CronoDAS comments on Causal Universes - Less Wrong

60 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 November 2012 04:08AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (385)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: lavalamp 28 November 2012 08:22:01PM 1 point [-]

My hypothesis is that universes that allow macroscopic time travel are very unlikely to have life intelligent enough to exploit the time travel. The hypothesis depends on two points: 1) policing time travel is likely to be extremely difficult or impossible, and 2) at least some members of the species will want to cause trouble with a time machine, including the sort of trouble that causes the entire species to have never evolved in the first place. Therefore I take the fact that we exist as evidence that arbitrary amounts of time travel aren't possible in our universe...

Comment author: CronoDAS 28 November 2012 09:35:45PM 3 points [-]

Larry Niven once commented that, if past-changing time travel is possible, the most stable universes will be those in which time travel is never invented...