alt text:
Many a hungry time traveler has Googled ‘trilobites shellfish allergy’ only to find their carrier had no coverage in the Ordovician.
You must log in or register to comment.
Asphyxiation checks out
A time machine is a teleportation machine. If we can imagine a time machine existing, a teleportation machine isn’t really far fetched.
I cannot wait for time travel to exist so all the pedants online can be like “um actually, it’s a space-time machine”
Edit: because I am also pedantic like this.
A time machine is a faster than light drive.
Well, the other way 'round, really, but same difference.
And to come back you need a slower than (but very close to) light drive.
well, if you rewind time and stay in the box, the box would probably stay on earth, but I have no idea how time travel would work.
There is no cosmic frame of reference. Earth is moving, the sun is moving, the galaxy is moving, but you can choose any frame of reference within that. It’d be really silly to use the suns frame of reference, you’d use Earth’s.
There is no cosmic frame of reference
There is. Just because we can’t correctly find and use it with our knowledge doesn’t mean there isn’t.
it’d be really silly
What would be silly is thinking that earth is some magical center of the universe… We have abandoned this concept about 500 years ago.
It isn’t about how humans view their place in the cosmos.
It’s about relativity.
Space and time are inseparable. Hence the term space-time. You can thank Einstein for that.
The comment you replied to states It’s also about frames of reference, probably one of the most crucial aspects of relaticity.
Einstein has proven that time and space appear and are experienced differently for each and every observer. With the effects being significantly different depending on gravity, speed and distances.
If you could reverse time travel then the space would conform to the time you travelled to.
If you could reverse time travel then the space would conform to the time you travelled to.
Really? What else would conform to the past point in time? Would fabric in my clothes disintegrate and transforms to something else? Would I, because I, well, didn’t exist in that past? Then it wouldn’t really be time travel, would it?
Or would the clothes stay, because they are mine and important for me and would I stay on earth, because that’s my baseline? Is universe somehow “me-centric”? Not really likely, is it?
You need to abandon your idea of time travel as seeking in a video with rewind button.
According to our current understanding of physics time travel is impossible, but we are talking about a word where it is clearly possible, so you can’t really constraint yourself with the limits as we know them now.
I don’t exist in the future, yet, here I am, in the future, with all my clothes in tact.
There is nothing in physics that actually says it’s impossible.
Maybe your current understanding of physics says it’s impossible.
Nothing about it is about me.
IT’S ABOUT FRAMES OF FUCKING REFERENCE. Inertial frames of reference, relativistic frames of reference, etc.
(This is relativity, if you think it’s about me, you obviously need to learn little more.)
*Also, I’ve blocked this user.
*Also, I’ve blocked this user.
Oh no, have you used the word relativity too many times and now you have no more arguments? :D
If we can’t find the cosmic frame of reference, then how do we know it even exists? Sure, you can assume it exists, and call that a hypothesis. If only someone had a way to test that hypothesis.
Ok, that’s fair point.
There is.
No. It’s called relativity for a reason.
Since a time machine has to fiddle with space-time somehow and that is an attribute of the universe – i agree, the universe is the frame of reference.
The earth is not a magical center of the universe, it’s just convenient right now to use it as a frame of reference no need to associate it to magical thinking.
I hear the universe is infinite, and no matter how far away from earth you go, there’s just infinitely more universe. So like if you are standing on earth looking twelve billion light years that way and then twelve billion light years the other way you are in a sphere of unimaginable size right? But if you actually went twelve billion light years that way once you get there you can still look this way or that way and see twelve billion more light years every which way. So from that perspective, pretty much anywhere in the universe is the center of the universe…from a certain point of view…
#1, during all eras: they didn’t get the space-travel part in space-time correct.
Wouldn’t that just be asphyxiation?
But what about time travelers who go forward in time
Lava
Autoerotic asphyxiation
Morlocks
Believe it or not, jail
…and asphyxiation.
Robot raptors
Cancer
Flu.
Asphyxiation
Time machine door gets stuck
Mole people.
It’s a spectrum from “low and slow” up to “broiled.”
[off topic]
One of my favorite time travel novels is ‘The Big Time’ by Fritz Leiber.
The two big ideas in the book. First, that there’s a Law of Conservation of Reality. Go back in time and shoot Hitler. He dies. Then gets better, really fast. Twenty minutes after you shoot him, he’s fine. Spend your whole life shooting him and the history books will just ignore it. It takes an army of time travelers working night and day to get any changes to stick.
Second idea. There are two armies, both trying to change the past/future. They have been at it since before the Big Bang and will go on until the Heat Death of the Universe. They recruit humans but no human has ever seen the big bosses, just low ranking stooges.
The first one was also used in the short series “11.22.63”. Going back to change things results in huge amounts of temporal inertia to overcome.
And the second one reminds of the TV series “Travelers”, with future factions of time travelers emerging from the changes of previous time travelers in the past. It’s worth noticing that time travelers from “Travelers” only displaces their mind consciousnesses, not their entire bodies.
Watched a couple of episodes, didn’t get to the time war part. May check it out.
Which was originally a Stephen King novel.
He dies.
That’s an unusual take on it. That would definitely have been recorded somewhere as a miraculous recovery. Usually it’s written that the time travelling assassin fails in such a way that no-one notices, and if they do have some kind of effect, generally ends up being the cause of the history they were taught rather than the changer of it.
The author did a few stories based on the ‘Change War.’
In one, a time traveler goes back and takes the bullets out of a gun, hoping to prevent a death. There’s no gunshot, but the victim is hit by a meteor and dies anyway. The idea is that Time is immutable and almost impossible to change with only one set of hands.
But that neccessitates a predetermined fate.
Ctrl+F Hitler, ah, there it is. I feel like the xkcd comic missed an opportunity to have a 1932-1945 segment in there about the biggest cause of death for time travelers being OTHER time travelers killing them before they can successfully go back in time and kill Hitler, lol.
Re: conservation of reality, I feel like if I went back and shot Hitler, I would miss, or be stopped by security, or bad weather, or my gun would misfire, or even if I managed to actually do it, he’d be replaced by a look alike, and then it would turn out the guy we always thought was Hitler was actually just an actor, or something. Like if someone went back and killed baby Adolph when he was six months old, the parents would adopt another kid and name IT adolph, and there you go. Whatever happened happened and can’t be undone, not through magic resuscitation of a corpse, but through smooth and natural intervention of reality itself, if that makes sense…
Mammalia are a footnote in earths history.
