It's a little long, but here is my incomplete thory of time, as I see it (CT / RD / CC / real life).
In order to understand time, we have to extend our idea of it and realize that we can go more than in just one direction. We also have to realize that we can not only go forward and back in time (traveling to future and past), but we can also go up time and down time.
Allow me to explain:
- If you go back in time, something will be changed (whether or not it’s a molecule of air someone will breathe or something more major, say the queen being murdered and a kingdom crumbling). This will inevitably cause the point in time to shift, going up or down time so to speak.
- - Within those new times, you can go up and down, left and right, etc. Now, what determines the instance you experience are the choices and experiences that came previous to the very instant in which you are currently experiencing. Thus, instances (the infinity of them) are experienced infinitely and rather smoothly.
- - - For instance, (very basic) seeing a dead animal on the road could cause grief and ultimately lead to a career in something that deals with animal caretaking. However, consider not seeing the animal, and choices leading to a career in poaching. Or seeing the animal and the grief ultimately leads to curiosity and a life in poaching. Etc.
- - - (Again basic) Two extremes in which between are an infinity of possibilities. For each choice and/or action lays a new path in the timeline, and a new path in history. Thus, whether you think of it spherically (as the universe is developed around the idea of circles – think about it) or cubically (as the tesseract is nothing more than a 4th dimensional square), time operates as a 4th dimensional attribute, which had it’s own 3-d type realm, which is more or less a 6th or possibly 7th dimension.
Time therefore extends itself into its own 3-d texture, and something (possibly) governs over time, asserting its will and bending it (time) to its (governor of time) own liking.
Now these other times that are experienced are in fact other realities. A “dimensional split” if you will. Can you determine the difference between what’s right and what’s not? Absolutely not, because each are profoundly different from each other. For instance, in one time perhaps you die of a tragic accident. But at that precise moment in which you are about to die, perhaps something happens in which you live. Thus the timeline shifts and one has two timelines that exist simultaneously and independently, but are both derived from the one timeline.
Now causing a timeline to become obsolete (in my own opinion) is impossible. But also, the only thing that may render a timeline obsolete is if the universe operates according to efficiency. In other words, if one timeline exists that is more efficient, but identical to another timeline, then perhaps the least efficient of them are obliterated. However, that can not happen since even if it is obliterated, it still exists in the form of the more efficient one. Thus, from this logic, timeline deletion should not and can not occur.
That's it as it stands... be gentle :p