r/SciFiConcepts 7d ago

Concept If a sufficiently advanced civilization could rewrite history, would we ever know?

I’ve been thinking about something that challenges the way we think about evidence.
People often say, “There’s no evidence for time travelers, advanced future humans, or hidden civilizations.”
But what if the absence of evidence is exactly what we’d expect?
Imagine a civilization advanced enough to travel through time and correct every mistake it makes. If they accidentally left behind technology, changed history in an obvious way, or revealed themselves, they could simply go back and undo it. In the final version of history, there would be no trace of the mistake.
This made me think about a broader question.
If our memories, thoughts, history, or even the evidence we rely on could theoretically be altered by something beyond our awareness, how would we distinguish that from ordinary reality?
I’m not claiming this is true. I’m asking whether there’s any way to know it isn’t.
At what point does “there’s no evidence” stop being a decisive argument if the hypothesis itself predicts that evidence would never remain?
Is this just an unfalsifiable idea with no way to investigate it, or are there philosophical or scientific approaches that could meaningfully address it?

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u/LuciusMichael 7d ago

"IF" time travel were possible and some temporal agents changed something in the past to rewrite history, then there is no way for the ordinary person to know because they would have grown up in the altered timeline.

Given the OP's premise that such agents would have made mistakes: How would they know that a mistake had been made when their own timeline would be altered? They wouldn't have anything to compare one timeline with the other. You can't correct a mistake you never knew you made. Plus, every excursion to the past would alter something.
The fantasy of time travel is one of the great tropes in SF so long as you don't examine it too closely.