From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!zeppo!wheps!eagle!mhuxt!mhuxa!mhuxh!mhuxm!pyuxjj!rlr Newsgroups: net.misc Title: re: "the past is determined by the future" Article-I.D.: pyuxjj.264 Posted: Tue Aug 10 14:38:36 1982 Received: Thu Aug 12 07:03:20 1982 (This probably belongs in sf-lovers, but the discussion started here, so... ) The notion described in wing's article is on of several "effects of time travel" concepts prevalent in sci-fi, and the one that I believe is the most "realistic" (whatever that means when referring to the implausible). Among these concepts are: 1) people can go back in time, change the past, alter the course of history, and screw up the "space-time continuum" (oh,no!), or 2) people can go back in time, change the past, and then somehow get lost in some random current of the various possible routes through which the river of time may flow (iccch!), some current other than the one that we (in the "real" world) are in (one story I read--the name escapes me--had the "hero" go back in time, kill his wife's parents, return to see no effect on the present, and then do a number of silly things like kill Mohammed---that's the name, I think, "The Man Who Killed Mohammed" [???]----only to find himself a ghost, along with a friend, outside the realm of reality in his own time (huh?), and finally 3) whenever a person goes back in time and does something, he had already been there in his own present's version of the past; in other words, anything that a time traveler does when he/she travels into the past exists (so to speak) in the history books of his/her present. His/her travel to the past and the events that transpired there (then?) resulted in things that *happened in our present history*. Thus there is no changing history; what you do when you go back there has already been done (???). This sure is confusing. Question: has anyone thought out the idea that we only move forward in time due to some effect similar to gravity, i.e., since time is a dimension like any other, are we being drawn by some force (accelerating in terms of time?????) to some point on the time axis, the same way gravity draws a body to a point on the xyz axes???? Just a random inane thought... Rich Rosen pyuxjj!rlr