Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson for April 25, 2024

There are other movies that involve time traveling, Ethan.

And if you do something different, then that’s the fixed history, and the fact that you did something else the other time doesn’t count. Somehow, this is completely logically consistent.

If you try to change history, a demon with a pitchfork will show up and force you to do the right thing and not change history.

No, the fact is that all the effects of your time traveling were already present in the past, even affecting you before you traveled in time. You can’t save the Titanic, because you already know you didn’t save the Titanic. In fact, maybe you doomed the Titanic. Cause and effect sort of break down.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around how “Avengers: Endgame” explained time travel.

The webcomic ‘Manly Guys Doing Manly Things’ had a funny version of time travel. Essentially time travel works just fine, and doesn’t cause any of that weird stuff like time paradoxes and alternate timelines and stuff – just as long as you don’t think about how it all actually works. If you ever DO stop and start wondering why you aren’t causing any paradoxes, everything goes to hell…

I hope for their sake, he’s right here.

Oh, Ethan, I thought you were smarter than this!

Remember the TV show “Time Tunnel”?!

The “Back to the Future” movies were fun. The Mad magazine parodies “B®ack to the future”, even more so!

Dr. Who never believed that!

Careful Phoebe: Maybe nothing is your fault, but being grounded could still be part of the “fixed timeline”.

LOL, you can’t change it, but what you do or say can still come back to bite you.

Two words: “Bell Inequality,” which is an experimentally observable difference between a deterministic world which Ethan and Karl Marx presume, and a nondeterministic quantum mechanical world. Einstein Podolsky Rosen experiments show that the world is quantum mechanical, not deterministic.

I believe it was Terry Pratchett who said; “Things that happen tend to stay happened”.

The other extreme is the quantum multiverse in which everything that can happen does happen, in its own parallel universe. In which case, nothing is still ever your fault, because in some parallel universe you did the right thing.

Some years back, I wrote a novel in which most of what you changed in the past didn’t have any impact… unless you created a paradox, in which case a new universe split off and proceeded from that point. Kind of an activation energy thing that led to a finite multiverse (2147 to be exact)… which was exploited by developers to create retirement communities, vacation resorts, theme parks and the like in an idealized past. What could possibly go wrong?

it’s all maitland’s fault, lol