Doesn’t Matter

[a “5th Wave” comic by Rich Tennant]

[Jack Sparrow voice]

No effect on the universe whatsoever? I wonder how they discovered it then.

(No notes.)¹

1. Fine: One footnote, for those who don’t read the comments:

My friend Brian (

Brian’s Substack

) writes:

Haha. Reminds me of various complicated conspiracy theories or “the way the world really works” beliefs that seem to produce no actionable insight. Like “we’re all in an perfect simulation”. Those always leave me scratching my head, because I can't figure out anything anyone should do differently, based on it being true. :-)

To which I replied:

For me it makes me think of C.S. Lewis’s explanation, in the preface to The Great Divorce, for how he borrowed the wonderful effect of the immovability of heavenly objects, even blades of grass, to the Ghosts, from a science fiction story in which a man travels to the past and finds a world where raindrops would pierce you like bullets, because in the past nothing can be changed. Of course it also follows that in such a world you would be both blind and invisible, because the paths of photons could not be altered by your body, nor could you displace the air, so there would be no room for you to exist. Nor could you interact gravitationally with the Earth. So in what sense are you “there” at all?

(A friend of mine developed a more interesting version of that sci-fi conceit in which you can travel to the past and change things, as long as you don’t change anything that has been *observed* in between the time you travel to and the time you traveled from. So you can move about in a house, see things, and even move things, as long as no one has observed it in the interim. But a door that someone else has moved or looked at between your departure and your arrival is immovable. And you can’t enter a room with people in it, or speak loud enough to be heard by them—if you try, your time travel will be abruptly terminated and you will be returned to your own time. Pretty amazing!)