Talk:List of Known World Lines/@comment-88.246.207.183-20150714112303/@comment-26833849-20150804002757

I´d consider that one a special case. Let me ask you something: if you change the past, everything from that point on changes. The events before the change however shouldn´t, right? Then why did the past change when Okabe sent the first d-mail? Simple, it was Sern´s doing using the knowledge of the d-mail. If we go by that, we´d have to accept that the two timelines were supposed to end up the same, but because SERN used the time machine in the future to change the past even further, we ended up in a world with a slightly different history. It is however important to note that according to this logic, the future changed BEFORE the past, that is a causal necessity in this worldline, as time travel reverses causality as we know it. Thus, my statement still holds: In 2010, during the convergence point, something similar to a split happened, which allowed the characters to switch from one existing timeline to another one with the very same past. However, because the future changed in a way that it allowed for time travel, the past was altered and history changed, even if only slightly. If we take a later d-mail, such as the one that turned Lukako into a girl, we can see that nothing before Lukako´s birth changed in the world. This can be backed up to an extent since the d-mail used to turn him into a girl serves the purpose the original d-mail did in the other timeline, the one that in this world never arrived to Okabe´s phone. The content of the message doesn´t matter, as SERN was merely concerned about finding out that time travel should in fact exist. The only problem would be that this d-mail was sent further into the past than Okabe´s, but not only do we know that SERN completes their time machine in the same year as always, hinting that it made no difference, we could also just take two d-mails that were sent to roughly the same period of time, which would be enough to show that the past of two worldlines before a convergence point has to be consistent with each other in order to make sense. Again, any change made to the past is merely a result of changes made to the future.