 But in making vivid the “threat” of determinism, we often want to fasten on the idea of the entire future of the world as being determined. No matter what the “speed limit” on physical influences is, if we want the entire future of the world to be determined, then we will have to fix the state of things over all of space, so as not to miss out something that could later come in “from outside” to spoil things. In the time of Laplace, of course, there was no known speed limit to the propagation of physical things such as light-rays. In principle light could travel at any arbitrarily high speed, and some thinkers did suppose that it was transmitted “instantaneously.” The same went for the force of gravity. In such a world, evidently, one has to fix the state of things over the whole of the world at a time t, in order for events to be strictly determined, by the laws of nature, for any amount of time thereafter.