It's "Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day" on Saturday, Dec. 8. Here are some suggestions to celebrate the traditional holiday:
Remember, dystopian future travelers are very startled that they've gone back in time. Some starters:
- If you go the "prisoner who's escaped the future" try shaving your head and putting a barcode on the back of your neck. Then stagger around and stare at the sky, as if you've never seen it before.
- Walk up to random people and say "WHAT YEAR IS THIS?" and when they tell you, get quiet and then say "Then there's still time!" and run off.
- Stand in front of a statue (any statue, really), fall to your knees, and yell "NOOOOOOOOO"
- Stare at newspaper headlines and look astonished.
- Take some trinket with you (it can be anything really), hand it to some stranger, along with a phone number and say "In thirty years dial this number. You'll know what to do after that." Then slip away.
My favorite time traveler story in the last year was the 2-part South Park episode in which Cartman can't wait for the Wii game player to come out.
People said they'd appear in cow pastures, etc., panic. But writer John Barnes won the grand prize. He was then teaching drama at some Colorado college which existed in 1936, as did his office, and said that he had showed up for work that morning (04/01/96) very hung over from a party, so he'd just have entered the building oblvious to everything and everyone, and not notice anything amiss until discovering that his keys did not fit his office door.
Wait, what is today?
"(And by the way, the history books didn't say anything about me sticking around afterwards.)"
It's also nice to give credit where credit is due. (Yes, Ken Denmead gave a tiny link to Dresden Codak at the end of the post, but apparently didn't otherwise identify it or name Aaron Diaz as the author.)
Which scenario pretty much proves that there will never be time machines: If someone were ever to invent one in the distant future, it would have been patented long ago.
But Larry Niven's analysis satisfies me. If time machines are possible, they will inevitably be used to alter the time line. The simplest alteration is the one that results in the time machine never being invented. Therefore time machines cannot exist, however much we'd like to go back to high school and this time have the courage to invite Andrea to the prom.
Regards,
Ric
The thing is, the past has already happened from the point of view of the future. There can be time travellers from the future, but they would already be a part of the past (their actions in the past will have already taken place before they step into the machine and go back in time) and thus can't change the future.
Well...the way I sees it, if you've actually invented the time machine, you can probably do whatever you good and well like with it.
Well...the way I sees it, if you've actually invented the time machine, you can probably do whatever you good and well like with it.
The thing is you can, but you have already done it.
That makes time travellers pathetic losers, since the rest of us can change the future.
In R.A. Heinlein's A Door Into Summer, the secret military laboratory developed a time machine that will displace two equal masses in time, one to the future and the other to the past - but whether it is you or your counterweight that goes to the past is, like certain quantum phenomena, inherently a 50-50 chance. Since that wouldn't be useful to the government, the project was shut down and the time machine remains locked up in an empty lab. However, Heinlein's protagonist knows from documentary evidence that he went backwards, so he breaks into the lab and puts himself in the machine. IOW, it worked for him because he was fulfilling history rather than trying to change it - but the time machine remains only because it is a closely held secret that hasn't affected society.
Aren't time machines only capabile of transporting the user back to the time they first become operational? I know that Tipler Cylinders and wormholes work that way...
-dk
At that moment, the universe presents a Blue Screen of Death, and if there's a God He hits the reboot button.
If there isn't, we're screwed.
Only a person who is his own grandfather can defeat the evil Brain menace.
And DMC? The flux capacitor?
I heard that people from the future are more subtle than are we.
You people need to read R. A. Lafferty's story "Rainbird."
Nice. Very nice.