Continuing the idea thread from yesterday…
The ability to travel to the future and come back again, as a fictional trope, creates all sorts of potential problems. Once you know what is going to happen, you then have sufficient agency to make it not happen, and that leads to paradoxes.
But there is no such restriction on traveling to the past, as long as you are only able to observe, without the ability to change anything. Semantically, this is equivalent to potential omniscience about everything and anything that has happened up to this moment in time.
We might call a person who has such omniscience a “reality superuser” (RS), to borrow a word from computer terminology. An RS is able to access any event at any location in history, and then act on that knowledge in the present.
This does not lead to any paradoxes, since the RS cannot change anything that has come before the current moment. But it does create a very interesting kind of superpower.
For example, an RS can look at you and immediately know your entire life history and experience. This may give the RS the ability to predict, with reasonable accuracy, what you are likely to do next in any given situation.
I wonder whether anyone has explored this trope in fiction.