I was talking with my friend Oliver about my “Bit” post from the other day. I described to him my possibly dystopian vision of the time-traveling superpower of being able to send a bit of information to the past. It was dystopian because if you screw up, you annihilate your entire time line. Definitely not fun.<\/p>\n
Oliver pointed out that there is another way of looking at all this: If you screw up, then you’ve only annihilated the time line of everything that happened after you received the bit of information from the future. So the “early” version of you that gets info from the future is just fine. It’s only the future version of you, the one that has screwed up, which becomes disappeared.<\/p>\n
Which means that you actually never get it wrong. The only version of future you which ends up existing is the one that never makes any mistakes.<\/p>\n
Oliver’s version of all this is much friendly than mine: Everything always works out by definition.<\/p>\n
I must admit, this is a much nicer way to think about time travel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was talking with my friend Oliver about my “Bit” post from the other day. I described to him my possibly dystopian vision of the time-traveling superpower of being able to send a bit of information to the past. It was dystopian because if you screw up, you annihilate your entire time line. Definitely not … Continue reading “A bit optimistic”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17005"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17005"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17007,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17005\/revisions\/17007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}