I don't want you to believe that the past and the future exist, not to mention the other things on your list. I want you to believe, that "your" present moment has its timespan which is not zero. To be more precise, it has an order of magnitude of the Planck scale and it's not "your" present moment, but the moment of all the elementary particles that make you.
For me, the entire spacetime on the Planck scale is 2-dimensional (t,1d) and flat, and its elementary surface is created by each interaction of elementary particles. Their distance 1d arises with the time of their interaction. Both dimensions obviously depend on the reference frame, but the surface area is the same in all of them. This surface area is actually the Lorentz transformation invariant, and spacetime interval is its square root. The scaffolding of spatial distances 1d creates spatial 3d.
The universe is eternal, has no past and no future, in the sense that many people want us to be able to jump through, traveling as some imagine through the time like in physical objects or like in space between objects, or if you will through spaces, other dimensions, or parallel universes. All of this is and will remain fiction.
The funny thing is, that this time I almost agree with you . Nothing that has a mass travels in space without the passage of its proper time and consequently, nothing massive travels in time without traversing the space. There is no time without the distance and vice versa. There is no elementary particle, which is in rest with respect to all the others, and between any pair in relative motion there is a time dilation and length contraction. There is no time dilation without length contraction and vice versa, so there is no time without the distance and vice versa. That's also the reason, why we are not moving in time with the speed of light when we are "at rest" (with respect to something in the chosen reference frame), because all the particles that create our bodies would have to be at rest with respect to all the others, and they never are, even if we were frozen in 0K in the cosmic void.
What's even more important,
there is no past and the future in the Einstein field equations, that general relativity is based on.
Metric tensor does not store its past values, nor does the spacetime store them, because it’s described precisely by its metric tensor, which gives us only a set of spatial rulers to measure the current distances, and a temporal one used to measure the current flow of time at each spacetime point.
Einstein tensor describing the spacetime curvature consists of the
Ricci tensor and the
Ricci scalar. Putting aside, that the
Ricci tensor is the contraction of the indices of the Riemann tensor, it consists of the
Christoffel symbols (Christ-awful symbols), their products and their first derivatives. These in return consist of the product of the metric tensor and its first derivatives. The Ricci scalar is the
trace of Ricci tensor. Metric tensor is a basic element of Christoffel symbols, which are the basic element of the Ricci tensor,
so all the geometry is based on the metric tensor and its first and second derivatives. Its components are the dot products of the basis vectors of a local coordinate system at the chosen spacetime point. They tell us a way to measure the distance from this point in its infinitesimal proximity and the flow of time at this point.
@Harry Costas this comment is also for you.