Temporal insurance

There are many examples in science fiction of somebody winding back time to change things. And we have all had the experience of saying “I wish I could go back and do that differently.”

Suppose time travel did exist, and we were each of us on our own personal timeline in a branching multiverse. In that reality, you could always go back and change the past.

On the surface, it would seem that there is no paradox, because the reality you create that second time around would, from your perspective, become the only reality. These sorts of do-overs would be seen as a kind of “temporal insurance”.

Is such a reality even theoretically possible, or does it fall apart due to self-contradictions? I can definitely see some issues.

For example, in your universe, you could always win at the stock market. But if everybody wins at the stock market, then the very concept of a stock market stops making sense.

I suspect that such examples will lead to multiple contradictions. Living together with 8 billion fellow humans seems to be incompatible with a world in which each of us is uniquely fortunate.

Which definitely raises some red flags. But could we mathematically prove that such a world is impossible?

An ending and a beginning

For me the last eleven months have been an extremely eventful. I am sure that at the end of this year I will look back on 2024 with a mixture of awe and exhaustion.

So it is odd to find myself, as of this morning, at the beginning of the final month of this already jam packed sequence of 365 days. I am sort of hoping that these next 31 days will be more restful and less eventful than the 334 days that have just gone by.

But you never know. 2024 might still surprise me.