Knurled's post mentioning a time machine got me thinking. You know how in every movie with time travel there are rules the main characters always break? Saving their dead relatives from dying, meeting themselves, that sort of thing.
What terrible event would probably happen if you could travel in time?
I'll need a minute before I actually have a good answer for this one. But I'll post the question anyway.
I would do many, many things differently. Like, I would start Amazon, so that would make a few things different. Like, there would be massive autocross venues everywhere.
Inability to travel backwards in time (including getting back to where I started from), trouble managing radiation exposure when using the machine, and massive damage in front of where the time machine exits FTL (or at least relativistic speed) mode, because my time travel story is hard sci-fi 
In reply to GameboyRMH :
Honestly my favorite theory of why time travel is a bad idea is you could theoretically land in a place in time where the earth wasn't where it was when you started your journey, so you land outside of earth's atmosphere.
I would probably wind up with a venereal disease. Or child support.
But id also have kept my 64 impala!
In reply to Dusterbd13-michael :
Honestly I would have kept my '86 Firebird and there's a girl who is a close friend now who would probably be an ex that hates me.
Daylan C said:In reply to GameboyRMH :
Honestly my favorite theory of why time travel is a bad idea is you could theoretically land in a place in time where the earth wasn't where it was when you started your journey, so you land outside of earth's atmosphere.
Or you land underground or under water or inside solid rock.
On the other hand, it would be a good idea if you could go back in time, pick up a few cheap Ferraris and Cobras, and bring them back to the present. 
In reply to stuart in mn :
Oe you screw up setting the dials and wind up right on top of the Big Bang...
stuart in mn said:Daylan C said:In reply to GameboyRMH :
Honestly my favorite theory of why time travel is a bad idea is you could theoretically land in a place in time where the earth wasn't where it was when you started your journey, so you land outside of earth's atmosphere.
Or you land underground or under water or inside solid rock.
On the other hand, it would be a good idea if you could go back in time, pick up a few cheap Ferraris and Cobras, and bring them back to the present.
I'd probably wreck the Cobra doing dumb E36 M3. I'm not used to driving on bias ply tires etc.
I have considered this question, and have concluded that I don't actually need a time machine to transport myself, I need a time telephone.
1980:" But as much IBM stock as you can. learn as much as you can about computers. Don't argue."
1984:"Sell the IBM, use the profits to move to Seattle. Find a guy named Bill Gates, and hang around with him for a decade or so."
I'd be back in the eighteenth century, supporting the revolutionary guys, but supplying the home-made beer.
But in reality, I'd definitely go beyond that to sustain freedom.
Here's something to think about. When Marty "fixes" the past and he returns home to a perfect life, he's not Marty. At least not this timeline's Marty. All the Christmas' and family trips , well our Marty didn't take those trips, and certainly not with that family. What a Hellish nightmare, for the people you love to be total strangers and memories to no longer belong to you.
What might you destroy by making things better?
Appleseed said:Here's something to think about. When Marty "fixes" the past and he returns home to a perfect life, he's not Marty. At least not this timeline's Marty. All the Christmas' and family trips , well our Marty didn't take those trips, and certainly not with that family. What a Hellish nightmare, for the people you love to be total strangers and memories to no longer belong to you.
What might you destroy by making things better?
Whoa. Heavy, man.
I'd probably hold onto my 1996 Thunderbird longer and then I wouldn't have ended up with my current fleet.
Wait would that be worse, or better...
Eh, probably worse.
I'd bet on the Cubs winning the world series the year after bttf said they would.
stuart in mn said:Daylan C said:In reply to GameboyRMH :
Honestly my favorite theory of why time travel is a bad idea is you could theoretically land in a place in time where the earth wasn't where it was when you started your journey, so you land outside of earth's atmosphere.
Or you land underground or under water or inside solid rock.
On the other hand, it would be a good idea if you could go back in time, pick up a few cheap Ferraris and Cobras, and bring them back to the present.
I don't think the universe has a 0,0,0 point in it that we can accurately calculate, right? We are spinning, moving within a solar system, which moves within a galaxy, which moves within the universe. Our physics models are pretty good, but I wonder how accurately we could predict the position you would need to be in be in in the past. Even if you had a machine that could instantly transport you back/forward in time, the math of putting in the exact coordinates would be pretty difficult.
I love my family, so I could only go back a few years, it would probably be with the winning powerball numbers from when nobody won it at 700m or something, so I could just retire and play with my kids and cars and do adult things with my wife and not work/hurt anymore.
It’d be pretty E36 M3ty to go back thinking you’re going to make everything better by being rich and you come back and your kids never existed or you never met someone important.
The bttf model, while one of the greatest movies ever, is broken or at least flawed. In 2 where doc draws the alternate timeline on the chalkboard, he’s basically stating that the 1985 of Biff being rich and Lorraine having a giant fake rack is happening in parallel to “normal” 1985 and that it skewed off when old gross Biff gave young Biff the sports almanac. In order for the movies to work, we have to believe that on the morning of November 5, 1955(or the day Biff made his first successful bet) that a whole alternate timeline spawned. By this logic Marty basically created another offshoot of an alternate timeline with every interaction. We also have to believe, for the purposes of Marty still having memories of his dysfunctional family and occurrences from his time travels, that multiple timelines all cross over each other at some point between the evening of November 5, 1985 and the moment Doc, Clara, Jules, and Verne pop up on the bridge over the Clint Eastwood Ravine
Nobody ever told us how confused Clint must have been either. Was the Gorillaz song named after him or the ravine? So many questions are left unanswered.
don’t even get me started on the HG Wells model. Morloks are creepy
ProDarwin said:stuart in mn said:Daylan C said:In reply to GameboyRMH :
Honestly my favorite theory of why time travel is a bad idea is you could theoretically land in a place in time where the earth wasn't where it was when you started your journey, so you land outside of earth's atmosphere.
Or you land underground or under water or inside solid rock.
On the other hand, it would be a good idea if you could go back in time, pick up a few cheap Ferraris and Cobras, and bring them back to the present.
I don't think the universe has a 0,0,0 point in it that we can accurately calculate, right? We are spinning, moving within a solar system, which moves within a galaxy, which moves within the universe. Our physics models are pretty good, but I wonder how accurately we could predict the position you would need to be in be in in the past. Even if you had a machine that could instantly transport you back/forward in time, the math of putting in the exact coordinates would be pretty difficult.
If there were a time & space machine that had an API accepting a time and relative coordinates to go to, perhaps using the plane of our solar system to define the axes, it would definitely be possible to predict where the Earth would be and have the machine reappear in generally the right area. For safety it would be best for this time & space machine to also be a helicopter so that it could be used in the air to reduce the chance of interference with solid objects.
I'm not sure if it's possible to calculate a "0,0,0 point" where the Big Bang started or something, but it sure wouldn't be helpful to use it.
If we talk about time travel movies with loose ends, my favorite is probably Deja Vu. Agent Carlin sends himself back in time to try to stop a bomber. When he gets there he ends up dying in a fight with said bomber but foils his plot, there was still a bomb that went off so cops and all still show up to investigate but nobody died except future Carlin and the terrorist. Is nobody going to question when they fish Agent Carlin's body out of the harbor while Agent Carlin is still alive? There is also a woman that knows that Carlin died but then meets Carlin again less than an hour after future Carlin died. So she knows Carlin died but also knows Carlin isn't dead. The Carlin that's still alive has never met this woman until this moment and doesn't remember any of what happened with future Carlin.
^That movie also requires some kind of multiverse system of alternate timelines...which means Carlin left a timeline in which he has simply disappeared and entered one where the timeline-native Carlin was killed.
|
So if time travel is possible, which I am not smart enough to even begin to discuss, the inventors still have to cope with the fact that the sun is going though space at something like 220km/sec (~136 miles/sec) and its not in a straight line, Its both orbiting the center of our galaxy and our galaxy is moving through space orbiting some other massive galaxy, probably Andromeda, plus everything in the universe is moving somewhere, expanding universe they say. So where we 100 years ago in space? And where was the spot you were standing in relation to the earth spinning on its wobbly axis? And if you travel there in a straight , 4 dimensional line (x,y,z,t)a (x,y,z,t)b , suppose you pass through a supernova?
|
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/so-you-bought-apple-stock-in-1980/494558/
I feel like the only way to travel through time without ending up inside a rock or exposed to the vacuum of space would be to do it in a space ship. Jump back 10 years and then go find the planet (which would be really really far away).
The time travel movie that really berked with my head was Looper. The guy getting whittled away as he tries to get to a rendezvous site is horrifying.
Belinda Carlisle would have a kid that looks a lot like me and is now 36 years old...
I often get lost in a daydream at work visualizing traveling back in time. Not my physical, present self zipping through spacetime, just my consciousness. As I envision it, my current consciousness would zip back into my younger, past self. I'd probably shoot for age 6 or so. It would be an interesting experiment to see if I could prevent some bad things from happening and bring about some good ones within my own timeline. Other than having pain-free joints, it would probably suck to be a 39-year-old Jackass stuck inside the body of a six-year-old. Kind of a Quantum Leap ripoff except I wouldn't be displacing anyone else's mind, just my own.
LOL
You'll need to log in to post.
