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Originally Posted by AstroReader
The following is a fairly straightforward issue, in my mind, but I haven't seen it put elsewhere quite the way it's occurred to me. The issue relates to the question we often see asked in connection with time travel: If time travel is possible, why haven't we been visited by others from our future, or even our past? For the sake of this message, let us assume that the "many worlds" theory of quantum mechanics is correct.
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Here is one possible answer for you. Time travel into the past is not possible because it violates conservation laws. If you send yourself back in time you have added mass to the past. Time travel into the future would mean skipping over a segment of time, thereby creating a gap in your existence. Thereby creating a time period in the universe wherein mass was absent.
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Originally Posted by AstroReader
The answer to the above question may be as follows: The reason that we see neither time travelers from the future, nor time travelers from the past, nor any effects from their visitations, is that this universe happens to exist in a central zone of probability where the anomalous effects of time travel have virtually no chance of prevailing.
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What mechanism establishes this putative "central zone of probability"?
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Originally Posted by AstroReader
In other words, as measured on a higher dimensional plane where all the possible instantiations of the universe may be visible, our universe occupies an infinitely large zone where time travel has no effect. (And the infinite nature of this preferred zone is not determined by its "centrality" as so defined, but by the fact that any zonal percentage, however defined, of infinity is also infinity.)
This would not mean that time travel is impossible in our universe; it would mean only that any time travel by any occupants of our universe would be to another, parallel universe that permits manifestations of the consequences of time travel.
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What exactly is a "higher dimensional plane"? At the risk of starting a long and tedious debate, I must point out that any claim about the universe being infinite is an arbitrary assertion. Everything that exists exists as a definite quantity. If you are going to claim that something is infinite in extent, then you must prove why this is necessarily so. The burden of proof is on you in this matter. You are making the assertion.
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Originally Posted by AstroReader
Thus, in the future, occupants of our universe could avail themselves of time travel without the universe's ever being subject to its effects. The drawback to the time-travelproof nature of this universe is that any time travel by a given individual would result in the loss of that individual to this universe, and possibly the instantaneous retroactive, concurrent, and future-active reset of events throughout time to accommodate the disappearance of that individual.
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The real problem is that the missing person's mass constitutes a violation of conservation laws.
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Originally Posted by AstroReader
As for the absence of time travelers from our past, it may be either that time travelers never existed, or that they did exist, but history reset itself to compensate for their travels to other universes.
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Again, time travel into the future is yet another violation of conservation laws.
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Originally Posted by AstroReader
The central thesis of this proposition is that our universe is time travel-proof, without being time travel-prohibitive.
Finally, the idea that history, the present, and the future must necessarily reset themselves upon time travel is not so strange, considering that some physicists contend that there is a cosmic censorship principle that prevents such things as the classic paradox where a time traveler kills his own parents before they can conceive him.
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The cosmos hasn't a care about it. It does not censor anything. I can't. It does not think. It obeys physical laws. Those laws state that matter and energy are always conserved.