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🕑 Added 2015-07-31 21:18:39 +0000 UTC

Comments

Alistair Young

In conversations this morning, my better half points up Kage Baker's "Company" books as another example of useful applications of time travel in an immutable timeline: snatching valuable artifacts, data, etc. out of history before their destruction. (One might not be able to avert the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, but history _might_ have included a wandering scholar with a mysterious "document scanner" artifact sometime in the previous months, who's to say?) (Hm. Which probably implies, in my universe, that the Transcend has a long-term plan to build stealth uploading drones, once someone figures out how to do stable time-like skew-framing, in order to rescue the mind-states of everyone who died before it was created. Much easier than Tiplerian resurrection!)

Nyrath

I saw! What a coincidence! And that is a good comment you have, about reconciling free will and eternalism. I'll have to insert my notes on the Block Universe, as you mentioned in your fic-a-day

Alistair Young

Heh. Amusingly and by coincidence, today's fic-a-day ( <a href="http://eldraeverse.com/2015/07/31/unmoved-monad/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://eldraeverse.com/2015/07/31/unmoved-monad/</a> ) is all about the fun you can have with time travel without having to use <em>time travel</em> in the whole messy past-editing-is-permitted sense. (In the name of pickiness, though, I can't help but mention that theologians have been reconciling free will and eternalism for a very long time, and I can't help but think that physicists will do it better, should it turn out that both of those things exist in the first place. After all, that an extratemporal observer could theoretically observe everything you did-are-will choos[e|ing] simultaneously isn't <em>per se</em> incompatible with the notion that nevertheless, you did still choose it.)