Marle Paradox: Let's change our point of view

[FouCapitan]

I still hold regard that it's a matter of probabilities.

Exactly.  Less immunity, and more probability.  I explained my view on this in a previous thread.

Basically until a time change reaches the tipping point for them, nothing changes immediately for the time traveller.  With Marle, Crono being ready to take her home while her ancestor was still lost was the tipping point.  For Crono, they didn't want to risk the change.  Who's to say alternate timelines haven't fallen to disaster due to GP?  Fact is we just played the game covering a timeline that didn't.

[stenir]

Well, it's not so much a tipping point, since the time chance won't actually occur until the action of killing Leene takes place. While I understand how TTI can cause certain problematic anamolies, perhaps once I fully flesh out the theory (and get a bit better at description) of Probabilities, it might end up challenging TTI.

Not trying to, if it happens, it happens.

Of course, everything we discuss here is a game mechanic. If time travel, a game mechanic, did not exist, we wouldn't be discussing it. I bet you alternate timelines have fallen to disaster due to GP. Maybe we could make it go way out there and say Lavos' presence has the side effect of altering time mechanics of a planet.

[alfadorredux]

Much simpler explanation for what happened to Marle:  The Guardians searching for Leene had only medieval-level technology, which means no instantaneous communications except for possibly heliograph or smoke signals, both of which require line-of-sight.  This means that the search for Leene could not be called off on a moment's notice.

Now, let's say that until *Lucca* showed up in the year 600AD, whoever was originally supposed to find Leene didn't know that the search had been called off and would still have found her if nothing else had happened.  Then, at some point between emerging in Truce Canyon and arriving at Guardia Castle, Lucca did something which drew that searcher's attention to the end of the search (under the right circumstances, firing her gun straight up in the air might do it).  As a result, the searcher gave up, Leene wasn't found, and Marle disappeared.  If I'm not mistaken, generally accepted theories would then take care of the rest, with no need for intervention from the Entity.

[IAmSerge]

Disregarding anything anyone might have said prior to this, my personal opinion is that the reason this happened goes along on the same lines that say "the further back in time you change something, the less effect it has on the future", kindof like a reverse butterfly effect.

However, my theory suggests that time always trys to correct itself back to its original course.  Weather this is done by laws of time or it is actually the entity at work doing this is subjective.

In a more simple way, lets say that a straight metal wire represents the timeline.  X represents the length back in time that a time-traveler changes something.  F, force, is the "magnitude" of the effect that the time traveler makes.

So, thusly, if said force F is applied over X distance, then depending on how big F is and how long X is,  F/X should represent the amount of change placed over each individual unit X, averaged out.  Also, taking into effect Time Error (T), F/(X-T), X being the distance traveled back in time, would thusly represent the amount of change over the Exact time, as it calculates between when the event of change actually occurred and the exact moment the time travelers traveled from.

Example: Travel back in time 80 years and then in 4 years do something that effects the future F much.
F/(80-4) would effectively represent the change based upon the time from which he came, and the time he actually changed something.  Thusly, 76 years, rather than 80.

Because Chrono and crew went back in time 65 million (billion?) years, and took the dreamstone from Ayla (minor change),
the amount of force placed over each single year would be so miniscule that it is incalculable.


HOWEVER: The fact of the matter is that time, theoretically, is being represented by a metal wire.  The above example would barely bend the wire, if anything, but nonetheless, revert back to its original course. 

Time will only be allowed to bend between 2 points in time: when the timeline was changed and the exact time the time travelers left from.

That is the first part of my theory.  ON THE CONTRAST if a BIG change occured over a small amount of Exact time, time would not only bend but it is quite likely it would break, and branch out to elsewhere.

A big change being, say, the death of Queen Leene, and the amount of exact time being 400-T, T being time error, but almost 0.  A change like this would likely break the current timeline, and sending what was the future to be DBT'd.

The magnitude of the event was not amazingly catastrophic, being that it merely destroyed Marle and not the Chrono nor Lucca, thusly in the temporary future between the time that Marle disappears and the QUeen is saved, Chrono and Lucca are TB'd to 600AD.

Just for fun, I'm going to take into play the following quote and play with it.

Much simpler explanation for what happened to Marle:  The Guardians searching for Leene had only medieval-level technology, which means no instantaneous communications except for possibly heliograph or smoke signals, both of which require line-of-sight.  This means that the search for Leene could not be called off on a moment's notice.

This would mean there is ANOTHER time factor to take into play.

Say, a time capsule was made in 10000BC to be dug up in 10000AD.

10000AD comes around, after the capsule is opened some idiot from nearby hops in a time machine to 10000BC and sneaks a bomb onto the time capsule with the trigger being when the capsule is opened.  4tehlulz, the bomb is a nuclear one, the size of which can wipe out a small country.

Despite that the person put the bomb on in 10000BC (causal time), the effect is not felt until 10000AD (time of effect).

the equasion for this would be changed from F/(X-T-Ce), Ce being the time between cause and effect.  This case, whatever future the people used to have would be DBT'd, as the Force would be so great and the Exact time (now X-T-Ce) would be so small that it would "break" time.  Thusly, the idiot that put the bomb would encounter the Marle Effect, and would cease to exist.


The theory basically stated and summed up:
Time is like a metal wire:
1: Time, when changed, will try as hard as possible to bend back to where it originally was, with bending room allowed between when the effect of change is felt and when the time travelers left from.
2: When the value (F/(X-T-Ce)) is so great, time will eventually "break" at the point in time that the Effect is first felt.
3: Under the circumstances, time bending back to where it was shouldnt cause any sort of effect, time bastard or otherwise.
4: However, when time breaks, a time bastard effect can possibly occur, and there is a chance that some of the travelers, if any, can experience the "Marle Effect".

Thusly, the Marle effect is the rarest effect that time travel can cause.  It will only happen if time is broken, and only if this break in time will affect the time traveler.

Other examples of time breaking? The Black Omen, the Sun Stone.

The Sun Stone situation is a case that leads me to believe that time breaking can be relative to a specific area or universal, as well as that it is also related to the natural amounts of change that occur in that area on a normal basis.

The sun stone is definitley a relative break in time because prior to the party's interference, the sun stone did not exist in the Sun shrine (or whatever that place was that you leave the stone for 65 billion years), however the sun stone did not seem to affect much else in the world.

If, say, the party put the sun stone where the future leene square was to be, the natural amount of change that occurs there is massive, because of all the human activity and everything, whereas in the sun shrine or whatever, nothing occurs for 65 billion years or so.  So if the party left it in the future square, it is likely that time would merely bend for that section, and the sun stone be taken, stolen, destroyed or otherwise in a relatively short time.

This makes me change (F/(X-T-Ce)) to  (F/(X-T-Ce))-C, with C being the normal amount of change over a unit of time.

After more thought, I think I shall expand on my definition of "Bend" vs "Break".

As a more appropriate definition, a "Bend" is a change in time which time was able to naturally correct itself between the moment of effect and the time in which the time travelers, who changed time, left from.

A "Break" would then be a change in time which was so massive that time was unable to naturally correct itself before the moment in which the time travelers, who changed time, left from.

And, as a 3rd definition, a "Relative Break" would be a "Break" that only affected a specific area, set of areas, objects, or persons.

Then, to resummarize my THeory with the newly added information,

1: Time, when changed, will always seek to correct itself between the point in time which affected time and the moment from which the time travelers that caused the change left from.
2: If F is the force of the change, X is the time that the travelers went backwards in time, T is the Time Error between when they caused the change, Ce is the Cause Effect time between the cause and when the effect was felt, and C is the amount of natural change per unit of time, then the Formula ((F/(X-T-Ce))-C) is the amount of stress put on each unit of time in the timeline between the time the effect is felt/occurs and the time the time travelers left.
3: When the value ((F/(X-T-Ce))-C) is so great, time will eventually "break" at the point in time that the Effect is first felt.
4: When time bends, then from the point in time the travelers leave, the future is the same.
5: When time breaks, that is when the Time Bastard effect and the Marle effect occur.

Now, for my take on the marle effect:

The marle effect, as most people see, is where a person disappears after a time break.  This is true, however what most people probably do not see is the full scope of the marle effect. 

It seems best explained in an example:

Time Traveler A goes back in time and causes a time break, relative or otherwise, which causes time traveler A, in the new present, not to go back in time.  Time Bastard, in the future will look for any entity that it knows to be the time traveler A so it can pull it back in time.  We know this already.
Lets say that time traveler A goes and kills his great grandfather in the past, and then disappear. 
Time bastard will look for time traveler A.
However, when Time Bastard does not find said entity, Time Bastard will not pull anything, whilst Time Traveler A will still end up in the past, pulled, supposedly, "from no where".  Time Traveler A will then go on and exist until the point in which Time Traveler A kills his Great Grandfather, and thusly disappears again.

Time Traveler A seems to exist merely as a ghost.  Yes, lets call a person who experiences the Marle Effect a "Ghost".  It's quite fitting. Coming from no where and returning no where.  However, since the conservation of matter and energy take place in this world, matter cannot be destroyed or created.  So how is this explained?

Think about Time Bastard for a moment: The time traveler is gated at the exact point in which he/she originally traveled, and appears at the time he/she traveled to, with memory being that of the original traveler and not that of the TB'd traveler.

So my theory on the Marle effect takes this a step further.  There are 2 possible/feasible ways that the Marle Effect can occur in my theory:

1: Time Bastard, when it cannot find the entity, will go to the exact moment in which the effect that caused a Time Break causing the nonexistance of the time traveler, and TB the time traveler from then back to the moment he/she arrived in the past.  Rather than by use of a gate, however, the time traveler is painfully ripped apart (possibly by conversion into Tachyons?) and recreated at the point in which he/she originally arrived in the past.

So, to use Marle as an example, rather than "dissentigrating into nothing" she is "Ripped" back in time to the point in which she arrived, thus turning Marle into a "loop" so to speak.  Ripped back in time to the point she arrived at just to return to being ripped back.

This is a technicality of the conservation of matter and energy.  In all truths, she is not being created when she arrives, nor is she being destroyed.  she is coming from somewhere and going somewhere each time she is ripped.

This is the first, and in my opinion, more likely story behind the Marle Effect.

The second way the Marle Effect could be occuring is as such:

2: Time Bastard, rather than not doing anything, will revert to stealing the atoms that the original time traveler was comprised of at the exact moment the time traveler left from.  The "ghost" is then created with these atoms being repieced into the original traveler.  The traveler will go along with what happened and then will be "ripped apart" at the moment that the effect of what he/she caused is reached.  Then, Time Bastard will return the atoms to the exact moment and place they originally came from, disregarding the time error.

So once again, conservation of matter and energy is not breached.

There are 2 ways for a "Ghost" of a person to return from the circle of the "Marle Effect".  Either a time traveler that came back with the ghost in the original travel back in time, or a time traveler from the future created by the ghost breaking time, must either:

A: Try and undo the effects that the ghost caused (aka: Chrono and Lucca saving the Queen after Marle disappeard).
or
B: Go back in time to stop the cause from occuring.

Let us review what I have gone over:

1: Time will try to correct itself back to its original course
2: ((F/(X-T-Ce))-C) is the equasion to see how much impact an event will have, weather it bends or breaks time.
3: Breaking time can be relative to a certain area or universal.
4: Only when time is broken in one way or another can Time Bastard or the Marle Effect occur.
5: Marle Effect will only occur when time is broken in such a way that the entity who broke time ceases to exist in the future in which said entity originally came from.
6: Marle Effect can possibly be a loop of matter being taken from the point in time which the effect occurs back to when the entity originally traveled back in time to; or it could be the stealing of matter from the point in time which the entity originally traveled back from to create the temporary ghost of the entity, and returned to the exact point and place in time from which it was stolen when the ghost reaches the point of effect.
7: A ghost in the Marle Effect cannot save itself, and can only be saved by a fellow time traveler.

So... I had fun writing this.  I started some point in time before 12:00 am and right now it is 1:36.  so it has taken me between an hour and a half to 2 hours to write this. hope i got somewhere with it.

Anyone understand what im saying? =D

EDIT: This post prior to this edit was 2352 words long, 10556 characters long and 12878 characters long if you include spaces.  Not bad eh? *sigh*

[xcalibur]

as far as the marle paradox, it was likely an oversight by developers.

but to weave it into the story, id argue that the entity wanted to preserve the guardia line for whatever reason, and caused marle to disappear to lead chrono to save queen leene, who believed that it was a grandfather paradox.

to keep it consistent with the rest of CT, what i wouldve done is had the present greatly altered (perhaps guardia would be in ruins) if chrono tried to return without saving the queen.. and then theyd realize that they have to save the guardia line to get the present back to normal.

[ZeaLitY]

I'm considering the dimensional TTI thing, but I don't buy this. We know that Yuji Horii made that scenario, and we also know that Yuji Horii likes causal loops and the grandfather paradox. This means that it's a total developer oversight, because Kato's the one in charge, and Kato wrote the other parts of the series that supported TTI and TB. The theory also boils down to some vague version of "Marle is a special case because, uh, um...the grandfather paradox made her get reverse Time Bastarded." That's far more complex and troubling than the Entity solution.

But the Marle Paradox is still in the Plot Inconsistencies page, because we still recognize that the Entity solution doesn't work -- and that's because it's a developer oversight thanks to Yuji Horii's ideas about time fiction.

[Cous]

My personal point of view about Marle's paradox is this :

The TTI is not absolute !

When an entity goes back through time in the past, he/she/it creates a new timeline in which there is inevitably a Time Bastard of himself/herself/itself in the future. This Time Bastard disappears when his/her/its age reaches the age the original version had when this one appeared in the past, in order to respect the convervation of energy in the universe.
The fact is that a same entity can't exist in two different points of the timeline at the same age !
BUT, at the same time, each age of this entity has to be reprensent at least once during the entire timeline ! This can be interpreted as another consequence of the conservation of energy.

This assumes the existence of a link between the original and the Time Bastard, as the two are here considered as a same entity.

Once could object to this that, if Marle creates a timeline in which her time bastard will never be born, it will be all the matter that composed her which will disappear in the future. Howerver, we can say that it's easier for the universe to "delete" the original in the past rather than to delete in the future all the scattered atoms of "Marle". This is for me a similarity with the principle of attraction forces. When I fall, even if the force I exerce on the Earth is identical to the one the Earth exerces on me, I'm easier to move, so it's me who moves toward the Earth and not the Earth that moves toward me.

I think things can work like this...

[Acacia Sgt]

I believe this conclusion was reached and discussed before. Don't remember the outcome though.

The TTI is not absolute !

Actually, Marle would still be TTI-protected. Remember that TTI only determines that the time traveler would arrive to the destination, meaning that once they are in it, anything goes. It would be like a case of a TB time traveling. Notice that in order to disappear, Marle would have to appear in the time line for it to happen, which TTI can provide.

[Thought]

Query: Why does Marle reappear later?

Let us say that Marle disappeared on May 27th 600AD, at 11:53:35 am, due to changes to the timeline. When those changes were corrected for, why didn't she reappear at May 27th 600AD, at 11:53:35 am? Why did she instead reappear on May 30th 600AD, at 02:24:12 pm?

Let us imagine a different scenario: Crono & Co sets the Moon Stone in the Sun Keep in 65,000,000 BC. They discover that it is missing, and track it down to 1000 AD. They get it back from the Mayor of Porre. However, they then go back in time and kill the person who took it before they had actually done the deed. In the newly created timeline, the sunstone, then, should have never disappeared from the Sun Keep in the first place. It would be nonsensical for, in the new timeline, the moonstone to disappear from the Sun keep and reappear several days later.

So why did that nonsensicalness essentially happen with Marle?

[Acacia Sgt]

Let us say that Marle disappeared on May 27th 600AD, at 11:53:35 am, due to changes to the time line. When those changes were corrected for, why didn't she reappear at May 27th 600AD, at 11:53:35 am? Why did she instead reappear on May 30th 600AD, at 02:24:12 pm?

Wouldn't that be impossible? She can't leave and appear at the exact same time. And anyway, it would mean a time travel to the past to fix the problem. But then, with the problem corrected, she wouldn't disappear anyway, so she can't 'reappear' in a later time.

Since, the 600 AD scenario involved solving the problem way after her disappearance, meaning how could she reappear the moment she was gone?

[Thought]

Exactly! If Crono and Lucca fixed the problem tha caused Marle to disappear, she shouldn't really have disappeared at all.

Something happened in 600 AD creating a new timeline in which Marle did not exist in 1000AD (and subsequently, in 600 AD after she traveled there). If this something was Leene being killed before having children (grandfather paradox), then Crono traveling to 600 AD and preventing her from being so killed should have utterly undone that by creating a new timeline in which Marle DID exist in 1000 AD (and subsequently never disappeared in 600 AD, since she was existing in the first place).

That Marle reappears (rather than having never disappeared) implies that Crono didn't undo the original problem.

[utunnels]

Well, the main problem isn't wether a new timeline is created or not, but Marle disappears before their eyes.
If time travel event created a new timeline, isn't it a different timeline other than the one Crono is currently in?
Or, if every decision creates a new timeline (like Miguel said), shouldn't such thing always happens to time travelers?


Time travel = dimension travel, somehow?

[Thought]

Ah, if restoring Marle creates a timeline other than the one Crono is currently in, then shouldn't Marle have never "disappeared" from Crono's perspective, since that would have happened in a timeline other than the one Crono was in as well? That she disappeared from Crono's perspective indicates that the changes to the timeline affect the timeline on is in. The fact that Marle disappears at all indicates that time travel does not equal dimensional travel; if it did, than Marle should have caused a different Marle to disappear, not herself.

[desrever2]

Well, Belthasar knew that the Chrono Trigger would be used on Death Peak, before the team decides to interupt Magus. So, he knew Lucca at least made the Gate Key. Time would have continued on from 600, even if Marle and the Queen had vanished from history. The question is, would have Leene's Bell still be made, or would the making of Leene's Bell dramatically effect Lucca's existence? If the Gate Key gave Lucca some kind of immunity, then Leene's Bell must have been made, which means Queen Leene must be the only Queen in that era. By Lucca's presence with the Gate Key, Marle then could have been forced to disappear. Don't mind me, I'm just blabbering nonsense.

[utunnels]

I think Lucca arrived before the Queen vanished. She just took some time to get to the castle.