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Merged Time travel would change the world with the butterfly effect

Coincidentally enough, I just picked up a copy of The Time Machine from a free book swap.
I was also thinking of that Big Bang Theory episode where the guys buy a replica of the Machine from the 1960 movie, thinking it was a miniature, model-size. They paid $800 for it. They were bemused when it turned out to be a full-size replica (at least, until they started playing with it.) Hell, I'd pay $800 for one of those!
 
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Emre_1974tr said:
If someone goes back in time, even if he does nothing there, he changes the whole world with the butterfly effect. Because it affects the people around it first, they affect others and spreads like dominoes to the world.

I mean, there is no traveling back in time. If there were, each visit would change the whole world in the long run.

Peace
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Peace!

And welcome to one of the classic tropes of science fiction literature!
 
I think it was Larry Niven who taught us the important but ever-so-subtle principle, if you've traveled back in time, don't drop a matter annihilator into the Moon. Tiny little mistakes like that can mess up your timeline just as much as major ones!
 
wobs said:
In terms of Hollywood Science level of time travel, T1 made sense (up until you explained otherwise!), T2 I thought was even more flawed, in that the terminators couldn't have been invented without it going back in time, so how could they have come back in time at all? A throw away comment that blemished an otherwise perfect film.
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There was a similar scenario in the "12 Monkeys" TV series, which went in a completely different direction than the original movie. Instead of being a red herring, the Army of the 12 Monkeys was a global cult founded by another time traveler, seeking to use paradoxes to destroy linear time and make Humanity immortal in an eternal "Now". They created the plague because they needed time travel to complete their plan, and since the founder was from the future he knew that time travel was invented to find a way to stop the plague.
 
Emre_1974tr said:
If someone goes back in time, even if he does nothing there, he changes the whole world with the butterfly effect. Because it affects the people around it first, they affect others and spreads like dominoes to the world.

I mean, there is no traveling back in time. If there were, each visit would change the whole world in the long run.

Peace
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You need to read more SF. There are a number of ways around this.

1 - "If there were, each visit would change the whole world in the long run."

So what? The timeline is in continual flux. Deal with it. You and I and our world are an ephemeral timeline which will eventually produce a time traveller who will snuff us out of existence. We won't know, of course, since we will never have existed.

Easy come, easy go.

2 - Timelines are self-healing. They permit details to change, but the larger issues will be preserved.

3 - While time travel is "possible", the universe acts to prevent it and thereby preserve its current existence. A civilization which is about to produce a working time machine will inevitably experience a supernova in its immediate stellar neighborhood, wiping out the civilization before the time machine is created. Or an undetected asteroid will impact in the vicinity of the inventor's lab, destroying it.

4 - The appearance of a time machine produces a split timeline. The original timeline produces a present/future in which an inventor fires up his invention and disappears without a trace. The new timeline differs from the original in that a time machine appears in the past, and produces differences from the original. Both timelines "exist", so far as the term has meaning. And, yes, this potentially implies the "existence" of a multitude of timelines. So what?

5 - The present exists because a time machine appeared. And has, from our perspective, "always" appeared. This is different from 4) because it says nothing about the fate of the "original" timeline. This obviously plays hob with conservation laws, but so what?

6 - If a time machine is operated, it goes back in time and creates a new history. If the new history produces a time machine, that in turn produces yet "another" history, and so on. See #1. However, if a time traveller produces changes, they may result in time travel never being invented. And that is how it has always been. Just because something is possible does not mean it will happen.
 
wobs said:
In terms of Hollywood Science level of time travel, T1 made sense (up until you explained otherwise!), T2 I thought was even more flawed, in that the terminators couldn't have been invented without it going back in time, so how could they have come back in time at all? A throw away comment that blemished an otherwise perfect film.
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T2 was the best film of the series. The later movies were flawed.

T3, while a far inferior film, made sense in that the events in T2 simply postponed the development.
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But the robots were always going to lose, no matter how much they tried to change the past. By T3 we knew this and were getting bored.

People who nitpick the 'science' in science fiction don't understand what it's about. It has almost nothing to do with science.

Scientifically speaking, time travel paradoxes are a crock. But they make an excellent plot device. The reason for this is that in reality we cannot change the mistakes of our past, so we have to accept them and try to do better in the future. Going back to the past to 'fix' things is a cop out - and an option we don't have anyway so there's no point considering it. Time travel stories explore this moral quandary and others. They are not about being scientifically accurate - and we don't want them to be.
 
For me, the best science fiction is actually social fiction. Speculate about some technological paradigm shift - the "science fiction" - and then imagine a story about how the humanity we're all familiar with would react or adapt to such a shift.

Larry Niven seemed to do this pretty well. Same with Isaac Asimov. And Ray Bradbury, in his own weird way.

Niven's stories about what happens when a humanity that has sworn off war makes contact with alien civilizations who think they're easy pickings, for example. Answer: The humans kick those alien asses. But what if the aliens are literally the most aggro and effective warmongers around? Answer: They're not. Humanity, remember?

Even something like The Murderbot Diaries takes a speculative technological premise - cyborg security robots - and tells us a human story about it that we can all relate to today.
 
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I suppose if the machine only allows jumps into the future, as in Joe Haldeman's The Accidental Time Machine, there's less of a problem. Apart from the fact it assumes there is one fixed(?) future. And does have other time travelers who send the protagonists back in time at the end. Though the main protagonist has enough nous to avoid doing anything to change the future from there.

There is also a problem (mainly due to sloppy plotting?) of things appearing from nowhere, like the body-morphing machine thingy in Babylon 5. Given by Valen to the Minbari, it is then taken back in time by Sinclair who uses it to become Valen, so he can later on give it to the Mibari etc.
 
The documentary Millennium, starring Kris Kristofferson, was about this very issue:

What you actually get when you change the past is time quakes.
 
I am a time traveler. Seriously.

Last month I got on a plane at 6 pm on July 23rd, flew for 9 hours and landed, at noon on July 23rd. Six hours before I took off! Explain that skeptics!!
 
SteveAitch said:
There is also a problem (mainly due to sloppy plotting?) of things appearing from nowhere, like the body-morphing machine thingy in Babylon 5. Given by Valen to the Minbari, it is then taken back in time by Sinclair who uses it to become Valen, so he can later on give it to the Mibari etc.
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Ontological paradoxes are fairly common in science fiction. The protagonist in "All You Zombies" and the movie adaptation "Predestination", the notebook in "By His Bootstraps", Captain Kirk's glasses in Star Trek II and IV, and the title character's necklace and he himself in "Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann" (went for an obscure one there at the end).

The "12 Monkeys" TV series I mentioned also makes use of it, with it being revealed at the end that the original source of the virus was the corpse of a person from the future who was transported into the distant past and eventually found by scientists.
 
Myriad said:
I think it was Larry Niven who taught us the important but ever-so-subtle principle, if you've traveled back in time, don't drop a matter annihilator into the Moon. Tiny little mistakes like that can mess up your timeline just as much as major ones!
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I think Niven's idea that time travel is fantasy - even when you have working time travel - was a good side step on the problems of time travel. So when someone is sent back into time to grab a horse for the amusement of the leader he comes back with a unicorn, further travels result in him collecting Moby-Dick and a range of weird and wonderful creatures from fantasy. (The Flight of the Horse)
 
SteveAitch said:
There is also a problem (mainly due to sloppy plotting?) of things appearing from nowhere, like the body-morphing machine thingy in Babylon 5. Given by Valen to the Minbari, it is then taken back in time by Sinclair who uses it to become Valen, so he can later on give it to the Mibari etc.
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That's not a problem, nor sloppy plotting. That's what makes time travel stories fun.
 
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