A pact with the Universe?

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One of the most popular notions of Time Travel is that if a person ventured backward into yesteryear, altered a major historical event, then traveled back to his point of origin (his original reality), he would find that he had just returned to a world very different from the one he'd left.

I disagree with this notion.

While it's my belief that the Universe not only allows for Time Travel but intends for it to one day become a reality, I don't believe the Universe would ever allow us the ability to alter our original reality. For that to be the case, the Universe would have to have some kind of death wish. The havoc which would be wreaked is incalcuable. Flawed humankind can never be entrusted with the power to alter its original reality. Through incompetence or madness, such awesome power in the hands of humankind would eventually turn the entire Universe into an insane asylum. I just cannot believe that this is the gameplan.

I don't accept that the Universe is destined to disintegrate into chaos, nor do I believe that it grew out of chaos. The notion some hold that the Universe began in chaos and will one day return to it seems to me ridiculous. It seems to me infinitely more likely that there was, is, and always will be order (whether or not our limited minds are able to perceive it in all its glory).

Given that, the Universe would never allow any of its creatures the ability to destroy that order. But the Universe has always allowed us the ability to learn (I dare say, has encouraged it). I believe it has even made something of a pact with us.

The theory of Time Travel that makes sense to me would hold that we human creatures are destined to one day discover a way to travel backward in time and unlock the secrets of the past, but to do so without causing horrendous disruptions to our points of origin (our original realities).

Creating new realities out of copies of the original? Yes. Altering the original? No. Meeting yourself (your original self)? No. Meeting a copy of yourself? Yes. Killing your grandfather and then suddenly disintegrating? No. Killing your grandfather and then perhaps finding out what the world might have been like without your homicidal existence? Yes.

In short, the opportunity to safely play out historic and personal scenarios, and learn and learn and learn -- this to me seems more likely what this orderly Universe has intended all along for its ever curious, extremely flawed yet promising human beings.
 
Maybe there is only a "now" in time. We can't do anything yesterday or tomorrow; we can only do things "now".
 
We can probably only experience the "now" that we collectively exist in. This is our "now". Maybe there are others, as well.
 
I mean this relativistically - if you're moving relative me, your reference frame is different to mine. So even humanity doesn't exist all in one "now" - those of us who are moving would see events occuring at different times than those at rest. It's impossible to even say that someone else would see one event before another (if you're moving fast enough).
 
I think that someone once said that even if you went to the prehistoric period and killed just one little thing like a worm, then you could change the whole world. Because that could have been the first worm, and worms help people with their gardens, so when agriculture started they didn't have worms to help them, so farming might have been so difficult that just quit and went back to their caves forever. So if someone were to do something as tiny as that, they could change the world.

However, according to BradJ, the person who squashed the worm wouldn't be effected by the change. They could just go back in time and keep themselves from stepping on that worm.
 
There was an episode of I think "Ray Bradbury Theatre" with one of these go-back-in-the-past-and-change-the-present things. The gist was, this company was sending rich people back in time to hunt dinosaurs. They took every precaution not to pollute the timeline (killing T-Rexes that were about to die, etc.), but this one guy accidentally stepped off the path and squashed a butterfly. When they got back, the letter 'A' had never been invented! Something about the letter was invented from someone seeing a shape on a butterfly, which had descended from the butterfly the guy squashed. I thought it was a pretty good way of explaining it.
 
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