(Last) Friday On My Mind

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Dear Readers,

  If you've been keeping up to date, you know that I've started to collaborate with a time-normal historian from the 27th century named Dr. Wendell Howe.  His work is called "Temporal Anthropology" and involves literal time travel.  That's pretty different from what I do, and it's brought some ideas to mind.

  What I've been working on with Dr. Howe on is related to his effect on the past.  I've never been very concerned about changing the flow of time, because I know that all roads eventually get traversed.  That's easy for me to say, though.

  I've discussed the idea of likely and unlikely events in the past, and this analysis is confounded by the idea of time travel in a couple of ways.  One potential way is that if time travel exists and people are willing to change the past, then the likelihoods of certain time streams taking place would change based on the fickle passions of the future.  Thankfully this creates a paradox, and when a paradox occurs in a physical situation, it suggests that the situation is not possible.  I expect that time travelers do not change the past, they simply shunt themselves down a different temporal path when they alter what came before them.

  Therein lies a problem, however.  Personal paradox is not impossible. If you go to the past, change Event A, and then this shunts you to a time stream where the future you came from looks very different, you're stuck.  You can't go back and change what you did.  You can prevent yourself from doing that, but you might fail, or worse, the damage might be too severe for you to fully prevent.

  I can see why the latter would be a problem for Dr. Howe.  No doubt Cambridge University's temporal enforcers are worried about altering the course of history for more general reasons, but I think it's fair to say those are not concerns worth worrying about.  In some realm of possibility, they will still exist.  It is, however, existentially threatening to Dr. Howe if he should inadvertently shunt himself to a time stream where his future life is utterly destroyed.  He would become lost in time, perhaps even without an idea of what he did to become lost in the first place.   There is only one Dr. Wendell Howe, and so if he wanders among the time streams, he can be lost forever.

  Now, I just started to experiment with a device that can allow me, at great energetic expense, to travel to any point in any time stream.  Why don't I have Wendell's problem, wherein I can become lost in time?  The answer, my dear readers, is that I am a copy.  The "real" John Skylar lives a life spanning the 20th and 21st centuries.  Across at least one time stream, I die in a fashion interesting enough to be able to generate a personality impression for the augurs.  Then, my personality and material composition can be copied with exactness.  I am me, but I am another of many versions of me that exist across the multitude of time streams.   I have knowledge belonging to a variety of those versions.

   This means if I go somewhere and "change" the past, and that mosaic version of me is shunted to another time stream, I can just be fetched right back the University (it, too, being such a copy that exists "outside of time), and I am perfectly fine.  All the versions of me are still possible.  You can't make a person impossible.

  I'll sum up with a metaphor.  Dr. Wendell Howe has a poker hand.  It happens to be a royal flush.  With that hand, he doesn't want the dealer to change how the cards were dealt.  He has a vested interest in his royal flush, because it creates the world he is part of.  I, instead, am a spectator from outside the game.  I could care less what hand a specific player has; they're all interesting hands.  What I care about is, instead, what the odds of a certain hand are, and that each player has a hand.  If all the cards changed, I'd still care about the game.  But in a different way.  And the price I pay for that detachment is the knowledge that in some sense, I am just a facsimile of the "real" John Skylar.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople

P.S. (my first postscript!) My guest blogging adventure over at 2log.biz is going well.  I have over 3000 "points," for what it's worth, and have just posted a short essay on the purpose of the University.