What would the most peculiar characteristics of a "time fly" be?
One of the syntactical interpretation of the famous linguistics sentence "Time flies like an arrow." is to consider "time flies" as a noun phrase. This makes "time flies" analogous to "fruit flies". For details about this, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_flies_like_an_arrow;_fruit_flies_like_a_banana.
My question is that if we go along with this interpretation, we have "time flies" which would probably be some sort of flies attracted to time. What would the characteristics of these time flies be? What would their appearance and behaviour be from the human perspective?
I am looking for interesting characteristics grounded in physical and/or biological principles. This creature is to be designed for humorous and parodical purposes. As long as it's feasible in a fantasy setting and cannot be disproven given our physical laws, it is an acceptable answer. The limiting rules here are that they are analogous to fruit flies (or some type of flies) as their basic characteristic i.e. attracted to time in some way. As an example of a physical principle, time slows down as you travel faster so they might materialize in a near-speed-of-light spaceship or close to the event horizon of a blackhole.
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1 answer
Time flies are attracted to temporal paradoxes. The name implies a small fly, but in reality they are brutal, quite big and carnivorous.
Ever wondered why there are no time-travellers around? Guess who ate them.
Whenever some genius invents some form of time-travel these little critters find out and fly at the invention and the inventor alike, similar to how an arrow finds its target. They then proceed to consume the invention and the inventor.
They are the guardians that protect the universe from temporal paradoxes. They are scavengers just like your common fly, always looking for ways to help compost the temporal waste that time-travel invariably leaves around.
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