What does it mean to be "Locked out of time" (Destiny)

by RaichuKFM , Northeastern Ohio, Sunday, April 12, 2015, 06:33 (3320 days ago) @ Durandal

My guess is, multiple timelines, but not fullblown Many Worlds.

Possibly a deal where there's an "Alpha" timeline, and the others are just other bits, cropping out of the wake of the Aether, containing small parts and eventually fading out, or contorting into knots that shouldn't exist, or such.

Maybe they are chaotic or orderly, normally occurring or only made through the effects of the Darkness and/or Light and those that use it/them, and maybe sometimes they usurp the "Alpha", or can be brought in to replace it, or controlled, bent to one's will, and used as a place to store something outside of conventional space and time.

Maybe there is no one main timeline, but there are either multiple ones, or the main timeline is mutable. Destiny clearly doesn't have a "you already changed the past" effect; reality is mutable, whatever "reality" is.

There's something to be said for the concept of a universe with one mutable "timeline" existing with time travel inclusive in it being not really a timeline, nor even a universe with a singular timeline at all; instead, the timeline, which is really more of a set of points in spacetime and paths through thereof, is just a single iteration in a distinct progression of complete sets. These iterations are progressing through a causal stratum in an orderly fashion, with this higher causal stratum being a kind of "meta-time", where very little goes from one iteration to the next, and every iteration is causally complete, with the possible exceptions of what comes from the (immediately) preceding iteration(s). The alternative is that every iteration is not causally complete, and that if someone, say, goes back in time on 11:59:59 PM, December 31st, 1987 and changes the past, even a little, this not only spawns a new iteration, but the old one has no 1988 or onwards. (Adjust that for time zones, relativistic time distortion, the lack of absolute simultaneity, et cetera, where applicable.)

I'm really not sure if Destiny's time travel is one or the other, or if various systems within the Destiny universe function differently in that means, or what, though it's entirely possible that Destiny time travel isn't causally consistent, even on the highest level of abstraction. If the Darkness really did have acausal effects, it's a question of whether their cause did happen, but just got directed there through a strange shape in space and time, or the cause was brought in from another reality, or if the Darkness really was just transcendent enough to make something happen with no proper cause.

It also quite possibly plays by rules that don't model consistently (within individual systems, lack of consistency between various systems is fine) and/or at all coherently, but I'd rather not think that; it's less fun.

...Hoo boy, isn't this a doozy.