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Time Travel

NWO Sentryman

Proud NWO Gatekeeper
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Jun 16, 2009
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I was wondering about time travel:

I i went back in time and killed Hitler, why would i go back in time in the first place?:confused:

If i went back in time to meet Jesus, how would that affect christianity?:confused:

If i went back in time with a very advanced computer and gave it to Richard Nixon, would that mean sawtooth snap?:boggled:
 
That would require time travel backward to be possible. I don't think there's much indication that it is.
 
[fiction=scifi]
Look, all I remember is going back in time to prevent Amos Weatherby from marrying his wife Abigail in 1807, in order to later prevent the birth of a certain bully who put me in a coma, thus forcing me to miss the senior prom. Little did I know that events would precipitate that would (a) lead to the Great Depression instead of the Great Enlightenment, and (b) bring about proving the principle behind the atomic bomb instead of proving the principle of the "time-bomb" on July 16, 1945.

Besides, the timestream re-converged in such a way that a drunk driver put me in traction, thus forcing me to miss the senior prom...
[/fiction]
 
Do you think you could go back in time and find Jesus? Do you think all that stuff really happened?

But, if you could go back in time, you'd create an alternate timeline with nearly every trip so that the future you travel back to would not be the original future you left. So if you killed Hitler and then went back to your own time, you'd go back to an "alternate universe" or "alternate reality" and never be able to return to the original timeline.

Then again, you could go back to the original moment you popped into the past to kill Hitler and kill your previous self the moment you previously arrived to prevent you from killing Hitler and the new alternate future you returned to would be very similar, potentially, to the original future you left. That is, of course, if you didn't spread a horrible pandemic in the past when you zapped into it briefly.

I don't believe time travel into the past as you speak of it is possible.
 
lumos said:
... if you could go back in time, you'd create an alternate timeline with nearly every trip so that the future you travel back to would not be the original future you left. So if you killed Hitler and then went back to your own time, you'd go back to an "alternate universe" or "alternate reality" and never be able to return to the original timeline.
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I once wrote a short story that addressed the speculation of just such a scenario, except that as soon as the protagonist returned to the same time/space coordinates, he found that without the Hitler War Machine, Stalin ran roughshod over most of Europe and plunged the world into a war from which it never fully recovered. It seems that the Stalinists saw the potential of the Nazi Atomic Bomb project, and accelerated its schedule, thus producing the bomb first, and inflicting it not on just one or two cities, but on dozens of cities around the world, leaving little more than radioactive rain and a dying world behind.

The teacher gave the story a "B" for, commenting only, "Better than average use of a literary trope."
 
I like the Star Trek explanation as employed in the new movie. I guess it's Back to the Futurish as well.
 
Build a city out of Legos. Take it apart, and build a whole new different city out of the exact same Legos, using each and every Lego brick. Now take one of the little Lego people from the new city and try to have it visit the first city.
 
NWO Sentryman said:
I was wondering about time travel:

I i went back in time and killed Hitler, why would i go back in time in the first place?:confused:

If i went back in time to meet Jesus, how would that affect christianity?:confused:

If i went back in time with a very advanced computer and gave it to Richard Nixon, would that mean sawtooth snap?:boggled:
Click to expand...

Causality, as far as we can tell, is directional. As soon as you traveled backwards in time, you would be out of the chain of events that "caused" you to go back in time. The "cause" of Hitler's death would be you appearing suddenly in Austria in the 1920s (or whenever you were shooting for) and killing him. It doesn't matter that the future cause of you going back in time will no longer happen.
 
"Days of Cain" was another sci-fi novel to use this trope. In that one, there was a time travel enforcement agency to prevent this kind of thing from happening. So Hitler, having seen several people try to assassinate him only to be mysteriously prevented at the last minute, concluded he was invincible and had a cosmic destiny, which only emboldened him further.
 
godless dave said:
"Days of Cain" was another sci-fi novel to use this trope. In that one, there was a time travel enforcement agency to prevent this kind of thing from happening. So Hitler, having seen several people try to assassinate him only to be mysteriously prevented at the last minute, concluded he was invincible and had a cosmic destiny, which only emboldened him further.
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Kinda makes one wonder about all those other Über-confident, egomaniacal dictators ... Stalin ... Caligula ... Mao ... Hussein ... Pilate ... Nero ... Rev. Jim Jones ... Kim Jong Il ...

What if all of those man-made catastrophies (911, Titanic, Three-Mile Island, Jonestown, the 1969 World Series, et cetera) were actually condoned by the Time Police in order to prevent even worse disasters from happening?

And what's that "WOOOOOOO" sound I keep hearing?

;)
 
One of several interpretations of time would have you accidentally forking off a whole new universe at the point where you re-entered the time stream with your anomaly. Those lucky/poor people would never know that you saved/condemned them from/to a horrible fate. See James Hogan's Thrice Upon a Time.

I i went back in time and killed Hitler, why would i go back in time in the first place?:confused:
Click to expand...

I read a short story once where the time traveller from the future travelled back to the Nuremburg Rally in 1938 with the mission of assassinating Hitler. He found he had a hell of a time finding a parking space among all the other time travelling machines in the area.
 
shadron said:
... I read a short story once where the time traveller from the future travelled back to the Nuremburg Rally in 1938 with the mission of assassinating Hitler. He found he had a hell of a time finding a parking space among all the other time travelling machines in the area.
Click to expand...

Well, that would explain some of the violence ... the pro-nazi time travellers duking it out with the anti-nazi time travellers. Of course, they'd "have to" use only those weapons appropriate to local and current technology, or risk an anachronistic anomaly in the timestream.

You can't prove it didn't happen that way!

(WTF? There's that "WOOOOO" sound again!)
 
Imagine all the gypsies we'd have if you went back and killed Hitler. Where would they live?
 
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