puzzle
Regular
Re: Technomages and Their Tech (implants)
It could have come from a different world than the present of the characters we saw - a world visible/accessible though the rift, but not capable of swapping out the present, since that could possibly require infinite energy.
According to some approaches to the paradoxes of time travel, if B4 had not departed, the present might have just continued rolling on, while another world would never see Valen arrive, and presumably in that world, B5 would also fall.
Or perhaps that world would even never exist, and Sinclair's / Zathras' choice to travel and other's choices to help them actually created it?
That in turn would have the shortcoming of having to explain where B4 and Valen in the depicted world of B5 had come from. They had come from somewhere, but was there causality present in the process, and would they need to go too, or could one world just enjoy an unexplained trade surplus of space stations? Would it mean that another world would have a deficit, and it would be ethical to share extra space stations with them by traveling there?
However, and especially since B4 took two jumps, trying to speculate about time travel is something I quickly fail at... just a too convoluted system, and no good description of the nature of time in reach.
And I still haven't got to the seemingly inevitable (but possibly impossible) differences in details of how and when Sinclair would depart, and the question of whether those would influence the process, and whether the world is deterministic or not, or whether the question of world-level determinism is a moot point anyway.
So I can say to myself: it's all a story anyway, and not meant to resolve to clarity.
It could have come from a different world than the present of the characters we saw - a world visible/accessible though the rift, but not capable of swapping out the present, since that could possibly require infinite energy.
According to some approaches to the paradoxes of time travel, if B4 had not departed, the present might have just continued rolling on, while another world would never see Valen arrive, and presumably in that world, B5 would also fall.
Or perhaps that world would even never exist, and Sinclair's / Zathras' choice to travel and other's choices to help them actually created it?
That in turn would have the shortcoming of having to explain where B4 and Valen in the depicted world of B5 had come from. They had come from somewhere, but was there causality present in the process, and would they need to go too, or could one world just enjoy an unexplained trade surplus of space stations? Would it mean that another world would have a deficit, and it would be ethical to share extra space stations with them by traveling there?
However, and especially since B4 took two jumps, trying to speculate about time travel is something I quickly fail at... just a too convoluted system, and no good description of the nature of time in reach.
And I still haven't got to the seemingly inevitable (but possibly impossible) differences in details of how and when Sinclair would depart, and the question of whether those would influence the process, and whether the world is deterministic or not, or whether the question of world-level determinism is a moot point anyway.
So I can say to myself: it's all a story anyway, and not meant to resolve to clarity.
