Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to my youth

Up the line
ER — (archived)

Yes, but if you had taken the advice of you time-traveling alter ego and not enlisted, then there would be no reason for anyone from the future to come up the line and counsel you against that decision. So you would have joined anyway. Not only that, your time-traveling self would go back down the line with no memory he was ever a sailor, and so would be asking himself "why did I go back there and what was I doing?"

Maybe time travel paradoxes happen all the time, it's just that by their very nature they neatly obliterate all evidence of their existence and the world goes back to its appearance of temporal linearity. But if evidence of time travel is in principle and fundamentally impossible to demonstrate, isn't that empirically equivalent to saying that it doesn't happen at all?

I let SDAI handle these weighty issues, they are beyond me.

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