Why a Hydra? Why not a coral reef?

Why a Hydra? Why not a coral reef?

Because we did such a great job of finishing off the 300 year old argument about predistination and free will, I thouht we would tackle something simpler this post... time travel! Pretty scary with all the worry about accidently killing your gandmother while traveling to the past! Ah, but we must be brave! Our time-slice worms give us a totally different way of visualizing this interesting question... will we ever travel in time? This is too complex for one post, so we will talk about our "Past" paradigm first.

We already discussed this a little in the post "More Time for Nothng" . If our flatlander had no thickness in "hight," which was his "time," I would not be able to see him from his 2D brane! We agreed to consider him to be a thin wafer, rather than a 0-thickness surface. Then we tok little wafer snap shots of him and stacked them up to make a 3D worm from our 2D friend. Similarly, we took 2D wafer slices through our torsos to make 3D worms from ourselves and visualized a "hydra" creatures all the way back to Adam! Wow! a 12 billion bud hydra! (6 billion are "dead") We basically traded our "height" dimension for our "time" dimension.

As we grew our rib-slice-worm (RSW) I recommended that you visualize letting the "past" part of your worm sort of trail behind you as you rose through "time". This allowed us to visualize our RSW but leads to an interesting question... what is it like "down there?" In our usual paradigm of "past" we would need to think of the human-hydra as a coral reef stem - frozen like solid stone! Instead, we never gave it a thought, so our hydra was living and moving... hummm... interesting... Did you ever wonder if the past could be anything other than frozen?

I have a big problem when people, especially governments and the media '"rewrite" the past, and that is not what I am talking about! That is making the written record disagree with what happened. What I am talking about is actually changing the past! That is a very difficult paradigm shift, so let yourself relax a bit. Lets do what we did with the billion slice-space worms and concentrate on one simple example... like you! Your RSW that is. Remember when we visited flatland and watched our amoeba friend's slice-time worm move? He sort of twisted round, as worms do, but I did not mention at the time that if the part of him that was down in the watery past moved, it would be changing his past?. Right now, my RSW is pressed up against the back of my chair. Before that, I was in the kitchen. So my RSW went from the kitchen to the chair to come to the chair. Now, suppose I walked to the TV and then to the chair... Well it might not make any difference at all, but then again it could be like the buttefly Effect... suppose that during that act I saw an ad on TV that I would not have seen if I went to that chair... how far upstream would that change propagate? Hard to tell isn't it? It could totally change my life, or it might not cause any sgnificant change.

To me, the solution to this dilema is also the solution to the clasic problem about accidently killing your grandmother. Think about a hydra floating around in the water. The tenticles can float up and down, tangle together, unwind, etc. The do not damage each other do they? Suppose a tenticle hooked onto a twig. Would the rest of the tenticle have to stay froxen in the pond so that it did not pull the tenticle off the twig? Of course not! It is free to wiggle around. However, it does not wiggle around too hard and certainly not enough to hurt itself! So, why can't our RSWs worms wiggle around as long as they do not hurt themselves, including not doing something that significantly alters events? This is exactly the kind of flexibility I talked about last post about predestination... I can be soverignly passed through a future narrow gate without freezing me in time-space. I am free to wiggle around and am totally responsible for where I wiggle! So, for this post, I am just wondering if I could also do that in the past... see, if a 4D creature watched me he would just see me wiggling in time just like I watched my flatland friend's worm wiggle around.

Try that vision on for a while. We will do some real time travel next post.
Nois