Time Travel

I just finished a series of 5 books by Allen Appel which focus on the adventures of Alex Balfour, a fictional historian who travels through time. He and others in his family have the gift/curse and it shuttles Alex to the Civil War, the Russian Revolution, WWII and other places. I found it quite enjoyable and am using it to round out my poorly thought out opinion on the impact of time travel. I have decided that time travel does exist but it doesn't work the way it is often thought to.

Now I'm no scientist so I won't try to explain how or why people can travel through time, but I'm going to deal with the question of "changing the future". We often think of time as a line and at moments of decision, there are potential branches. With each choice any person makes, a path is chosen and other branches represent other universes in which other decisions were made and they branch off onto the aither. Imagine a nexus point/focal point, and off of this there are infinite paths to take. Our universe is but one of the infinite ones that are born of each moment. A single past leading to multiple potential futures, so going into the past would change a whole lot of infinite realities.

But I'm gonna flip that right on its head. I believe that there are multiple pasts and that they get mixed into a single present/future at these nexus points. Instead of infinite futures branching off, time is the process of resolving infinite pasts and lopping off all other future possibilities. Instead of one moment into many, it should be many pasts into one moment. This then also explains another issue of time travel -- changing things.

If someone goes into one of the pasts and changes something, and that has an impact on the unified "real" present, then that change happens instantaneously and we have no idea that it happens. You see, at the moment of change, all of our awarenesses and memories shift as well. Imagine if the Orwellian concept of "Eurasia has ALWAYS been at war with East Asia" was an actual truth. When the past is changed we cannot know any difference -- things are as they always have been. For most time travel changes, this wouldn't even be perceptible to the casual observer. A guy in India goes back in time and buy Colgate instead of Crest? Screw the butterflies; that will not result in any real change to my life. But if something large enough or local enough happens, then the observer would see me sitting and living life while reality shifts around and inside me, but I can't sense it. I am probably shifting through tens if not thousands of universe versions every day as time travelers go back and monkey around (or primate around) but I can't know it because the present is constantly the reality for me in whatever version I see it. And my memories will always conform to the reality I am in and the past which generated it. I can't remember any other reality because, in each case, there has never been any other reality. 

If time travelers are here from the future doing stuff, I'll never know it because they are creating a future reality into which I will move, never knowing that things could have been any other way. The word "change" is wrong -- people who travel to the past are setting up my present, not changing it.

Now, as to traveling into the future, no dice. That's silly.