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When Vrataski shoots Cage, does everything end and everyone is reset (without knowing/noticing it) instantly? Or does she (and everyone else) continue in this timeline where Cage is killed on the exercise area/beach/etc ...

Would everyone in every instance experience the rest of their lives (i.e. experience the rest of the alien invasion)? It's like Schroedinger's cat, isn't it?

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    I don't really understand why this post deserves to be down-voted? Dec 5, 2016 at 16:07

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Everything should be reset. The power resides on one of the aliens, and when it senses it is loosing one of the captains, it turns back time. It's not Cage's power, it's the alien. This alien would be alive in both timelines, and he'd know he pulled back time, it wouldn't make sense.

So, I'm guessing it's all in a single timeline.

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  • there are overwhelming amount of possibilities though. I know it is science fiction though. But does the day resets for all of the universe. I mean with power like that why would omega and its species need to invade primitive planet such as earth , and if the day resets only for earth that makes no sense either . Just a thought :) Dec 5, 2016 at 16:14
  • The aliens are terraformers. If they win the war they are going to transform Earth into an habitat befitting of them, probably killing every species on Earth in the process. Time should revert for the whole universe, as that's the only way that would make sense.
    – CyberClaw
    Dec 5, 2016 at 16:45
  • Time can vary between gravity wells. Look at time loops and black holes for SG1. Time loop only affected earth for a few months.
    – cde
    Dec 5, 2016 at 17:39
  • Yeah, I know (we all saw Interstellar). But time still only flows in only 1 way. Reverting the flow of time only locally would be hard to explain. But then again, the whole power is already hard to explain xD
    – CyberClaw
    Dec 6, 2016 at 9:43
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There is no evidence for or against a Many Worlds Interpretation of time Theory in the film. We can assume, if the MWI is valid, that the majority of what we saw results in doomed time lines, but with MWI, there is an infinite number of possible saved time lines as there are doomed. We just don't see.

if instead we take it to be like BTTF, each time travel event, results in a unique timeline, in which only one timeline where humanity is saved (along with n timeline where the mimics died and rebooted). It would be significantly less than infinity.

The last choice is like XMEN Days of Future Past. Information is sent back, and the timeline that was changed no longer exists.

Thematically, it has to be the last one. Because the story puts through no alternative. It strives to show that time is not fixed, that you can change the past and thus the present and the future. Had they went with MWI, all of Cage ' s trials would be meaningless. Nothing could be changed Rita and humanity would always die, to that Cage.

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