It’s also weird in that time is continuous in a way that space is not.
Sean Carrol used a pencil as an example. You are moving through space, left to right. There is no pencil, then there is a pencil, then there is not a pencil anymore. This doesn’t bother our intuitions, as we don’t intuit that a pencil should extend infinitely into the left and to the right.
OTOH, if you are moving forward in time, you would be very surprised to not see a pencil, then see a pencil, then not see a pencil anymore. You expect that pencil to extend indefinitely into the past and future. (yes it is created and destroyed, but you would observe that creation and destruction, rather than it just popping in and out of existence.)
The left doesn’t influence the right the same way that the past influences the future.
So, being able to freely change dimensions from length to time means either objects embedded in time are not continuous, or that those in space are. Or it means that it’s even weirder and less intuitive than even that. And causality is a casualty in this mess of a space-time metric.
Perhaps all time stopped just before the Inflationary Era, when the universe was much smaller and denser.
Some unknown form of thinking entity existing in this time has ‘imagined’ what the post inflationary universe might look like, using the vast amounts of mass-energy available within the tiny space that later would become our universe. Perhaps this entity has imagined our future world correctly, or perhaps it is all a particularly poor fantasy, and something completely different will happen when the inflation period finally occurs.
That was a hoot! Halfway through the first paragraph I started thinking that Detective Munch was somehow the Michael-Ironside-in-The-Matrix character of the TWU – it fits, don’t it?