Quote Originally Posted by Rosenstrauch View Post
I think I prefer that one, 'cause I'm gonna be frank: I don't think the way the Alexander raid incorporates time travel (namely, its use of causal loops) was particularly well written or consistent to begin with.
Working from a single-timeline perspective, if you assume that multiple realities and branching timelines are impossible, then the only way time travel can work is if time travel doesn't change anything - the most it can do is ensure events proceed as they have already proceeded. When time travel is used in this way, it is clean and not messy at all. There are no paradoxes (bootstrap paradox is a misnomer). There is no "before the time travel happened, things actually happened this way", because time travel has ALWAYS been a part of the timeline. It's like a roller coaster with a loop in it - the roller coaster didn't used to be flat and they added the loop later. The loop was always part of the design.

G'raha's time travel basically threw what we knew about time travel out the window. Or, at the very least, it introduced more things that it can do. I think that we can still assume that self-perpetuating time loops like Alexander's still exist, and do not spin off additional timelines since they do not introduce paradoxes. But now we know time travel CAN effect change, and when it does then a new timeline is generated, branching off the original but leaving the original intact.

Honestly, I think this was a bad genie to let out of the bottle. It takes a lot of the tension out of things if we know that, no matter how terrible things get short of total planetary destruction (and maybe even then), we can just wait until folks figure out time travel and then go back and fix things. Never mind that the way they managed it this time was nothing short of a miracle of merged technologies and circumstances - the fact that it's possible at all means that, in the fullness of time, someone can figure out how to do it again.

Introducing multiple worlds also runs into the problem of trivializing our own accomplishiments. Particularly true in the scenario of an infinite multiverse (what does it matter if we won here, if we failed in ten billion other timelines?), but even in this case where there's only two timelines: All of our work to stop the Ascians? Great for us - but in the "bad future" their plan is apparently still right on track, given that life on the Source is apparently NOT going to be extinguished (and it's debatable whether that would have stopped the Ascians' plan even if it was), and civilization is slowly beginning to recover (just as it has for all of the Ascians' previous Calamities).

I see the point that Alexander as a deux ex machina isn't much better - if he's playing us all like puppets, then what's the point of anything we do? Where is our free will if everything we do was determined by Alexander? That's a philosophical debate centuries old (just replace "Alexander" with "the Christians' omniscient and omnipotent God"). But if we treat a single timeline as a future we forge for ourselves as we move toward it, we have to bear in mind that there are other people forging it right along with us. These people interfere with each other and us all the time, and we do not always have full control of our destiny as a result. Alexander is just one other such person, and while he had capabilities that gave him a great deal of ability to interfere, ultimately his interference came to an end. So, Mide was not wrong - the future is something we choose. But you have to remember that Alexander is part of the "we" doing the choosing.