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Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
101–110 of 158 posts
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#102On a tangentially related note, the tabletop roleplaying game Continuum has, IMO, the most interesting description of time travel and a time travellers community. The premise is simple. What is the most logical thing for the first time traveller to do? He would travel to the future to get his hands on the most advanced time machine possible. In the end, the best is the human mind. They time (and space) travel with a…
Wouldn't we as well need a counterpart to "frag" such as "pop" for all the people saved/born due to the change? Then if the "good guys" corrected the original "frags" those "popped" people would be re-"fragged" which would cause a split group of "good guys" to attempt to "correct" the previously "corrected" history?
Not really. It's cosmology is weird.
The universe is kind of a mutable thing full of "sentient force" (it's time travellers). When a paradox is formed, it's defense mechanism kicks in to eliminate the paradox. That defense mechanism is the good guys (the continuum).
Frag is associated with what you KNOW. Information is usefull but very dangerous. Imagine this, I go to Auschwitz and see all that horror. I decide to kill Hitler and succeed. I just fragged myself, because I know I killed Hitler (therefore, the Holocaust never happened) yet I saw/know what happened if he were alive. Frag is like being "out of sync" with the universe. If I don't feel frag, it means the good guys intervened, and nullified my action. Of course, as punishment they would probably frag me in another way.
Why do they prevent the killing of Hitler? Because they and their frieds may have/will have seen the consequences of Hitler's actions so it's in their interest to prevent the paradox.
Practically, it doesn't matter what really happened, just that it happened as remembered by the coninuum, and that the consequences remain the same. Another example, by some means, JFK's father is sterile. He can't concieve JFK This is a problem as JFK is known to exist. The continuum may stealthily inseminate JFK's mother for him to be born. In the grand scheme, it may be even impossible to know if JFK's was always sterile or if some outside force made him sterile. The universe must BE as it is remembered.
Higher level continuum members start realizing that, in fact, free will does not exist. You just have to do what you have to do, and have fu doing it. (This is also the main focus of disagreement with the bad guys.)
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#103With a cursory look, I couldn't figure out if this was serious. Assuming it is, I'm convinced that Time Travel doesn't exist because casinos and sports betting exist, and casinos would go broke if time travel existed. (Unless you altered time so much travelling in time that you altered everything in the future)
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Combining time travel and computation has interesting results: http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.artic...
Totally serious question: If I go back to 1990, can I distribute a current version of emacs? The toolchain to build the current source tree won't exist for a while.
Why not? Any computer program is just a very large number. Even thought the emacs build process that calculates the large number corresponding to the current version of emacs hadn't been performed in 1990, the number itself "existed" back then as the outcome of any number of other possible computations.
On the other hand, you might have problems with dll dependencies.
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#105[deleted]
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#106With a cursory look, I couldn't figure out if this was serious. Assuming it is, I'm convinced that Time Travel doesn't exist because casinos and sports betting exist, and casinos would go broke if time travel existed. (Unless you altered time so much travelling in time that you altered everything in the future)
If we consider that multiple "time lines" can exist in parallel (multiverses perhaps?), and if we consider that changing an event is the equivalent of making a new decision and branching into a new multiverse, then it stands to reason that at least one universe still exists where casinos and sports betting have not gone broke. And it must be this one.
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
"...say to kill Hitler." Everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. http://www.abyssapexzine.com/wikihistory/
Why just Hitler? Stalin and Mao were arguably equally as bad: http://necrometrics.com/tyrants.htm And there are monsters like Leopold II of Belgium (possible victims in the range 2-15 million) who hardly anyone remembers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_II_of_Belgium#Exploitat... Actually, as hardly anyone remembers Leopold II maybe he is the ideal target.... :-| [NB I eventually remembered that I'm against the…
"Why just Hitler? Stalin and Mao were arguably equally as bad:"
Read the story. This is covered. Quite well, IMHO.
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#108[deleted]
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#109I'm not sure why time travellers from the future would bother to leave prescient messages on the net. What's the motivation? Something like graffiti artists tagging difficult locations? What I can see them (hypothetically) doing is manipulating present-day financial markets by exploiting their knowledge of future events (e.g. sudden commodity shortages or unexpected mineral discoveries) to increase their wealth. Even…
I think the idea is that they would go back to stop the 9/11 attacks, and then on the day prior would look up "flight 11, flight 175, flight 77, flight 93" in google (maybe in separate searches) to see exactly when/where they took off. They wouldn't mean to leave the clue, but no one should have any reason to connect those 4 flights together until the next day.
I guess that would be one motivation. But wouldn't they just do the searches in their present (our future) before travelling back to 2001?
And if they did prevent 9/11 then nobody would connect the searches anyway, because there'd be nothing to associate them.
Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
#110If you are interested in time travel: I saw the movie "About Time" last night and it was both awesome and romantic. Perfect date movie for the geek/non-geek couple. And now at least this discussion thread is not completely useless :-)
Well if you're really interested in time travel fiction, nothing beats Doctor Who.