The Ontological Information Limit: Why Temporal Storage Violates Physical Constraints

This paper develops a unified ontological and physical argument for the impossibility of temporal storage. It defends the claim that the universe exists only in the present state it actualizes, and that completed temporal moments do not persist as ontological or informational contents of reality. The central result is derived by combining ontological analysis with fundamental constraints from information theory and thermodynamics. If past moments were physically retained, the universe would be required to store complete prior universal states. Since each such state exhausts the universe’s informational content at the moment of its realization, temporal storage would necessitate an unbounded accumulation of information. This leads to an unavoidable infinite regress and violates established limits on information density, including the Bekenstein bound. The argument is further reinforced by Landauer’s principle, which establishes an irreducible energetic cost to information erasure. Temporal evolution is shown to require the continual overwriting of prior states; without such erasure, entropy could not increase and thermodynamic consistency would collapse. Memory, records, and physical traces are therefore interpreted not as stored pasts, but as present-time structures—entropic residues of incomplete erasure. On this basis, the paper demonstrates the ontological impossibility of time travel and the physical infeasibility of block universe models. Both presuppose the persistence of completed moments as accessible states, an assumption incompatible with finite information capacity and irreversible thermodynamic evolution. The conclusion is that temporal non-storage is not a contingent metaphysical thesis, but a necessary boundary condition for any physically coherent ontology of time. The universe is not an archive of moments, but a process that exists only by continually exhausting and replacing its present state.