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Hi, a timeline question, and some math about encryption
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(05-20-2018, 02:18 AM)stevebowers Wrote: Roman loops can't be used for time travel backwards in time, at least as far as any modosophont is aware. There are probably a few belief systems/religions/conspiracy theories that propose that the Highest Archailects can affect the past, but these belief systems do not have any proof- in some models of time travel, there could not be any credible proof of reverse causality, since each altered timeline would be separate and out of communication with every other one.

Of course - no FTL or time travel in OA. But Orion's Arms is a virch (or more exactly, a media feed from the inside of a closed virch) which (appears to be) exploring what could happen if a single-wormhole Roman loop could actually be stabilized with S:5 technology, and then allowed travel into the past or future parallel alternative histories (which branch off when the Roman loop forms, and diverge thereafter -- so you can't go earlier than that). Initially, that's really interesting -- but as time passes, these histories diverge, and they're now alternate histories that diverged at some point in the past. Since history is contingent and subject to butterfly effects (as described in the Psychohistory article and the section on limits on transapients), they're not going to come true. But for broad patterns that have strong antecedents from before the split, and aren't very contingent, they would still be informative (to the extent that the archai creating the simulation was good at predicting).

Assuming the media feed somewhere includes a large set of EGs from a set alternate histories, I would expect the Encyclopedia Galactica Institute to be interested -- if nothing else, it should help them find typos in and alternative phrasing for recently added articles. And if they see a consistent pattern across a large set of "future articles" from (alternate histories who branching point wasn't too far back, that were interesting or alarming enough (say >90% of them agree that minor variations on some specific major event occurs), then I can imagine them actually publishing an averaged or 'typical' version of these, with a prominent warning mark on it, an analysis of the range of variation, and a link to a detailed explanation of Orion's Arms, what's know or speculated about the source, and comments on their likely level of reliability or otherwise.
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RE: Hi, a timeline question, and some math about encryption - by Roger - 05-20-2018, 02:31 PM

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