Comment by renewiltord
5 years ago
Indeed, and balanced by the fact that the younger ones are more numerous by far and able to simply overrule the older ones by force. Of course, all of us know this and we know that all of us know this, which makes for an entertaining thought experiment.
After all, present day me would be trying to stop the other ones from getting to their goals, but they would figure that out pretty fast. And by generation 32 I am four billion strong and a hive army larger than any the world has seen before. I can delete the few oldest members while reproducing at this rate and retaining the freshest Me as a never-aging legion of united hegemony.
But I know that divergence can occur, so I may intentionally commit suicide as I perceive I am drifting from my original goals: i.e. if I'm 90% future hegemon, 10% doubtful, I can kill myself before I drift farther away from future hegemon, knowing that continuing life means lack of hegemony. Since the most youthful of me are the more numerous and closest to future hegemon thinking, they will proceed with the plan.
That, entertainingly, opens up the fun thought of what goals and motivations are and if it is anywhere near an exercise of free will to lock your future abilities into the desires you have of today.
> … the younger ones are more numerous by far and able to simply overrule the older ones by force.
By my calculations, after 64 iterations those with under 24 months' time travel experience make up less than 2.2% of the total, and likewise for those with 40+ months experience. Roughly 55% have traveled back between 29 and 34 times (inclusive). The distribution is symmetric and follows Pascal's Triangle:
where for example the "1 2 1" line represents one member who has not yet traveled, two who have traveled once (but not at the same time), and another who has traveled twice. To extend the pattern take the last row, add a 0 at the beginning to shift everyone's age by one month, and then add the result to the previous row to represent traveling back in time and joining the prior group.
> I can delete the few oldest members…
Not without creating a paradox. If the oldest members don't travel back then the younger ones don't exist. You could leave the older ones out of the later groups, though.
> > I can delete the few oldest members…
> Not without creating a paradox.
That depends on which theory of everything you subscribe to. If traveling back in time creates a new, divergent time line than the one you were originally on, later killing the "original" you does not create a paradox.
The divergent timeline model is indeed even necessary in the first place to achieve exponential growth. If there is only one timeline, only linear growth is possible (because the subjective history doesn’t split if the timeline doesn’t split, so there’s ever only a single subjective history overall).
Exponential growth furthermore requires that the time jumps are done “atomically” in increasingly larger groups (of people). If each member jumps separately/individually, they would each create their own separate timeline and thus again only add 1 to the member population on that timeline.
You're getting hung up on tunable details. There's a way to find your way through them.