Rewritten, or Why Time Travel With the Intent to Change is Impossible

Astro Pen said:
(I realise that this doesn't make for exciting SF :confused: )
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That's why we have fantasy... and time travel is clearly fantasy (even when it's dressed up as SF).


Cthulhu.Science said:
When you time travel with their machine you create a new Universe that includes an Earth
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IIRC, jumping into (or creating: the characters aren't sure how it works) a parallel universe is how the Skip Drive works in the Old Man's War series.
 
Another book Morlock Night by K W Jeter This book is a set of sequel to H G Well novel The Time Machine. In this book , The Morlocks have gotten control of the the machine and have turned all of history into their feeding ground which having negative effects on the space time continuum.
 
Swank said:
Nearly all of SF is "fantasy" if you only allow for things we strongly believe are possible.
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Given that
  1. belief is for those who want to think something is true without conclusive evidence that it is, and
  2. we are still a long way from knowing how the universe works (and we may always be that way, with regard to much of it),
we can't rule out things that may be possible, including in ways of which we're not aware.

The least likely of those things that may just be possible is time travel (of the type we've been discussing) as it would clearly undermine some of our most strongly held views of the way we think things are.
 
I remember thinking through time travel in great detail many years ago. I've forgotten most of it except this one point I got hung up on:

Never mind killing your grandad. Never mind sending a human back in time, even. If you send so much as a molecule back in time, that molecule is now in a Universe with one difference: it has an extra molecule in it. The world has been changed. From that point on, any (and I mean ANY) process that is not absolutely 100% deterministic has a chance to turn out differently from how it did in the future timeline the molecule was sent from.

Case in point: the conception of individual humans! Tiny variations in Brownian motion may effect which sperm reaches the egg. Chance variations at a molecular scale will affect the exact list of gene variants which get combined during fertilisation. Fertilisation may also not happen at all, or happen weeks or years later. The result: a different human being who didn't exist in that time-travelling molecule's original timeline. Scale that up: most, if not all humans will be slightly to very different in the new timeline. An entire world populated by our brothers and sister who never were. That's GOT to change everything.

...so if you want to kill Hitler, just send an air molecule back to the day before Hitler's mother got laid. Job done. Of course, you won't exist in the brave new world thus created. I'm not sure what happens to the orphaned futures left behind in this way. Had some ideas, but like I said I've forgotten them.
 
Fiberglass Cyborg said:
I remember thinking through time travel in great detail many years ago. I've forgotten most of it except this one point I got hung up on:

Never mind killing your grandad. Never mind sending a human back in time, even. If you send so much as a molecule back in time, that molecule is now in a Universe with one difference: it has an extra molecule in it. The world has been changed. From that point on, any (and I mean ANY) process that is not absolutely 100% deterministic has a chance to turn out differently from how it did in the future timeline the molecule was sent from.

Case in point: the conception of individual humans! Tiny variations in Brownian motion may effect which sperm reaches the egg. Chance variations at a molecular scale will affect the exact list of gene variants which get combined during fertilisation. Fertilisation may also not happen at all, or happen weeks or years later. The result: a different human being who didn't exist in that time-travelling molecule's original timeline. Scale that up: most, if not all humans will be slightly to very different in the new timeline. An entire world populated by our brothers and sister who never were. That's GOT to change everything.

...so if you want to kill Hitler, just send an air molecule back to the day before Hitler's mother got laid. Job done. Of course, you won't exist in the brave new world thus created. I'm not sure what happens to the orphaned futures left behind in this way. Had some ideas, but like I said I've forgotten them.
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Due to the eggs sperm disruption , you could in fact become your own evil twin or suffer an even worse fate by growing up to be a disk jockey or worse still a Public Chartered Accountant with no discernible imagination and a lion tamer career fetish .:eek:
 
Ursa major said:
Given that
  1. belief is for those who want to think something is true without conclusive evidence that it is, and
  2. we are still a long way from knowing how the universe works (and we may always be that way, with regard to much of it),
we can't rule out things that may be possible, including in ways of which we're not aware.

The least likely of those things that may just be possible is time travel (of the type we've been discussing) as it would clearly undermine some of our most strongly held views of the way we think things are.
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Yes, science fiction has to have some basis in reality: spaceflight to other planets, aliens destroying the Earth, dystopian futures.

Fantasy is things that have no (or so little that it might as well be no) basis in reality. Flying carpets, sentient luggage trunks, unicorns.

Basically the diffetence between plausible and implausible. Time travel definitely falls into the implausible category.
 
Ursa major said:
Given that
  1. belief is for those who want to think something is true without conclusive evidence that it is, and
  2. we are still a long way from knowing how the universe works (and we may always be that way, with regard to much of it),
we can't rule out things that may be possible, including in ways of which we're not aware.

The least likely of those things that may just be possible is time travel (of the type we've been discussing) as it would clearly undermine some of our most strongly held views of the way we think things are.
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So is FTL, materials stronger than chemical bonds, uploading minds, etc, etc. SF isn't about science, it is about possibility. The most strongly held views are that the MF made the Kessel run in 12 parsecs, not what science books imply is unlikely.


The whole damn point of SF is to propose something outlandish and see what the implications are. Not to present the film Gravity over and over.
 
I think this is why we have people with a difference of opinion as to whether Star Wars is fantasy or scifi, and why the lines between the two genres can become blurred.

Personally I believe that time travel is impossible, and so books that include it are fantasy. Often time travel novels are an allegory for something other than movement back and forth in time (The Time Machine for example).
 
paranoid marvin said:
I think this is why we have people with a difference of opinion as to whether Star Wars is fantasy or scifi, and why the lines between the two genres can become blurred.

Personally I believe that time travel is impossible, and so books that include it are fantasy. Often time travel novels are an allegory for something other than movement back and forth in time (The Time Machine for example).
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Fantasy is not anything that is impossible. Fantasy is a much narrower genre than that - it deals largely in what we already have long accepted are outmoded ideas of the arcane. There is a very, very long list of stories with impossible things that no responsible bookseller would ever classify as "fantasy".

That said, Star Wars is SF for exactly the same reason as I, Robot, Dune, Ringworld, Fire Upon the Deep, Player of Games, Star Trek, Gateway, Starship Troopers, The Expanse, Three Body Problem, Ender's Game, Bladerunner, Foundation, Frankenstein, Hyperion, 2001, Slaughterhouse 5, Murderbot, Old Man's War, Solaris, Contact, The Stars My Destination, Cyteen, The Peripheral, Revelation Space, Eon, Pandora's Star and The Invisible Man are. So when you are ready to consign all of the best and brightest to the dustbin of Fantasy because they don't conform to known science, that will be a very stupid day.
 
paranoid marvin said:
Often time travel novels are an allegory for something other than movement back and forth in time (The Time Machine for example).
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I fully agree. It's a terrific literary device to contrast directly, for example, people and attitudes in two different periods and increase the conflict in a way that would be much harder if the story was separated into those two time periods.
 
Harpo said:
See elsewhere for the details of my time travel ideas. It’s possible, but not yet.
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I think that to accept the possibility of time travel, you have to accept that there are a myriad of branching time lines running concurrently. So every time someone goes back, there is a new time line created with the changes they have made.

Go back in time and kill Hitler in 1932, and when you return to the present you have a quite different 2025. Either that, or every time someone goes back, not only does the world around us seamlessly change but so do our memories (assuming that we still exist).

Either possibility is too unlikely (in my opinion) to make the idea of time travel work. I accept the possibility that we may be able to intentionally speed up or slow down time. I also accept the possibility that we may be able to see things that have previously occurred a kind of natural VCR). Just not that we can move backwards in time, change something, and then return to our own time to witness the consequences; or that a new time-line opens open running alongside our own.

Otherwise there would inevitably be a timeline where someone machine-gunned Henry VIII, or took modern battle tanks to Gettysburg, or jet fighters to Pearl Harbour. Or created an alternative timeline where thst happened. Because that alternative timeline would have to accept the posdibility of time travel - otherwise how could any of those things have happened?

So we are living in a timeline where no time machine was ever invented. And perhsps that is for the best.
 
paranoid marvin said:
I think that to accept the possibility of time travel, you have to accept that there are a myriad of branching time lines running concurrently. So every time someone goes back, there is a new time line created with the changes they have made.

Go back in time and kill Hitler in 1932, and when you return to the present you have a quite different 2025. Either that, or every time someone goes back, not only does the world around us seamlessly change but so do our memories (assuming that we still exist).

Either possibility is too unlikely (in my opinion) to make the idea of time travel work. I accept the possibility that we may be able to intentionally speed up or slow down time. I also accept the possibility that we may be able to see things that have previously occurred a kind of natural VCR). Just not that we can move backwards in time, change something, and then return to our own time to witness the consequences; or that a new time-line opens open running alongside our own.

Otherwise there would inevitably be a timeline where someone machine-gunned Henry VIII, or took modern battle tanks to Gettysburg, or jet fighters to Pearl Harbour. Or created an alternative timeline where thst happened. Because that alternative timeline would have to accept the posdibility of time travel - otherwise how could any of those things have happened?

So we are living in a timeline where no time machine was ever invented. And perhsps that is for the best.
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Then there is the ability to go back in time and change anything you want.

You return to witness all the marvelous changes you've made, but, as a person out of time, you still have your memories from birth to the present moment.

On the other hand, every person conceived after the moment of your arrival in the past was never conceived. Instead different people were conceived. And so the timeline is completely altered and you, returning to 2025 might as well have gone to 3025 for all the current culture, technology and events you know about.

But you exist because you exist.

The fun thing about time travel is that we can make up anything we want about it. That is why it's called fiction.
 
Harpo said:
See elsewhere for the details of my time travel ideas. It’s possible, but not yet.
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Time travel could be possible ... in the future

Theoretical physicist Amos Ori has calculated in his equations that time travel, especially into the past could indeed be possible, but unlike previous models which require negative energy or exotic matter, this one created by Mr. Ori does not need it, thus, making time travel a seem like a real...
www.sffchronicles.com www.sffchronicles.com

Time travel?

Einstein once said that time travel was possible via the speed one would have to travel. Anyone think this is possible? For example: 1 km at 60km/h would take 1 min. 1 km at 120 km/h = 30 secs. 1 km at 240 km/h = 15 secs 1 km at 480 km/h = 7.5 secs 1 km at 960 km/h = 3.75 secs 1 km at...
www.sffchronicles.com www.sffchronicles.com

Writing a sci-fi world of future inventions. Feedback and help?

You might try something really far fetched, like people working together in peace and harmony, sustainability of farming attained, and environmental stewardship that actually maintains the earth for future generations. Now those are bizarre, far-flung ideas I'd like to see someone experiment...
www.sffchronicles.com www.sffchronicles.com

Time is an illusion

Yes, I suppose this is possible. Have transporter 'pads' that can move you from one to another in both space and time. But there has to have been a 'pad' made at the other side to be able to make the journey. It's entirely possible that in the near future with more and more powerful computers...
www.sffchronicles.com www.sffchronicles.com
And of course

problems of time travel being common and ordinary

I've long thought that when the first time machine gets invented and switched on, somebody from the future will instantly come out of it - travelling as far back in their past as they can. That person will be regarded as the temporal equivalent of Neil Armstrong. If, in the future, time...
www.sffchronicles.com www.sffchronicles.com
 
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