Nonliving things are retrievable from any point in their history, with potential duplication. I could fill the sky with copies of some world's Earth from every moment in its history up until the present, if I chose to. Nonlife is distinct from life in that way; relatedly, nonlife also cannot torch.

There is some automatic retrieval of nonliving things, which takes them from the moment that they are destroyed, for any obvious definition of 'destroyed'. Since duplication is not a concern, the same object may appear several times: for example, a mug in some living world might shatter, generating a copy from just before the break; then it might be repaired, and later broken again, generating a second copy from just before the second break.