That’s so many ungrounded thoughts and opinions though! The topic of this comment thread has changed like 7 times, I’m just having fun at this point. =D

same for me :D

Sometimes that’s just trying to justify why fictional Earth with time machines still has dictators and not a huge past interventionist problem,

In fiction, the best way to resolve this I feel is to assume that nothing can be changed from before the first time machines were invented, because the first time machine sets something like an "anchor" that all other time machines can jump to.

I look at time in general a lot like water in a river. It flows from the river to the sea (no pun intended) only in one direction, but once it reaches the sea, it can move relatively freely in all directions. I think that time will lose its sense of unidirectionality at some point, but that's solely my own hypothesis. I have zero evidence to back that up. It's more or less based on the idea that time represents progress, and at some point our world will be "fully developed", just like a child grown into an adult or an acorn grows into a tree. At that point, there is no more progress, and therefore, time kinda stops or becomes meaningless. Just that it happens at a cosmological scale, affecting all of humanity.