus one.

I think this works out: Any given reality is the product of all tampering done up to that point, and is only the next in a long line of altered realities, each one vanishing the moment someone goes back to change something. Any given reality also has a vested interest in preventing such tampering (excepting possibly fatally doomed societies), so it's still imperative that the past be protected. In other words: you can go back, but you don't have to, and you probably shouldn't.

Now, as for the nine-way gunfights, they might actually be invisible to the reality that ultimately synthesizes. Let's say a temporal hit-man A shows up to ice someone important; guys B show up to prevent the assassination, but in the ensuing gunfight inadvertently a bystander becomes collateral damage; this causes unexpectedly wide-ranging consequences, which causes party C to materialize in order to protect him; however the unexpected massive street fight sparks a radical turn in the political landscape, resulting in a much more insular, terror-phobic society; in three centuries this devolves into Big Brother, and the plucky rebels resisting Minilove go back in time in order to prevent the gunfight from happening, thus becoming party D... Now the outcome of the gunfight (or indeed if it happens at all) determines what reality ultimately look like, which might be nothing like any of the assembled parties might be familiar with (but they're time travellers and thus uncaused causes, so that won't affect them).

Not coincidentally the job of the hit-man would also be extremely dangerous because of this sort of development: you might think your job is to whack a relative nobody, only to be confronted with six different teams of guys from six different potential futures who try to stop you or aid you or be out for something completely different. For all the hit-man knows they might be out to kill him not because of this particular job but one he'll perform in two years time! This in turn could spawn even more temporal conflict... And if his day is really bad he'll turn out to have travelled back to a time after the invention of time-travel, so the minute he arrives the future cops show up to beat him over the head!

Either way, regardless of whether the hit-man succeeds or not, the resolution of the gunfight determines the flow of reality; it is thus imperative that the gunfight happens for reality to be the way it is, even if it was time-travellers who caused it to be so; thus anyone must be prevented from further tampering with the gunfight; because if they do, reality will change with it, even though from the position of the 'current day' any changes will inevitably already have happened . I do believe this is consistent with itself, although if you think too long about it it'll probably give you headaches...

[Shroom Man 777]

You people are terrible. Perhaps the society who invented the time machine earliest will be able to police its future the most... so when Mister Saxon is trying to rule the world with his ill-gotten gains, a knight ends up materializing out of a lightning ball and sticking a sword in his face.

NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUSITION!

[Acatalepsy]

Stuff

This is where my problem occurs: as uncaused causes, what happens to the time travellers if someone changes something that is earlier than them? If, for example, we send someone back in time to stop the destruction of the Hindenburg, what happens if we ALSO send someone back to destroy the Hindenburg, but in Frankfurt and not Lakehurst? Where does our first hypothetical time traveler end up - in New Jersey, ready to stop the accident, or in Germany, ready to stop the sabotage? What if he ends up in BOTH places, different versions of himself (or more realistically, different agents of the same organization)?

This is the biggest problem. I need to find a way to have causality preserved, but not absolutely preserved because then there is no time travel. I think that these time travelers can't be unqualified uncaused causes, for the same reason that we don't want uncaused causes to exist in this universe - if an effect doesn't actually have to have a cause, why hasn't a uncaused Godzilla decided to raze Tokyo? There's nothing to cause Godzilla to exist, but if we allow uncaused causes, there doesn't actually have to be. I think the crucial difference between our hypothetical time travelers and our hypothetical Godzilla is that one is a distinct possibility, one is not.

So instead I think we have to postulate not no causality, but rather weak causality. The probability of a time traveling agent showing up is based on the probability of his timeline coming into existence, not only over the his individual iteration but over any iteration resulting from his time travel. This way, stable time loops are simply much, much more likely to actually occur even though there is nothing, strictly speaking, saying that a timeline must be stable. It also means that time travelers are much more likely to show up at "crucial" moments where one timeline diverges from another in such a way as to change the future of the time traveling population. We can also, from this rule STILL have our time travelers be effectively uncaused from the point of view of any natives to the timeline - you could in theory still shoot his younger self and as far as you know it wouldn't actually get rid of him. But a time traveler that would get his younger self killed will have a hard time coming into existence in the first place.

SPANISH INQUISITION

Time traveling spanish inquisition....now there is an idea....

[Shroom Man 777]

Then some bad guy from the future travels to the past and allies with the Hashashins to take down the Time Traveling Spanish Inquisition, and afterwards the Mohammedians steal the Spaniard Time Machine and go hunting down Inquisitors throughout space and time. INTERDIMENSIONAL SWORD FIGHTS IN TIME AND SPACE!

[Acatalepsy]

Probabilistic futures I think the most in-timeline sense; the meta-timeline rules don't have to be really understood or even comprehensible because it is nearly impossible for anyone stuck on a timeline to probe them. The nomads might know them, but if we keep the perspective from that of the relatively "early" chronoforces, then we don't need to explain those rules at all.

[Siege]

Well, it all sounds very interesting to me - what would the name for this universe be?

[Acatalepsy]

The Continuity Wars. Because the focus would be on mostly violent conflict. Not that there is no real "peaceful" use of time travel, but n-th order equilibrium situations don't tend to emerge when you don't have some sort of high level conflict between roughly equal powers.

[Blackwing]

What we're touching on here, essentially, is the reason why Time Travel Tropes exist.

[Acatalepsy]

I think we all could have figured that out on our own. What I'm trying to figure out is what happens when you take them away...force the rules to make at least some degree of sense and then ask what must then happen.

[Siege]

Well, you can at least try to find the answers to those questions in your own forum now.

[Acatalepsy]

Sweet! I'm putting stuff up as fast as my brain can wrap around the implications. That is to say, not fast at all. But I'm getting there. I have a FAQ thread up so if there are any specifics anyone would like to discuss that would be the place to do it.

[Acatalepsy]

Updating this a little bit: I'm looking for some help refining my ideas a little bit. I think I've got a good idea of how I'm going to have all of this time travel stuff work. What I really need now is for someone who isn't me to try and exploit or poke holes in my theory. For this reason I've set up the Chrono Lab in the Continuity Wars forum. I'd appreciate it if anyone could stop by and take a crack at setting up an experiment, and helping my more meta experiment in semi-interactive world-building.