Time Travel Conundrums (standard:science fiction, 862 words)
Author: Saxon Violence	Added: Dec 07 2012	Views/Reads: 5075/1980	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A brief discussion of Time Travel, Chaos Theory and Paradox

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

be conceived will be. 

Friends, from that point on, it's a whole new ballgame. 

Go back to the 1880s to hobnob with the Impressionists for a few
days—and when you get back, no one that you ever knew will be here. 
Your grandparents—maybe even your great grandparents—would never have 
been born there. 

One hypothetical solution is to imagine our Timeline as a 4-D “Tree”. If
you go back and change things, the “Tree” “Branches” in 5-D Space. The 
farther you move into the Future, the farther apart the two “Branches” 
grow in the fifth Dimension. 

I never liked the “Many World's” Theory: that our “Tree” branches at
every possible decision point. That raises all sorts of Practical and 
Philosophical Conundrums. 

No, my “Tree” may branch for other reasons besides Time Travelers—but it
has to be shaken hard to get it to branch. 

I have been playing with the Idea that any Time Traveler will “Drift” in
the 5th Dimension and after a relatively few trips, he'll find that he 
has wandered so far off course that he'll never be able to go home to a 
Time Line that is even remotely like his own. 

I also like the idea of a cluster of “Mainline” Timelines where the very
improbable happens very seldom—They are “Privileged” somehow and they 
tend to protect themselves from the wild improbabilities often created 
by Time-Travellers... 

By pushing them out into the far less probable and “Off-The-Wall”
Timelines. 

Most Time Travelers come from “Main Lines” and in the Bizzarro Time
Lines they have a sort of... 

Well, they're very difficult to kill and “Lady Luck” seems to favor them
to a ridiculous extreme, but also seems to enjoy plunking them into 
improbable adventures. 

{No Personification intended—just a manor of speaking. But in any game
of life and death, their “Dice” are always weighted heavily in their 
Favor.} 

Yes, that is a conscious attempt to rationalize a “Doctor Who” type time
traveler. 

Saxon Violence 


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