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Merged Time travel would change the world with the butterfly effect

theprestige said:
That's not a problem, nor sloppy plotting. That's what makes time travel stories fun.
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I don't think I've seen the episode since it originally aired, but looking at summaries online I'm seeing references to Zathras bringing the Triluminaries and the chrysalis machine from Epsilon III and giving them to Sinclair. If correct, that would mean the ones that went back in time were the same ones used in the other episodes, but from an earlier point in their history, so they were created at some point and then left on Epsilon III.
 
I once tried to come up with all the time-travel devices/vehicles/trinkets I could think of in programs and movies I've seen. Aside from all the non-named ones that are basically just "Time Machine", and without naming the sources (a little puzzle for you), there's

The Time Tunnel
The Atavochron
The Guardian of Forever
The Tardis
A motorcyle (the reference above made me think of this post)
A DeLorean
A train
A phone booth
A coin
The Time Twister (?)
The Time Gem
A Starship using The Slingshot method
A hot tub
The Omega-13
 
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I wonder if the branching multiverse concept would be considered blasphemous in Islam. The implication that you can create better and worse versions of Allah's plan might be problematic. Or it might not. Maybe Allah isn't that kind of planner.
 
alfaniner said:
I once tried to come up with all the time-travel devices/vehicles/trinkets I could think of in programs and movies I've seen. Aside from all the non-named ones that are basically just "Time Machine", and without naming the sources (a little puzzle for you), there's

The Time Tunnel
The Atavochron
The Guardian of Forever
The Tardis
A motorcyle (the reference above made me think of this post)
A DeLorean
A train
A phone booth
A coin
The Time Twister (?)
The Time Gem
A Starship using The Slingshot method
A hot tub
The Omega-13
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Vortex Manipulator (Doctor Who)
A storm or vortex, possibly a natural phenomenon (The Final Countdown)
The Ocarina of Time (Legend of Zelda)
The Sands/Dagger of Time (Prince of Persia)
The Time Turner (Harry Potter) (Is that what you meant by Time Twister?)
The Wayback Machine (Mr. Peabody and Sherman)
The Time Stone/Green Infinity Stone (MCU) (Is that what you meant by Time Gem?)
Pym Particles/Quantum Realm (MCU)
 
Pym Particles in the MCU? I'm not seeing it.

But there's also relativistic idling, as described in The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. And C. J. Cherryh's gates, from her Morgaine Cycle. And Larry Niven has a story about a weaponized Tipler Cylinder.
 
the difficulty of time travel on a planet

Is the possibility of finding yourself pressed in the vacuum of space or in the soil/rock of the planet in the time period you teleport to as a result of the constant movement of the planet.
 
theprestige said:
Pym Particles in the MCU? I'm not seeing it.
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Used for time travel in Avengers: Endgame. The Pym Particles are treated more like the fuel, and the process involves the quantum realm, but whatever additional machinery is involved is left a bit vague. There's a machine in the movie's present, but characters back in time can make additional backward jumps by obtaining more Pym Particles without returning to the original machine. Some kind of modified version of Ant Man's shrinking suit also seems to be involved.
 
You already started one thread about time travel. If you want to discuss it further, post in the same thread, don't start a new one.
 
Sidereal motion of a planet seems easy enough to account for, when implementing time travel.

Have you really just discovered this corner of speculative fiction? It's pretty well populated with interesting and exciting stories.
 
Actually, movement in WHICH coordinate system? ('Chart' lest someone objects to my using the wrong terms again.) Most of these ideas presuppose that there is some fixed point, and the Earth moved relative to that. But the whole point of special relativity is that fundamentally there is no preferred frame. Well, not among inertial frames, at the very least. The frame of the railway station and that of the train going 100 mph past it are equally good.

General relativity has you deal with acceleration and is a bit more of a pain in the rear, but basically still, you can transform between almost any two frames. Well, as long as you don't have some coordinate singularity, like going through an event horizon.

But anyway, even presupposing a preferred frame, i.e., basically a fixed point in the universe... are you sure it's that easy? What movement do you take into account? Just Earth around the Sun? Also Sun around the centre of the galaxy? Galaxy in relation to the local cluster? The dark flow towards the Great Attractor? Universe expansion, if that point isn't pretty much on top of us?

(I mean, bound systems move in relation to where the 'here' coordinate would be a million years ago. Think two treadmills put front to front, running in opposite directions. The 'you are here' point moves away from the centre over time. But if you put two footballs tied with a rubber band to each other on that system, they stay at the same distance from each other. Essentially they both move relative to where their respective previous 'you are here' point was.)

Or are you sure that for time travel over really vast time intervals, you even know every asteroid that passed close and gave Earth a wee bit of a gravitational nudge?

Now some of those corrections may or may not be small (I expect the Hubble expansion one to be really negligible at these scales, for example), but you don't need to miss that mark by a lot to end up dead anyway. E.g., you just need to end up 10 ft (3m or so) underground with your DeLorean at 88mph to be dead.


Granted, that IS thinking it through a bit further through than Emre apparently did.
 
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HansMustermann said:
Actually, movement in WHICH coordinate system? ('Chart' lest someone objects to my using the wrong terms again.) Most of these ideas presuppose that there is some fixed point, and the Earth moved relative to that. But the whole point of special relativity is that fundamentally there is no preferred frame. Well, not among inertial frames, at the very least. The frame of the railway station and that of the train going 100 mph past it are equally good.

General relativity has you deal with acceleration and is a bit more of a pain in the rear, but basically still, you can transform between almost any two frames. Well, as long as you don't have some coordinate singularity, like going through an event horizon.

But anyway, even presupposing a preferred frame, i.e., basically a fixed point in the universe... are you sure it's that easy? What movement do you take into account? Just Earth around the Sun? Also Sun around the centre of the galaxy? Galaxy in relation to the local cluster? The dark flow towards the Great Attractor? Universe expansion, if that point isn't pretty much on top of us?

(I mean, bound systems move in relation to where the 'here' coordinate would be a million years ago. Think two treadmills put front to front, running in opposite directions. The 'you are here' point moves away from the centre over time. But if you put two footballs tied with a rubber band to each other on that system, they stay at the same distance from each other. Essentially they both move relative to where their respective previous 'you are here' point was.)

Or are you sure that for time travel over really vast time intervals, you even know every asteroid that passed close and gave Earth a wee bit of a gravitational nudge?

Now some of those corrections may or may not be small (I expect the Hubble expansion one to be really negligible at these scales, for example), but you don't need to miss that mark by a lot to end up dead anyway. E.g., you just need to end up 10 ft (3m or so) underground with your DeLorean at 88mph to be dead.


Granted, that IS thinking it through a bit further through than Emre apparently did.
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One easy answer is to just make your time machine also a spacecraft, like the TARDIS. It might have to travel vast distances to catch up with Earth, but if you can make it travel in time you probably already have the traveling-in-space problems licked.

Another possibility is... simple gravity. One way of visualizing forward time travel is the time machine (say, the DeLorean with Einstein in it going one minute into the future) just freezes in place, from the point of view of Doc and Marty watching from outside. They wouldn't be able see inside because no light would come out of it (and it would probably be super-cold, and various other thermodynamic problems) and there would be practical problems (on a long trip to the future it would get in the way; what happens if someone tries to move it?), but there's no reason to expect it to suddenly fly off the Earth instead of staying in place. Now, what we see instead is that it disappears and reappears, but wherever it is during that minute, it could continue to follow the spacetime trajectory it was on, or in other words, continue to be pulled by Earth's gravity. The same could just as easily be true of the reverse trajectory of backward time travel. Why would the machine follow the Earth's course backward in time? No idea. Why wouldn't it? Still no idea!
 
This is also how Welles' Time Machine is usually rendered. It stays in place while the world changes around it. Another demonstration of this principle is in the first episode of Futurama.
 
arthwollipot said:
[qimg]https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/kill_hitler.png[/qimg]
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It you really wanted to do away with Adolf Hitler then it would be easier to travel back to 9 months before Adolf was born, stop Alois Hitler in the street and ask him for the time. That should be sufficient to change the result of the sperm race.
 
psionl0 said:
It you really wanted to do away with Adolf Hitler then it would be easier to travel back to 9 months before Adolf was born, stop Alois Hitler in the street and ask him for the time. That should be sufficient to change the result of the sperm race.
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Or better still - go a little bit further back and say "Eve that snake is trying to cause you problems don't listen to it".
 
psionl0 said:
It you really wanted to do away with Adolf Hitler then it would be easier to travel back to 9 months before Adolf was born, stop Alois Hitler in the street and ask him for the time. That should be sufficient to change the result of the sperm race.
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End then to find out that in the end Alois never did father dear little Adolf. :D
 
psionl0 said:
It you really wanted to do away with Adolf Hitler then it would be easier to travel back to 9 months before Adolf was born, stop Alois Hitler in the street and ask him for the time. That should be sufficient to change the result of the sperm race.
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But in this timeline, Alois was already delayed by someone stopping him to ask him the time.
 
erwinl said:
End then to find out that in the end Alois never did father dear little Adolf. :D
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That's been a staple of many a science fiction short story.

There's a variant used by James Blish with his "dirac" communicator a faster than light communication technology - has the property that all such communications are received by all such communicators throughout space and time. There is an agency tasked with protecting the population of the earth based universe, the population is always protected as the agency always seems to be able to take the right action at the right time, as if they know the future. They do as they use the dirac comms to report on events and everyone in the past makes sure that what needs to happen to happens. One of the functions of the agency is to see that everyone mentioned in a report via the beep gets to be born. Trainees are given the task to make sure parents of people mentioned in the beep meet up. They also have a cardinal rule - the death of someone is never to be communicated via the beep.
 
arthwollipot said:
But in this timeline, Alois was already delayed by someone stopping him to ask him the time.
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The silliness of the multiple timelines idea means it is pointless to do anything positive or negative - as everything will happen anyway no matter what you do.
 
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