[ianai]

That’s a really awesome thought experiment! I got a related idea during undergrad. What if the apparent symmetry between the three special and one temporal dimensions was at one point complete? Ie time could at one point be swapped out with any of the other three dimensions. But somehow that symmetry collapsed- and maybe it’s collapse was the result or creation of mass-energy. I imagine a hypercube being “pulled down” into a confined region. But the confinement “pushed” the two directions of time into the one direction and mass-energy.