Imaginary Worlds
A world exactly, to the minutest detail, a duplicate of our own, but
as we shall be five hundred, or from that to twenty thousand, years
hence. Let there be also another world, a duplicate of what we were
five hundred to twenty thousand years ago. There should be many
worlds of each kind at different dates behind us and ahead of us.
I send a visitor from a world ahead of us to a world behind us, after
which he comes to us, and so we learn what happened in the Homeric
age. My visitor will not tell me what has happened in his own world
since the time corresponding to the present moment in our world,
because the knowledge of the future would be not only fatal to
ourselves but would upset the similarity between the two worlds, so
they would be no longer able to refer to us for information on any
point of history from the moment of the introduction of the
disturbing element.
When they are in doubt about a point in their past history that we
have not yet reached they make preparation and forecast its
occurrence in our world as we foretell eclipses and transits of
Venus, and all their most accomplished historians investigate it; but
if the conditions for observation have been unfavourable, or if they
postpone consideration of the point till the time of its happening
here has gone by, then they must wait for many years till the same
combination occurs in some other world.
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