The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [192]
A time-traveler has free choice and individual power of action; however, he or she has no more power of action than is allowed by the traveler’s personal circumstances.
A necessary corollary to this postulate does not deal with time travel at all, but only with the observed nature of historical events:
Most notable historical events (those affecting large numbers of people and thus likely to be recorded) are the result of the collective actions of many people.
There are exceptions to this corollary, of course: political assassination, which affects a great many people, but can be carried out by a single individual; scientific discovery, geographical exploration, commercial invention, etc. Still, the effects of events such as these depend in large part on the circumstances in which they take place; many scientific discoveries have been made—and lost—a number of times, before reaching general acceptance or social relevance.
Thus, the notion that knowledge is power is not absolutely true—knowledge is power only to the extent that circumstances allow that knowledge to be used.
That is, if a time-traveler arrives in a society where he or she is merely a normal citizen, then the traveler has relatively little power to affect social events. Madame X arrives in Paris on the eve of the French Revolution, for instance. If Madame X is in fact merely a time-traveler, and is not taking the place of an extant citizen, then she is not an aristocrat, has no connections among the powers of the revolution, and is thus in no position to affect the overall course of the revolution.
Even if she should somehow gain access to the Petit Trianon, scrape acquaintance with the Queen, and hint that it would be injudicious to make remarks regarding cake… the French Revolution was a complex social phenomenon, emerging from the results of years—centuries!—of actions taken and not taken by hundreds and thousands of people. Madame X very likely cannot take any individual action that would succeed in preventing the revolution as a whole; that was a social event of such complexity that control of it is simply beyond the scope of any individual.
Madame X does, however, retain the power that any individual of that time has; she can warn a friend that it would be wise to leave Paris, for instance. If he listens, she may indeed save his life—and thus change “history” (but not recorded history).
Ergo, a time-traveler can exercise free choice, and can effect small-scale, personal changes in the past—such as advising a friend to plant potatoes, thus averting the consequences of an anticipated famine. However, because large social events are usually the effect of the cumulative actions of large numbers of people, the time-traveler most likely cannot make a change in larger, well-documented historical events.
Ergo, from a “story” point of view, we preserve the philosophical and fictional advantages of free choice, without incurring the cognitive dissonance associated with changing “history,” as perceived by the reader.
NONSIMULTANEOUSNESS
Two individuals cannot occupy the same physical space; two species cannot occupy the same ecological space, or niche. Ergo, it seems intuitively obvious that two entities cannot occupy the same temporal location. The trick here, of course, is that physical space and ecological niches exist outside the individual, while time exists inside the individual. Any moment in time—or any longer segment (a lifetime, for instance)—belongs only to an individual.
Therefore, the implication of nonsimultaneousness is clear; two individuals can exist in different spaces at the same time, but an individual cannot exist simultaneously at more than one temporal location.
This leads to one of the interesting basic questions of time travel—so, what if the individual does try to exist in more than one time? Is this possible?
In terms of our physical frame of reference, no, it isn’t—but