problems of time travel being common and ordinary

[J Riff]

The answer is - it won't be invented, ever.
So its a puzzle for writers. I watched Looper last nite and it is typical, utter trash. writing-wise.
Ghad its bad... people flippin back and forth thru time like its a walk in the park.
Try and write one and you will see. My latest has a guy waking up in a primordial jungle. Then he goes back and forth thru time, a few times. Immediately the problems begin - is he wearing clothes when he travels to the ancient past and back? Becos if he is... then what's in his pockets? Shouldn't he be able to etc.etc.etc. Headache-inducing.
So the trick is in dodging the paradoxes. Hollywood gets around this using visuals and lots of exciting gun battles which tends to make one forget what the original premise was.
The movies get away with it, but writers shouldn't. It's a minefield, the more you think about it the worse the paradoxes get.

 

[Harpo]

It won't be invented? How do you know? Imagine yourself two centuries ago saying that The Internet won't be invented.
And please read my posts in this thread, I've dealt with the "where are they?" argument already.

I would suspect if you built a time portal in 2563, you would then be able to travel only to that portal as long as it existed. Some how the traveler would have to have a way to determine whether or not the portal was empty at the moment he or she was going to travel to so you didn't have a temporal version of the Fly. You would not be able to travel to April 3, 2581 at 6:00 PM GMT because of a power failure caused by Anti-Tempite's bomb. Of Course, then it starts to get complicated.

Again, see my earlier posts.

 

[Drakai]

Time travel is a complex thing and it's exhausting to think about it because it almost always creates paradoxes. Travelling through time, changing it and affecting future probably needs some kind of parallel universes or timelines theory to explain it. But if you disregard the paradoxes and the explanation; I think you've got a good idea to start from. When thinking about time travel being a common thing, the first thing comes to my mind is an ever-changing future. Everything always changes and you are aware of it. Your friend with whom you were talking suddenly disappears to be never seen ever again. Or one day, when going to work, you notice the building you were working is now a military camp. Or your wife of twenty years is now your best friend and she is married with someone else. But it has always been like this since your birth and you have to adapt in order to preserve your sanity. Yup, I think this is a fun and surreal start to a story.

But to be honest, I don't believe time travel as it is. I think it is only possible to travel into the future because I believe time to be a linear line. So time travel in my stories are pretty simple and easy to write.

 

[Dave]

It won't be invented? How do you know? Imagine yourself two centuries ago saying that The Internet won't be invented.
And please read my posts in this thread, I've dealt with the "where are they?" argument already.

If I have this correct, you say that we see no "time tourists" because the time tracks to those particular events will never ever be built.

Sorry, but have to ask Why not? Unless you are making it some kind of physical law then there is considerable profit and a huge commercial incentive to build those particular time tracks rather than any other tracks. Even if they were officially banned, and locked off, with extreme penalties for breaking the law, criminals will still build them because of the demand. It is simple economics. But actually there is more than that since you have the religious aspect. The birth of Jesus Christ, the Crucifixion of Christ, and the Flight of Muhammad - those three events would probably draw 80% of the "time tourists" IMHO, with another 10% wanting to see Dinosaurs. To use your own analogy, very few people are going to want to see the invention of the Internet (or the invention of anything else.) The only future event that might have a greater pull would be our First Contact with the aliens, but that will be shrouded in secrecy and government conspiracy in order to keep the ordinary public away.

 

[Harpo]

Thanks Dave. The reason (in my opinion) that we don't see time tourists and never have, is that time travel won't work that way. If a time machine itself goes nowhere (in the same way that railway lines stay where they are laid) then time travellers merely step into a machine at one point during that machine's existence, and step out of it at another time during its existence. Changing machines (like changing elevators to go higher up a sky scraper) enables more distant time travelling. But the earliest possible time (Basement in my elevator analogy) would be the limit for travel into anyone's past. 'Year N' being the year the first machine gets invented, it'll become a very important moment historically.

I'm awake at 5am because I can't sleep for thinking about another possible idea relating to this - something I hadn't thought of before, and wanted to write it here - suppose Year N marks a transition as important as that between the Prehistoric era and the Historic era? Call it the Post-Historic era, maybe?
It'd happen that way because (thanks to time travellers from the far-distant future sharing their own time's inventions and discoveries) we would all have teleportation and immortality drugs and easily transmutable objects and stuff that I can't even imagine. There'd be space colonies throughout the galaxies too, providing the raw materials for all of it. So every year from Year N onwards would be basically the same, and anyone can travel to any time. Which then begs the question - why bother noting the passing days & months & years if they're all the same forever? No noting the passing of time equals no history. There'd be no wars if the losing side knew in advance it would lose, and no wars equals no armies, no famous generals, no nations at all probably. Post-Historic.

Or maybe I need a cup of coffee?

 

[Fishbowl Helmet]

No, haven't read the whole thread, but will back track after initial comments.

My question is, in a world where such time travel has become common and ordinary, what are the consequences? For example, everyone who'll be famous for any reason will be known from their birth right through their life, even before they achieve whatever it is (for a real life example, think of when Prince Charles or Prince William were born). Criminals would know that they will get away with it, millionaires won't bother working hard to get there (because their names will be in a list of millionaires) and the register of marriages will tell everyone the name of their future spouses.

This is exactly why you see time travel dealt with the way it typically is, meaning it's either restricted to few devices or there's laws against messing up the past.

But what are the consequences? That's easy: the universe wouldn't exist. Really. More after the jump.

What else? What would happen to religions, in a world where the future history books tell you which religions are going to die out and which will become huge? If an asteroid causes worldwide destruction in the year N, won't everyone time travel away from that year to a future time when the effects of the destruction have faded? What else?

No, they'd time travel to prevent the asteroid hit. Because it would be easier. And humans are nothing if not lazy.

Over the course of all the galaxies, all the universes, all the dimensions proposed by real physicists, and the vast amount of time between the big bang and the possible heat death of the universe, anything that can or could happen, will. Somewhere, somehow, anything that is physically possible is not only possible, it passes probable, and becomes essentially mandatory. From weight of sheer numbers.

Okay, so therefore, if it were ever possible under any physics paradigm for time travel to exist, it will, and might already. And considering it's time travel, that means if it ever happens in the future, it still exists now as they could travel to now. My head hurts already. But, the point being, if time travel inevitably exists, then also inevitably someone's invented it and used it. In some dimension or pocket universe somewhere someone has gotten the hair-brained idea to go watch the big bang.

But, not only would our one time traveler have done so, just about anyone with access to the device and an ounce of curiosity would as well. Remember, weight of numbers. So you have tens, hundreds, thousands, millions? Billions? of time travelers taking a gander and the pop gun that started the race. Over all of time after the device is invented, all species, all planets with access to it, again, sheer numbers dictates that not only will someone do it, but a massive amount of beings are likely to do so.

Forget the doctor letting Rory's da dangle his feet out of the TARDIS and have a snack, watching the big bang would be like a stadium event. You'd have people hawking tickets and punters queued up round the block... you know what I mean. Now, the presence of the time traveling punters would interact with the bang itself. The energy released would interact with the matter of the devices and travelers themselves...

Which would mess up the distribution of stuff released from the big bang, causing those universes to evolve differently. Or exactly as they "were meant to." Point being, things would get messy. If any of a billions things didn't go just so, we wouldn't be here to talk about it. If you've got millions of punters having a go at the big bang, they're going to mess with the distribution of matter and energy in their universe altering it impossibly.

So... any universe where the physics make it possible for time travel to exist, it inevitably would exist... which would cause a temporal traffic jam just as inevitably thereby mucking about with the early universe which would make that universe go sideways in a hurry.

Thankfully our universe is here, as far as we can tell, therefore, time travel is impossible with our universe's physics.

 

[Harpo]

The obvious response to your Big Bang comments is - maybe it was caused by tourists there to watch it happen?

But in my concept of time travel, nobody would ever be able to travel to a time before the invention of time travel.

 

[Fishbowl Helmet]

The obvious response to your Big Bang comments is - maybe it was caused by tourists there to watch it happen?

But in my concept of time travel, nobody would ever be able to travel to a time before the invention of time travel.

Sure. On both counts. And the obvious response it that there's no reason to assume it would work that way if it were invented. In all likelihood it wouldn't work that way. Again, weight of numbers. It's just as likely that time travel exactly fits your model as it would be limited to N -1, or N -2, or N +1, or N +2, on and on to infinity with each direction. Then there's only forward or only backward travel combinations, then there's all the other ways it could be possible. Each one with equal likelihood. So if time travel were invented, not only is it unlikely to fit your model, it's odds against working that way are astronomical. So if you want to limit time travel like this for a story, go for it, but it's just an arbitrary conceit. Any other individual method is just as likely, and there's an unlimited supply of alternate possibilities.

 

[Harpo]

Assuming there are various possible ways for time travel to exist - my idea of future time travellers arriving when the first time machine gets switched on could just be the first of several possibilities. Let's call the different methods of Time Travel 'method 1', 'method 2' etc. So swicthing on the first ever time travel machine is the start of 'method 1'. But immediately we'll have visitors from the future, who will have knowledge of all the other methods of time travel and bring them along when they come. But since we're looking around in 2013 and the world isn't filled with future people, none of the various methods will ever involve travelling back to 2013 or earlier.


(Unless it's a 'view only' method,or similar idea)

 

[Fishbowl Helmet]

Again, only if you assume your method is correct, which you have no reason to assume it would be, as it's completely arbitrary. That we cannot see, or do not know of time travelers now isn't support that therefore they don't exist, it's basically the argument from ignorance, a logical fallacy. It's axiomatic to say that the abscence of evidence is not evidence of abscence.

 

[Harpo]

Yes I'm assuming my method is correct, but this is fiction, I can do that.
In fiction we know of plenty of time travellers - there's HG Wells' chap, there's yr man in his TARDIS, there's Bill & Ted, there's etc etc....

 

[barlennan]

The great problem that this time portal idea and The Time Machine manage to avoid, which is never confronted elsewhere, is that the spatial location you appear at is anchored. Why do time-travelers never materialise ten feet above the ground, or upside-down? If you go back in time to the same point in space, the the Earth will be at a different point in it's orbit, the galaxy woud be less expanded, and your corpse will be floating about in outer space.

 

[Harpo]

In my version, the time machine doesn't travel. it just exists for a long time. It could be moved up & down & sideways, of course.

 

[barlennan]

Or, how about this? You can only power up for one jump. When you turn the machine on, the first person to step into it uses up a one-shot, one way journey back to the intial switch-on. The portal can then be powered up again. This means that there can be multiple portals, which almost all immediately release a one-way traveller. But do avoid the temptation to rip off Heinlein by having one guy appear, only to loop back again at the end, having us wonder where he came from in the first place...

 

[Harpo]

I want to focus on the world where time travelling is commonplace, rather than just one traveller and what they get up to.

 

[barlennan]

Well, it could be commonplace, but the mechanism could be simplified, to stop yourself getting in a plot tangle. Remember that you are creating a device to move on a plot that you want to write. As a pure thought experiment alone, you'd need to explore all the ramifications, and you'll tie yourself in knots doing that. With a one way hop, you can contrast the motivations of the portal builders of the past (modern-day geeks want eloi ladies) with the motivations of the jumpers (morlocks want to see metallica).

Robert Silverberg wrote The Time Hoppers about this sort of idea and I thought it was a great idea, woefully under-explored.

A story is a linear form, no matter how you segment and cross-reference. You can only write one story. The history of the might-have-been is interesting, but eventually you end up with only one narrative. So you have to either have a jumper (Marty McFly) who experiences multiple realities serially, or several whose multiple threads interweave chaotically, or one person who never jumps and wonders what the impacts are and that story is very metaphysical and the plot can't be based on the premise alone.

All of these are hard to write and not much easier to read.

 

[Harpo]

I envisage the arrival of future merchants bringing portable devices (or self-assembly, maybe ) back from the future to earlier times, and distributing them everywhere for whoever can pay the price. of a journey.

 

[J Riff]

The more complex and/or common it is. the worse it gets, if you are trying to write about it,
Imagine asking some million-year old alien race about time travel... they would look at us like some kind of infantile idjuts.
Nope. Not happening. Sorry. But, tis fun to write about, if you are very careful that is.
Think now... reflected light from the surface of the Earth of a million years ago... is still out there, moving away from us. If only we could catch it and at least have a look at the Earth in ancient times! This is, theoretically, possible, but we aren't within a thousand years of being able to do it. Actual time travel, changing events that have already happened? Nah. Next impossible question. Wait till the aliens show up, then you will believe me.

 

[hopewrites]

There will always be skeptics, perhaps some countries will ban it (akin to the countries who ban or chock hold internet within their power) creating a black market time travel where you'd have to say you did your time jumps in another country, or passports would include your when as well as your where of origin.
There could spring up religious fanatics who decry the evils of disturbing the purity of gods time and defiling oneself with the temptation of knowing.
I wouldn't say that millionaire's wouldnt work as hard, if I knew I made a million dollars doing something I'd do it harder faster better than before I knew it would work, perhaps in the hope of making more, perhaps out of extacy in knowing something about it would go right. Food for optimists! " this set back is just a set back. I'm not defeated because my future self says I'll make it. I just have to find out how."

I would be interested in the 'time puritans' like those who chose to live lives in a pre-industrial revolution style nowadays, will their be those who refuse not only to travel themselves, but to accept any technological advance before its time? Would they become a religious sect? What else would they oppose? What would they promote?

Voting campaigns would get interesting in that candidates would base their platforms not on what they would do but what their future selves have done. Opposition would still be naysaying and have to make campaign promises. Some voters would not bother voting because its all decided anyway. Some would vote against the future they know is coming just because they can or in an effort to change it. Some would vote for the future they know is coming just to be right about something or because they believe in it and want to see it happen.

Even if things are set in stone people will try to change them. What you've got a hold of sounds like a modern Greek tragedy. Fate is a set and inescapable thing - so naturally some humans want to escape it.

There would be criminals who still commit their crimes knowing they get caught. Some wouldn't. Massacres might be prevented by knowing in advance they will be attempted, but the courts will have a hayday trying to pass judgment on a future crime. There will be those who demand that because a person can change from one moment to the next his future shouldn't be held against him. Innocent til guilty acts are commented, could easily replace til proven guilty. Time investigators would only need to show up at the scene of the crime and gather evidence (film it happening, get something with DNA samples) to prove guilt so that would be an easy thing to take for granted.
It might be conclusively shown that innocent people held for crimes not yet commented would be X% more likely to commit said crimes, having already done the time for them. Creating an ethical debate on holding people for future crimes as deep and passionate as the modern debate on death sentences.

I've always disagreed with the argument one would notice ones time changing. If my timeline got altered, my current memories would all coincide with the past changes made and I wouldn't know any different. If your coworker disappears right infront of you, your memories of him would be equally gone.

Creating a new discipline for mental health workers. Memories of people that don't belong in this time line. "But we were married I loved her" "well something must have changed that because your life doesn't reflect what you remember."
No one would have to swallow the "I can change" line without prof that the person who can will.

 

[Harpo]

That's the sort of reply I was hoping for, something I can get inspired by. Thanks Hope