Timelines

I had a funny dream where I was looking at a tree that was a family tree.  But it was a physical tree in the real world.  Then I looked at it again and it was a branching diagram of _homo sapiens_.

I’ve often regretted that Homo sapiens can never really know Neanderthal man, or homo erectus, because we must compete for resources, and in the modern world we would interbreed, knitting us together.  Thus we are deprived of knowing those who are like us, and yet different from us:  human, family, but different in kind.  That would just be so cool.

So I had this dream that time travel was not possible, but communicating among contemporaneous points in alternate branches was.  Thus we could in VR walk among our cousins, and yet we would be spared the possibility of war between homo sapiens and homo nextus, or homo nextus and homo nextus nextus.

It was a very cool dream.