Precommit to create a paradox if whatever arranges time in consistent loops doesn’t give you what you want.
If you don’t get what you want, receive a red or green slip of paper from your future self. Use time turner, hand to your past self whatever color of paper you didn’t get. If you find that the paper has “Do not mess with time” on it, for the slip you hand to your past self, instead write “Fuck you, time.”
Discover secrets of Atlantis, hack time travel, etc.
The problem with this is that time can adjust to avoid the paradox at any point in the timeline, which means that if you are a person who would try to exploit this, the sperm that would have created you was outraced by another one. So perhaps existing depends on not using this. (Parfit’s Hitchhiker)
Or, if you try to use this and commit to be really serious about it, you get struck by a meteorite before completing the paradox. Or slip on a banana peel and bash your head. Or a get mauled by a troll. Some external cause comes in and prevents you from fulfilling your paradox.
Do you know, for some reason that actually strikes me as more terrifying than the fabric of time-space collapsing. Which is incredibly human-centric, since it prioritizes the existence of humanity over the extinction of every species in the universe, and yet is true nevertheless.
(A deeper insight: “anthropic selection” is what you call a source of optimization that you don’t know how to characterize. Existent writing about anthropics is only somewhat cognizant of this.)
Brute force method:
Precommit to create a paradox if whatever arranges time in consistent loops doesn’t give you what you want.
If you don’t get what you want, receive a red or green slip of paper from your future self. Use time turner, hand to your past self whatever color of paper you didn’t get. If you find that the paper has “Do not mess with time” on it, for the slip you hand to your past self, instead write “Fuck you, time.”
Discover secrets of Atlantis, hack time travel, etc.
The problem with this is that time can adjust to avoid the paradox at any point in the timeline, which means that if you are a person who would try to exploit this, the sperm that would have created you was outraced by another one. So perhaps existing depends on not using this. (Parfit’s Hitchhiker)
Or, if you try to use this and commit to be really serious about it, you get struck by a meteorite before completing the paradox. Or slip on a banana peel and bash your head. Or a get mauled by a troll. Some external cause comes in and prevents you from fulfilling your paradox.
Or you never come up with the idea in the first place.
Or abiogenesis never happened in the first place. That seems a lot simpler than nudging tons of different humans later.
Do you know, for some reason that actually strikes me as more terrifying than the fabric of time-space collapsing. Which is incredibly human-centric, since it prioritizes the existence of humanity over the extinction of every species in the universe, and yet is true nevertheless.
I will have to think on this.
(A deeper insight: “anthropic selection” is what you call a source of optimization that you don’t know how to characterize. Existent writing about anthropics is only somewhat cognizant of this.)
DO NOT MESS WITH TIME