Mucking about in Time.

[Steve]

No: HPFGUIDX 79827

I believe you can alter time or perhaps I should say, that you can
alter past, present, and future history, but the consequences of doing
so can have catastophic consequences.

If we need a good model for mucking about in time, all we have to do
is look at the series of movies 'Back to the Future' starring Micheal
J. Fox. 

Marty McFly (MJ Fox) and the Professor move forward and backward
through time making changes, changes that severely alter the timeline.
Marty travels to the future, picks up a book of sport trivia and then
loses the book in the distant past. That book falls into the wrong
hands and creates a disasterous new timeline. So Marty and the
Professor have to go back in time and fix that change. 

But everytime they try to fix one thing, they screw up something else.
The interactions of time and events are so complex, that their
original timeline is lost forever. So all they can do is keep mucking
about in time until they spawn a timeline that they like, and try and
live with that one.

But what happens if there are several people with several time
machines, and they all go mucking about in time, trying to create a
timeline that suites them. Prof. Dumbledore points out, with regard to
the Philosopher's Stone, and it equally applies to time modification,
 that humans have a knack for choosing percisely that which is worst
for them. 

So, wizards can go back into the past and change history, but in doing
so, they invalidate all the history between that change and their
present time. That creates an irresolvable conflict in time; temporal
chaos. To make one small change in the past creates a temporal
upheaval that forces a whole new timeline; a whole new version of
history to be spawned. 

If you go into the past and kill your past self, then the time and
space continuum experience a cataclysmic upheavel, that forces a new
timeline into existance. If the timeline is alter too drastically, the
results can truly create disasterously cataclysmic results;
apocalyptic results. Perhaps even plunging the future world back into
the equivalent of the stoneage. And once again, I remind you of how
massively the problem is compounded when multiple wizards start
mucking about in time.

Yes, you can change time, but the consequences of doing so are of
apocalyptic proportions. Remember, it's not nice to fool with Mother
Nature.

Just a thought.

bboy_mn