Progression of Time and World Hopping

[TheStick]

So I was reading through the wiki looking for confirmed cases of various world hoppers and I stumbled upon a segment that explained who the three strangers were in the Purelake in WoK. I had assumed they were world hoppers but I was not aware that it is believed that one of the Demoux from Mistborn and one of them is Galladon from Elantris. This has me a little confused. While unexpected, there is plenty of room after the completion of their stories for them to become world hoppers. However; most chronologies that I have seen place Elantris and Mistborn further apart in time than what could be expected from an average life span with even more time until the events of stormlight. Do all of these stories occur almost at once or is there something about world hopping that effects this?

[RShara]

People have figured out how to get some sort of time dilation effect to occur in the Cognitive Realm, and a lot of the non-immortal worldhoppers take advantage of it to skip over periods of time where they're not useful or interested in living through. We don't know exactly how or where it's done right now, though.

[Karger]

@Rshara peaty much covers it.  Although their are alternatives to time dilation.  On Nalthis for example you can buy immortality.  Their are likely other options as well.

[Weltall]

To add to that, while time dilation helps explain some of the temporal 'distance' the characters are able to cover (especially Baon and Khriss) we know there's also some actual slowing of the aging process at work in most cases. We know that most members of the Seventeenth Shard use a method that considerably slows their aging, though it doesn't make them truly immortal. Galladon is obviously an exception since as an Elantrian he actually is immortal.

Edited July 19, 2019 by Weltall

[RShara]

7 minutes ago, Weltall said:

To add to that, while time dilation helps explain some of the temporal 'distance' the characters are able to cover (especially Baon and Khriss) we know there's also some actual slowing of the aging process at work in most cases. We know that most members of the Seventeenth Shard use a method that considerably slows their aging, though it doesn't make them truly immortal. Galladon is obviously an exception since as an Elantrian he actually is immortal.

I think that second WoB is referring to the time dilation, myself.

[Weltall]

21 minutes ago, RShara said:

I think that second WoB is referring to the time dilation, myself.

Eh, could be, it's certainly open to interpretation. My own read is that it's referring to what Brandon mentioned in the first WoB (about there being a mix of time dilation and actual slowing of the aging process in a lot of cases) since I don't think of time dilation as actually slowing your aging. It lets you live longer in relative terms but you're still aging at the normal rate while you're doing it.

Let's imagine you've got some trick using the Cognitive Realm that lets you skip over ten years of time in a day. While in relative terms you haven't aged as much as you should have in ten years from the perspective of an observer, you've still aged exactly as much as the amount of time you directly experienced, one day. So your aging hasn't literally slowed despite the way you skipped over ten years. I see that WoB and its description of slowing the aging process as something more akin to accumulating Breath, where you actually do age at a slower rate the more you have, up until the point that you hit the Fifth Heightening and stop aging altogether.