Slightly more seriously (but only slightly), what if what we see as Heisenberg uncertainty and probabilistic wave/particle weirdness is actually the result of multiple overlaid timelines caused explicitly by time travel, and if time travel wasn't possible, the universe wouldn't have those properties?
Objectively wrong for your part of the world maybe.
I guess my part of the world probably doesn't have a word for the distinction because here it can mean either.
Either that or it's a case of common parlance versus learned parlance, like, for the sake of any example, when people say "theory" but mean "hypothesis" and in learned parlance "theory" has a different meaning.
Right verb or wrong verb, it doesn't really invalidate the point I was making. If all you do is stand by the barbecue, put things in it and flip the food occasionally while everything else magically happens around you, you're only doing the fun bit.
What is the right word for indirect heat cooking anyway? "Smoking" in that context doesn't necessarily imply making it hot for close-to-immediate consumption, and "cooking" seems far too general.
Likewise, "barbecuing" could mean grilling, so that's too general as well.
When real-world horrors are too existential and complex to implement, more tangible, definite horrors must be created to make a game world a better approximation of reality.
At least one of the levels is practicality: The acts of buying and/or preparing every other food, condiment and implement that will be used for the barbecue, then cleaning everything up afterwards without implicitly relying on anyone else.
The grilling might be the fun bit, but there's a lot else either side.
You don't just hand someone a grilled meat patty, however beautifully it's cooked and seasoned. The required bun has to come from somewhere. So did that plate. Maybe there's butter on the bun. Maybe there's salad. Maybe the meat needed marinating, etc.
No, it's more like each extremist Muslim doesn't want any other man looking at any of his women, because he knows what he'd be unable to stop himself from doing if he saw someone else's woman and assumes every other man is like that.
And that line of thinking breeds generations of men who rather than might think that way, actually do think that way, making the rule even more necessary.
It's also a lot easier for a man to punish or beat a woman than it is another man, and it's that line of thinking which turns women into property rather than people. And property can be treated however you like.
Here's the weird thing: In terms of the beginning of the universe, it could well be the case that it's universes all the way back.
That said, "back" indicates a straight line, and since time doesn't extend past the beginning, at least, not directly, that line most definitely isn't straight, unlike an infinite stack of turtles.
My prediction: There will be riots and looting, which will be squashed by police and/or military. The riots will increase until martial law is declared.
The US will become an effective dictatorship, but no-one there will call it that and that word will be conspicuously absent from other English media elsewhere in the world, despite that being precisely the right word.
Eventually, the leadership's grip will weaken as the old guard dies off and people with marginally less extreme views take up positions of power. In time, things will loosen up and regular, genuine elections might start happening. First at a local level and then eventually spreading country-wide.
This will, of course, take the rest of the 21st century to play out.
Just in time for the next pandemic, and the next round of riots because the biosphere's wrecked.
Yay, humanity!
(I'd like to be wrong about this, but it's been seen enough times before.)
Apparently west coast sports teams have an advantage over more easterly teams because of circadian rhythms. If you have to travel east a time zone or two to play, you're playing late in their day, but it's still early in yours so you're more awake and up for action.
If you have to travel west a time zone or two, you get the opposite effect. It's now very late for you, even if the sun's still up in this hellish western place. You're groggy and tired and you're not as fleet of foot on the sportsball field.
So basically, on the off-chance that OP's a pro sportsballer, they might want to bear that in mind.
There is no problem if both of these people are sane and are getting sane, non conflicting direction from those interested parties who are not involved in the software design.
How far ahead do you want to go? The Borg are a more likely future phase of humanity than Star Trek's Federation, though without FTL travel, we're gonna be stuck crawling from rock to rock in our own neighbourhood for a very long time.
There's also a bit in old kid's TV show The Girl From Tomorrow where, at one point, something mucks up the timeline so badly that the future she comes from ceases to exist and all of the Earth's land ends up an uninhabitable desert, devoid of life. That seems pretty likely too.
These two things are not mutually exclusive either.
My British brain thinks that the short-e pronunciation would be spelt with a double-n. Since some letter doubling has been removed in US English spelling ("travelling" vs. "traveling" springs to mind), the US spelling could easily mean either pronunciation.
This does all make me very uncomfortable about the word "panel" though...
Huh. I always thought the colour had the emphasis on the second syllable and had no idea about the software, but it turns out I've been wrong all along.
I'm going to blame "Azores" (which can be either, apparently) and "assure" (which is always emphasis second) for this as being the model(s) for my mistake.
I am reminded of the joke about the chihuahua that killed a Rottweiler, with the punchline being "it got stuck in its throat".