How on earth could you possibly grasp the meaning and the nature of time itself?
You may not like me pointing it out but speculation of this sort is no less subsumed in the “unknown unknowns” that stand between what you think you know about it here and now and all that can be known about it going back to how it is wholly integrated into all that can be known about the meaning and nature of existence itself.
We are all stymied here of course.
Now, I make what I construe to be a crucial distinction between what we seem able to demonstrate as in fact true for all of us in the either/or world, and what we cannot. At least Insofar as we interact out in the world from day to day.
But how can that ever be removed from all that I don’t know about the really big questions revolving around threads like this one?
Looking forward at an event in the future, you don’t know what is “determined” to happen. You don’t know how the infinite number of factors, swirling around you, affect your decisions.
Most crucially though [in my view] we don’t know if the future is something that we can steer in one rather than another direction autonomously.
In fact this point is one that I would make in regard to “I” in the is/ought world. Even assuming autonomy, we can’t possibly grasp all of the variables that came/come together to form the trajectory of our actual lived life. In my opinion, the “self” here can only be reasonably construed as an existential contraption in a world teeming with conflicting goods as we go about the business of interacting amidst an avalanche of contingency, chance and change.
Is it “determined” that you sit on your couch eating cheese doodles or that you get up and do something else? You don’t know until after you do what you decided to do. It’s when you do it that it becomes the thing that “had to happen”. Before that, you could have chosen something else, you could have done something else.
Back to my hypothetical aliens. They note us choosing to do one thing rather than another. But then they point out that on earth everything unfolds in a part of the universe that is wholly determined. We think [psychologically] that we chose freely to eat cheese doodles but there was never really any possibility that we could have chosen not to.
You seem to mix up past, present and future. As a result, you treat future events as if they are somehow in the past - as if the future has already happened. So you say " unfolds{present and future} in this sequence of events that could ever have possibly been{past} anything other than what it was{past}".
Consider this: youtu.be/vrqmMoI0wks
Now, how close is this speculation to all that would need to be known in order to demonstrate that the points here are wholly in sync with that which explains the existence of existence itself.