User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Reference Desk/@comment-24894325-20160526133608/@comment-24894325-20160526225938

Thank you for the clarification. The authorial view---can I invent a way for them to drop out for a century---is very useful. Especially, given how inventive authors have been. I keep thinking about The Transit of Venus that was inserted in between The Sensorites and The Reign of Terror despite the fact that in the original TV series The Reign of Terror follows directly from The Sensorites. And this insertion made sense.

So my internal understanding of "story evidence that someone was alive and present" is now the following: there must be an evidence of a particular event involving someone doing something on Earth at a particular time during the century.

I hope I got it.