Some ideas are:

  • You branch off into another timeline and your actions make no difference to the previous timeline
  • You’ve already taken said actions but just didn’t know about it so nothing changes
  • Actions taken can have an effect (so you could suddenly erase yourself if you killed your parents)
  • Only “nexus” or fixed events really matter, the timeline will sort itself out for minor changes
  • something else entirely
    • Doorbook@lemmy.world
      3·
      5 months ago

      I just imagine if life is a simulation and everytime someone travel back a new branch created but then coming back to present timeline you have to fix all the merge conflicts.

    • palordrolap@fedia.io
      1·
      5 months ago

      But what if: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_triangular_number

      Slightly more seriously (but only slightly), what if what we see as Heisenberg uncertainty and probabilistic wave/particle weirdness is actually the result of multiple overlaid timelines caused explicitly by time travel, and if time travel wasn’t possible, the universe wouldn’t have those properties?