Two Times One

- You know, there’s something quite funny about time traveling. Our current knowledge of physics and math hint to us that is quite possible to travel backward in time without incurring into paradoxes, assuming there are multiple universes and we can travel between them. Yet, if time traveling it’s possible, why aren’t there any proofs in our past that time travelers have shown up? Maybe you could say that they just come to observe or make subtle changes in our past. But, given that time traveling could become possible in an infinite time range, any moment in the past or even the present could be flooded with time travelers from very distinct time periods, and some of those travelers should be dumb enough to make their presence evident. Don’t you think?

- Well but, there’s no contradiction or paradox in what you mention. If the multiple universes hypothesis is correct, where every time travel implies traveling to a new universe and you can never travel back to the same universe where you came from because you have already changed the past. Then there must be an original unchanged timeline from where all other altered universes are spawning. A virgin time-space from where the first time-travelers came, come, and will come from.

- So you are implying that we are right now in the original timeline? That no time-traveler has arrived in our past because time traveling will be invented in our time-space?

- Not necessarily. Think about it. Every travel to the past creates an entirely new timeline. That means that there could be probably infinity of universes with only a few time traveling occurrences, most of them occurring totally unnoticed. Just like throwing little pebbles to a river. Now, time-travelers aren’t necessary to change the past. If you throw to the past a lighted match inside a medieval forest you could change the shape of history entirely.

- But what for, Leonard? As you where saying, every change in the past sparks a new timeline enclosed in another universe. That means that the changes you make to the past will not affect your present unless you go by yourself to the past to change it and then travel in the new timeline to the new present. That also supposes another risk. You will disappear from your original timeline to never return. Only people with nothing to loose would dare to do such a thing.

- That’s the point, Robert. Whoever risks his actual existence traveling to the past must be someone in with a very special mind in a very special situation. The best advantage of traveling to another time-space is that you can do anything nasty to yourself, even preventing yourself from being born, without affecting your own time-line and yourself.

- You know! I think I know where are you going with all this stuff about time-traveling psychos and no! I’m not going to let you make think that the assassination of Dr. Dwright was carried by a guy that came from the future.

- Not any kind of guy, someone with the knowledge and the power to do it, and… nothing to loose.

- But, they already got the killer, Dr. Evans. And a lot of evidence to support it: the gun with his fingerprints, DNA tests, and better than anything else, a motive. Dr. Dwright fired Dr. Evans for his apparent waste of resources in his "secret" research, and the not very much publicized fact that Dr. Evans wife cheated on him with Doctor Dwright.