Darby
Epochal Historian
PeterPanParadox,
Great handle! It gets right to the heart of the matter here - paradox.
Your question is similar to mine: what's the point of posting? As stated above, this is a Standard Model QM scenario. Same world. All she had to do was read the posts in October 2008 to know how she had already been received and then go back to September to either post or not post.
But there's the paradox. It's a viscious paradox because the "effect" - the posts that she read in October - would appear to her to have created themselves. What happens if she reads them, is frustrated, and never goes to 2008 to write them? Yet there they are - with no obvious cause.
And how does she know that DARPA invented time travel? The technology can't be kept secret for all time on to the future infinity. It will leak out. Someone will eventually travel back and settle in the past with their time machine, the knowledge to build time machines and whatever else they have technologically. Now we have the "future" technology co-residing in the "past". The technology is available, linearly, before it's invented. Why invent it? Who invented it? It's already there when "the future" arrives. There's no incentive to invent something that already exists - and no reason to go back to the past and take the technology with them.
You have the paradox of effect with no cause. And that's what his/her story implies.
This is the reason why the early wanna-be time travelers stuck to the Everett-Wheeler model - it avoids those obvious paradoxical outcomes. And it also gives them an out if their predictions are wrong because the history known to them is not ours (which still begs the question of why post as if they have a message that applys to us?)
Oh, yeah - her version of the Standard Model is incorrect. In the Standard Model you can TT only as far back as when the time machine was first activated. That's where the loop is formed. As the time machine moves forward in time the diameter of the loop increases so that you can travel back to that point from more distant points in the future. But the loop doesn't extend any farther into the past than when it was originally created.
Great handle! It gets right to the heart of the matter here - paradox.
Your question is similar to mine: what's the point of posting? As stated above, this is a Standard Model QM scenario. Same world. All she had to do was read the posts in October 2008 to know how she had already been received and then go back to September to either post or not post.
But there's the paradox. It's a viscious paradox because the "effect" - the posts that she read in October - would appear to her to have created themselves. What happens if she reads them, is frustrated, and never goes to 2008 to write them? Yet there they are - with no obvious cause.
And how does she know that DARPA invented time travel? The technology can't be kept secret for all time on to the future infinity. It will leak out. Someone will eventually travel back and settle in the past with their time machine, the knowledge to build time machines and whatever else they have technologically. Now we have the "future" technology co-residing in the "past". The technology is available, linearly, before it's invented. Why invent it? Who invented it? It's already there when "the future" arrives. There's no incentive to invent something that already exists - and no reason to go back to the past and take the technology with them.
You have the paradox of effect with no cause. And that's what his/her story implies.
This is the reason why the early wanna-be time travelers stuck to the Everett-Wheeler model - it avoids those obvious paradoxical outcomes. And it also gives them an out if their predictions are wrong because the history known to them is not ours (which still begs the question of why post as if they have a message that applys to us?)
Oh, yeah - her version of the Standard Model is incorrect. In the Standard Model you can TT only as far back as when the time machine was first activated. That's where the loop is formed. As the time machine moves forward in time the diameter of the loop increases so that you can travel back to that point from more distant points in the future. But the loop doesn't extend any farther into the past than when it was originally created.
