Existing While Not Being God

“I am confident, to more than nine nines of certainty, that not only has a fully-general means of causality-altering time travel not been invented, but that a fully-general means of causality-altering time travel never will be invented within our light-cone.”

“Excuse me, Academician – but how can you be so sure?”

“Are we, as we speak now, omnipotent deities the supremacy of whose mere whims is written into the canons of natural law itself?”

“…no?”

“Exactly.”

– from the proceedings of the Oroelle Conference on Temporal Mechanics,
7920, 8340, 8760, and 9180