Judge Bean
Senior Member
The 2% Solution
The 2% Solution.
Titor is his own worst prophecy; he is himself the Waco-type event, the herald of the Day of Judgment?and he desperately struggles to claim his own existence in the face of the 2% margin that calls for his annihilation. As we speak, he may have ceased to exist, and will never be born. That?s just the way things are.
He proposes that there is an approximate 2% variation between his own and our timeline; that some things, notably a skyscraper that "don't" [sic] exist, are different and that all things are slightly different. His trip to the past has made a different future.
I will take the Titor 2% only as a rule of thumb, without meaning to grant him special legitimacy. The 2% makes sense and is consistent with the only logical explanation of time travel: the only way around the primary paradoxes that I can conceive is one in which alternate futures are available for every passage to the past.
The 2% balloons to nearly 100% as the possible variation range for each individual?s existence if the move is to a point in time prior to the individual?s conception. In other words, to travel to a point in time before your own conception practically guarantees that you will never be born.
There is only half a chance that, even if a child is born to your parents on your birthday, the infant will be the same sex as you; the odds of them having you ?again? are miniscule in its favor. It may be that there will be a baby born who is your virtual twin and born on the same day and hour; but these facts having reached an incredible level of coincidence already, it is unlikely that the precise genetic arrangement was reached in all respects.
In other words, you are not likely to be born again even if almost all of the circumstances of your conception are duplicated.
What happens if the trip to the past lands you within your lifetime?
Most probably, a reversion to the recent past would pose the problem of matter having to be in two places simultaneously, which is impossible; and matter cannot be conjured from nothingness or absolutely replicated. The safest tactic would be to travel to a point far enough in the past to avoid requiring the molecules constituting your vital organs to have to choose between locations.
There is a schedule according to which most or all of the actual matter in your body is recycled into the world, and it would be safest to revisit yourself decades before you grew up or received artificial molars. The acquisition of semipermanent cellular material, as in bone, calls for caution, and probably for time travelers above the age of 20 or 25, if these are meant to travel within their own lifetimes, and to travel no closer back than 15 or 20 years.
While this comports with the Titor narrative, in which he visits his toddler self, it also demonstrates the subtle desperation of his ?mission,? and why it must have personal and official portions: for if he does indeed pass to the 1970s to complete the official part, he will have obliterated his own existence in the new future he has created for himself. He will have only the memory of a life, and there will be no record of it; he may experience some amnesia. So he must visit himself one last time.
The 2% operates in society to cause specific drastic modifications within a context of overall and general familiarity. This is because some individuals have dramatic effect, and influence others, and are missing in alternate futures posed by time travel to points before their births. Even in proposed futures in which influential persons are already born, they may be obscured or their actions suppressed by otherwise altered circumstances.
The great ethical questions raised by time travel are therefore for the most part moot: if you want to stop Hitler, you simply travel to the past before his conception. The dangerous social conditions in Germany in the 1920s and 30s are left to resolve themselves along other lines, and it will be noticed that there will probably be no Nazis whatsoever. On the other hand, the U.S. or Russia might find itself open to a persuasive tyrant who imposes a military regime and wages a genocide campaign against those in their midst of Jewish, African, or Asian ancestry.
The only presumptions of engineered history are known evils.
The value of time travel is its simple, unobtrusive, passive alteration of dire fate; it is an ultimate human accomplishment, to be likened to an achieved immortality, to have snubbed fate, and we should tread lightly when we want to conclude that time travel is unlikely or impossible. Given the pattern of human desire and invention, it should surprise no one to learn that science will stretch the human lifespan to 150 or 200 years; that it will eradicate all disease; that it will allow travel to other planets and encounter alien life; and that it will find a way to revisit the past to alter the future.
The 2% Solution.
Titor is his own worst prophecy; he is himself the Waco-type event, the herald of the Day of Judgment?and he desperately struggles to claim his own existence in the face of the 2% margin that calls for his annihilation. As we speak, he may have ceased to exist, and will never be born. That?s just the way things are.
He proposes that there is an approximate 2% variation between his own and our timeline; that some things, notably a skyscraper that "don't" [sic] exist, are different and that all things are slightly different. His trip to the past has made a different future.
I will take the Titor 2% only as a rule of thumb, without meaning to grant him special legitimacy. The 2% makes sense and is consistent with the only logical explanation of time travel: the only way around the primary paradoxes that I can conceive is one in which alternate futures are available for every passage to the past.
The 2% balloons to nearly 100% as the possible variation range for each individual?s existence if the move is to a point in time prior to the individual?s conception. In other words, to travel to a point in time before your own conception practically guarantees that you will never be born.
There is only half a chance that, even if a child is born to your parents on your birthday, the infant will be the same sex as you; the odds of them having you ?again? are miniscule in its favor. It may be that there will be a baby born who is your virtual twin and born on the same day and hour; but these facts having reached an incredible level of coincidence already, it is unlikely that the precise genetic arrangement was reached in all respects.
In other words, you are not likely to be born again even if almost all of the circumstances of your conception are duplicated.
What happens if the trip to the past lands you within your lifetime?
Most probably, a reversion to the recent past would pose the problem of matter having to be in two places simultaneously, which is impossible; and matter cannot be conjured from nothingness or absolutely replicated. The safest tactic would be to travel to a point far enough in the past to avoid requiring the molecules constituting your vital organs to have to choose between locations.
There is a schedule according to which most or all of the actual matter in your body is recycled into the world, and it would be safest to revisit yourself decades before you grew up or received artificial molars. The acquisition of semipermanent cellular material, as in bone, calls for caution, and probably for time travelers above the age of 20 or 25, if these are meant to travel within their own lifetimes, and to travel no closer back than 15 or 20 years.
While this comports with the Titor narrative, in which he visits his toddler self, it also demonstrates the subtle desperation of his ?mission,? and why it must have personal and official portions: for if he does indeed pass to the 1970s to complete the official part, he will have obliterated his own existence in the new future he has created for himself. He will have only the memory of a life, and there will be no record of it; he may experience some amnesia. So he must visit himself one last time.
The 2% operates in society to cause specific drastic modifications within a context of overall and general familiarity. This is because some individuals have dramatic effect, and influence others, and are missing in alternate futures posed by time travel to points before their births. Even in proposed futures in which influential persons are already born, they may be obscured or their actions suppressed by otherwise altered circumstances.
The great ethical questions raised by time travel are therefore for the most part moot: if you want to stop Hitler, you simply travel to the past before his conception. The dangerous social conditions in Germany in the 1920s and 30s are left to resolve themselves along other lines, and it will be noticed that there will probably be no Nazis whatsoever. On the other hand, the U.S. or Russia might find itself open to a persuasive tyrant who imposes a military regime and wages a genocide campaign against those in their midst of Jewish, African, or Asian ancestry.
The only presumptions of engineered history are known evils.
The value of time travel is its simple, unobtrusive, passive alteration of dire fate; it is an ultimate human accomplishment, to be likened to an achieved immortality, to have snubbed fate, and we should tread lightly when we want to conclude that time travel is unlikely or impossible. Given the pattern of human desire and invention, it should surprise no one to learn that science will stretch the human lifespan to 150 or 200 years; that it will eradicate all disease; that it will allow travel to other planets and encounter alien life; and that it will find a way to revisit the past to alter the future.
and so if it was all true he would not have ended up where he first started anyways.. just uin a place where nobody would know of him or to know him as a tt