Why would the only way to prevent timeline collapse be to prevent civilizations from achieving black hole-based time travel? Why not just have it so that whenever such time travel is attempted, any attempts to actually change the timeline simply fail mysteriously and events end up unfolding as they did regardless?
Like, you could still go back as a tourist and find out if Jesus was real, or scan people’s brains before they die and upload them into the future, but you’d be unable to make any changes to history, and anything you did would actually end up bringing about the events as they originally occurred.
I also don’t see how precommitting to anything will escape the “curse”. The universe isn’t an agent we can do acausal trade with. Applying the Anthropic Principle, we either are not the type of civilization that will ever develop time travel, or there is no “curse” that prevents civilizations like ours from developing time travel. Otherwise, we already shouldn’t exist as a civilization.
Universe will choose the simplest way to stop time travel. It doesn’t care is it the destruction of a civilization or some mysterious way to prevent changes in the past. Moreover, as civilizations naturally have a tendency to fall and this prevents all time machines, then civilization destruction is easier way to prevent time travel.
If a non-cancel principle is false, then causality should move along a timeline twice. First normally, and second time—when the time line is canceled. The interesting question arises: can the canceling wave reach the normal wave and if yes, when? (the answer must be “yes” because if it never reaches the now moment, the canceling never happens). For example, if cancel wave has finite but high speed, it will reach us just before we were going to start the time machine.
From anthropic considerations, we can say that we will take this precommitment and will follow it.
I should point out that the natural tendency for civilizations to fall appears to apply to subsets of the human civilization, rather than the entirety of humanity historically. While locally catastrophic, these events were not existential, as humanity survived and recovered.
I’d also argue that the collapse of a civilization requires far more probabilities to go to zero and has greater and more complex causal effects than all time machines just failing to work when tried.
And, the reality is that at this time we do not know if the Non-Cancel Principle is true or false, and whether or not the universe will prevent time travel. Given this, we face the dilemma that if we precommit to not developing time travel and time travel turns out to be possible, then we have just limited ourselves and will probably be outcompeted by a civilization that develops time travel instead of us.
Of course, I meant not Bronze age collapse, but known plethora of existential risks. But your argument that others will outcompete us is valid—unless the totality of x-risks is a universal Great Filter.
Why would the only way to prevent timeline collapse be to prevent civilizations from achieving black hole-based time travel? Why not just have it so that whenever such time travel is attempted, any attempts to actually change the timeline simply fail mysteriously and events end up unfolding as they did regardless?
Like, you could still go back as a tourist and find out if Jesus was real, or scan people’s brains before they die and upload them into the future, but you’d be unable to make any changes to history, and anything you did would actually end up bringing about the events as they originally occurred.
I also don’t see how precommitting to anything will escape the “curse”. The universe isn’t an agent we can do acausal trade with. Applying the Anthropic Principle, we either are not the type of civilization that will ever develop time travel, or there is no “curse” that prevents civilizations like ours from developing time travel. Otherwise, we already shouldn’t exist as a civilization.
Universe will choose the simplest way to stop time travel. It doesn’t care is it the destruction of a civilization or some mysterious way to prevent changes in the past. Moreover, as civilizations naturally have a tendency to fall and this prevents all time machines, then civilization destruction is easier way to prevent time travel.
If a non-cancel principle is false, then causality should move along a timeline twice. First normally, and second time—when the time line is canceled. The interesting question arises: can the canceling wave reach the normal wave and if yes, when? (the answer must be “yes” because if it never reaches the now moment, the canceling never happens). For example, if cancel wave has finite but high speed, it will reach us just before we were going to start the time machine.
From anthropic considerations, we can say that we will take this precommitment and will follow it.
I should point out that the natural tendency for civilizations to fall appears to apply to subsets of the human civilization, rather than the entirety of humanity historically. While locally catastrophic, these events were not existential, as humanity survived and recovered.
I’d also argue that the collapse of a civilization requires far more probabilities to go to zero and has greater and more complex causal effects than all time machines just failing to work when tried.
And, the reality is that at this time we do not know if the Non-Cancel Principle is true or false, and whether or not the universe will prevent time travel. Given this, we face the dilemma that if we precommit to not developing time travel and time travel turns out to be possible, then we have just limited ourselves and will probably be outcompeted by a civilization that develops time travel instead of us.
Of course, I meant not Bronze age collapse, but known plethora of existential risks. But your argument that others will outcompete us is valid—unless the totality of x-risks is a universal Great Filter.