Free Avengers and Philosophy: Earth's Mightiest Thinkers, The by Mark White

in converting Chronopolis (Kang’s cross-timeline base of operations) into the Forever Crystal to help him “change history—and reflect those changes throughout all of the timestream.” 8
     
    In the final confrontation of the Destiny War, it is revealed that Immortus’s various manipulations seem to have the goal of saving humanity from the wrath of his masters, the Time Keepers. In the end, Immortus is destroyed, which seems for a moment to shake even Kang’s resolve. “They—killed him? Was that—my death, then?” 9 Instead, the battle ends when Captain America destroys the Forever Crystal, the effect of which splits Kang in two—Kang the Conqueror and Immortus—revealing that Immortus is not a replacement of Kang but rather a complete variant of him, a new worldline that branches off. He is able, through sheer chutzpah, to survive the creation of Immortus with his Kang identity still intact. The important thing to note is that Kang’s attempt to change time to prevent the creation of Immortus is doomed to failure. Since he has encountered Immortus, it is inevitable that Immortus will eventually come into being; their individual closed timelike curves are set in motion and cannot be changed.
     
    Finally, we see the same pattern at work with Iron Lad, a teenage version of Nathaniel Richards (Kang’s true identity), who when confronted with the reality of the warmonger he will become flees to the twentieth century with Kang’s armor. 10 Once there—or perhaps we should say “once then”—he gathers together a group of heroes, the Young Avengers, in an effort to stop the eventual, adult Kang. They succeed, in fact, but in doing so radically alter the timeline: Kang never exists because Iron Lad never becomes him, the Avengers are all dead, and the other Young Avengers begin to vanish from the timestream. The only way to mend the timeline is for Iron Lad to accept his fate, erase his memories, and return to his own timeline so that he can ultimately become Kang.
     
    In this case, again, we see that it’s not possible to change the flow of events on this scale. When Iron Lad kills Kang, he creates a short-lived alternate timeline where Kang never existed, but this timeline is a closed loop that ceases to exist moments after it was created. Even if Iron Lad had stood fast in resolve, refusing to become Kang, there’s no guarantee that years of living in desolation wouldn’t eventually have led him to become Kang anyway. The timeline could have existed for twenty years, but the moment he became Kang, it would have ceased to exist and the original timeline would have popped back into existence.
     
    Time to End
     
    Physicists in our own reality may not be on par with Hank Pym or Reed Richards (yet), but they seem to have a better grasp than Kang does on how hard it is to change time. Stephen Hawking has said, when speaking of his Chronology Protection Conjecture, that “it seems there may be a Chronology Protection Agency at work, making the world safe for historians.” 11 In the Marvel Universe, there is such a group: the Time Keepers and their minion Immortus. But when these powerful beings, or even just a gun-toting Kang, show up with plans to change time, it’s the Avengers who step in to fill the role, to protect the timeline from harm. Even in a world where time travel is possible, there are still rules—and fortunately there are also Avengers to help enforce them.
     
    NOTES
     
1. Young Avengers #2 (May 2005), reprinted in Young Avengers: Sidekicks (2006).
2. Avengers , vol. 1, #2 (November 1963).
3. Saint Augustine of Hippo, Confessions , trans. Albert C. Outler, 397, XIV 17, available at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/confessions-bod.asp .
4. Actually, this needs a vacuum, so assume the clock exists in a box that’s had all the air removed.
5. Stephen Hawking, “Space and Time Warps,” http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php/lectures/63.
6. Avengers , vol. 1, #269 (July 1986), reprinted