  In 1972, Geroch, Kronheimer, and Penrose introduced what is now called the
causal boundary of a spacetime. This boundary is constructed out of Terminal
Indecomposable Past sets (TIPs) and their future analogues (TIFs), which are
the pasts and futures of inextendible causal curves. The causal boundary is a
key tool to understand the global structure of a spacetime. In this paper, we
show that in a spacetime with compact Cauchy surfaces, there is always at least
one minimal TIP and one minimal TIF, minimal meaning that it does not contain
another TIP (resp.\ TIF) as a proper subset. We then study the implications of
the minimal TIP and TIF meeting each other. This condition generalizes some of
the "no observer horizon" conditions that have been used in the literature to
obtain partial solutions of the Bartnik splitting conjecture. We also show that
such a no observer horizons condition is satisfied when the spacetime has a
(possibly discrete) timelike conformal symmetry, generalizing a result of Costa
e Silva, Flores, and Herrera about conformal Killing vector fields.
