Yes, unlimited slots within the space on your disk.
"Single Player" will take you to "New world", "continue last world", "load previous world"... you'll be able to have as many worlds as your disk will hold.
Very good
Each world, as described above, can have multiple characters created for it but time will move forward while playing, even for the other characters. So if you have characters Joe and Pete and play for two game days with Joe and then go to play with Pete, the world will be the same time it was when you stopped playing Joe, ie: two days later. I hope that makes sense.
I have no plans to support going back in time to some previous save point. I will probably support fully copying a world into another world... which would kind of be like forking time sort of.
I think that makes sense. Imagine a game slot where you already played with Joe who built a bridge and Pete who waited for Joe to finish and then built a tower on top of the bridge. Then you start with Dave at some global starting time and accidentally kill Joe. Then Pete would act as before and tries to build a tower in the air o_O (I hope that's what you were talking about
) Besides, you would have to record all the actions performed by all player Characters...