Well, it looks like the Civil War's died down a bit. I wonder what this timeline is like
OK, I think I've got that bloody American thing sorted out. You know, I think that American politicians may, in fact be capable of breaking the laws of physics in order to argue with each other. If you locked a senator in an empty room for a day, then opened the door, you'd end up with an irresolvable deadlock on whether to go through the damn thing... remind me to try that one, actually. Seriously, North Dakota, Republican again? It never helps.
Politicians is a step forward.
But I think I've finally got bipartisan agreement that mothers selling their children for food isn't a wonderful expression of the free market. Yes, I might've had to shoot Life President Lincoln, but I'm sure the heroism of Generalissimo Stalin will still have been able to keep the Papist forces out of Petrograd.
Wait, really? REALLY? I know Swift can be a bit subtle sometimes, but we went back in time to suggest that pamphlet to him for exactly this reason.
So apparently I'm overly cynical about the whole American political process with regards to the 'fiscal cliff' thing. I'd really like to be wrong about these things more often, since I basically just assume that what's going to happen is whatever would require the least competence. For example, it's more incompetent to completely fail to protect the president than to murder him then cover it up, so the CIA wasn't responsible for the Kennedy assassination. See? It works!
So... um... awkward. To be fair, they really aren't that competent. Originally, they managed to cover it up for like... a week. Also, it was the FBI.
Anyway, you know what would be awesome? Time travel! Why? Because after thinking about it for a long time, I'm pretty sure that most people don't actually understand the concept of a fourth dimension. Also, it really helps with the problem of free will.
Maybe I should give a definitive answer to this question, since I actually do come from a Universe where time travel is possible. So, do you have free-will? Well, I can now definitively state... Maybe! Yeah, so it turns out that the intricacies of quantum theory, combined with some of the finer points of time travel mean that it's impossible to determine whether you have free will or not. And then some philosophers started getting uppity about what we meant by 'free will' in the first place, and we just gave up on the whole thing.
So whatever else I might've done, we seem to have lost about a century of progress. I wonder if Gonsales is still the capital of Luna in this timeline.
And the moon still exists! Probably! YAY!
The question is, how could time travel work? Well, you know how people say that time travel is probably never going to happen because of the minor fact that there don't seem to be any time travelers around (and the idea that they're just too good at hiding requires a level of competence I'm really not comfortable with accepting yeah, that would be accurate if we didn't have some way of covering up all our mistakes)? Well good news! The current (and by current I mean that the idea may or may not have been new this millennium) thinking is that you can only time travel within the time in which a time machine exists. Thus, we won't start getting time travelers until after time machines are invented*. Still useful, though.
Saying that time travel is 'useful' rather downplays the political, social and economic issues. How the hell do we deal with the fact that one person can do infinite amounts of work in an afternoon. I'm told it took the best minds in the world a hundred years to figure it all out, and then we had to completely restructure society. Fortunately, we had time travel, so it actually took an afternoon.
OK, perhaps I should explain this one. Yes, that was originally true, until the Discovery Nine reached Sagittarius A*. As I understand it, we decided to spin the thing, and the resulting ring singularity* was connect to all parts of time and space. And, as it turns out, didn't destroy all of reality.
In my timeline, there was a theory that time travel was inherently unstable - since the time line was going to keep changing until we got to a timeline in which it never exists, when it would become stable. That turned out to be a pretty good guess, really.
*Of course there's also the far simpler explanation that time travel actually causes changes in the timeline when you go there, so currently we haven't had any time travelers, but in the future the past will have been different, and we will have always have known about the time travelers, and the idea that we should not have known about them will be relegated to a time which will have been real but which is going to have been unreal.
*Calling it a ringularity looked like it might become standard for a bit. But as it turned out, it just got really old really fast. Spingularity is just terrible.
