Does the Combine hold the technology to..

[Gordon-Shepherd]

He has not, at any point, gone back in time.

how do we know?

 

[ríomhaire]

how do we know?

Because Marc Laidlaw is not that bad an author.

 

[Atomic_Piggy]

Because Marc Laidlaw is not that bad an author.

Exactly. I will forever use this as a argument.

 

[Ophiguris]

I've been wondering, do the Combine hold the power to time travel back in Earth's past to change the history of the human timeline in their own benefit? If they have holstered the ability to form teleportation devices, then they might be able to fold space upon itself to allow for time travel.

The closest relation to Time travel in HL 2 is Entanglment, where Gordon and Alyx are sent a whole week AHEAD of time. the only other relation id that of Gordon's stasis, but even then, that's not combine technology.

 

[Ophiguris]

It's both been said way too often and it's also too "out there." It's also a very cliched way of dealing with a problem, going back in time to redo something. In addition to all that, it invalidates the story thus far, and any dramatic situations.

Consider: you inadvertently cause a rift between worlds. You stop the first "invasion," only to (again unwittingly) cause an even bigger problem. You end up fighting in a big war with a lot of losses on the human side, including those of one or more important people in your life. At the end of it all, the G-man comes back and says, "Now you get a chance to do it all over again."

You just took everything you ever did, all the choices you ever had, all the sacrifices you ever made, picked them all up and threw them out the window. Why would you be forced to do all that if you could simply go back to Day One and not push the sample into the anti-mass spectrometer?

My god, the Butterfly Effect strikes again!!!
8i8

 

[Flyingdebris]

I don't think the gman travels through time in the classic sense. I believe he's more like a 4th dimensional entity that can manifest whenever and wherever he feels like.

The best way i can describe it is as follows

Imagine you have a piece of paper with an ant moving around on it. now lets say that as the ant is moving about, you drop ink in its path, lead it around, draw cartoons around it, whatever. But wherever it is, you see it at all times

I think thats basically how the gman sees you, like an ant he put you on that piece of paper, and he manipulates stuff around you to happen a certain way to meet his ends. However since in my opinion is that he is 4th dimensional. He sees everything you will do and have done, not just the present.

So no, he doesn't time travel in the sense of "we need to get back to 1985!" more like "i'm going to take a short walk that way into 4 hours ago"

My idea is supported by the fact that it seems the vortigaunts hive mind works in the same manner. Since apparently not only do they see you in the present, but they see you at the same time in black mesa killing them.

And i feel that the ant/paper equivalent of the beginning of episode 1 would be if someone saw you screwing around with the ant on the paper and took it away from you.