I fondly remember watching that movie on TV with my grandparents at their place one summer.
I mean, it was terrifying and might have given me some nightmares since I was pretty young but still, fond memories nonetheless. The movie is just very unsettling, like the horror lies in how alien the whole experience is for the protagonists and it does a great job of encapsulating the weirdness they're going through.
Been many years since I watched it though so it might be actual trash for all I know.
To find that answer I took a screen cap of the pic and used Google image search. Edit: or if you're on an android (I'm sure iPhone has something similar) mine has an option where I can press and hold the little bar on the bottom then do a circle of my screen and it'll search that.
Because with time travel you can travel to a time before they are important and under highest security, say when they are 20-years-old and just walking down the street.
don't worry guys, I just came back from the past, I killed baby Hess Von Macher. the whole German fascism that invaded Poland and killed a hundred thousand people in concentration camps has never happened. y'all welcome.
I would have a Lovecraftian statue carved out of some sturdy, semi-rare material that can stand the test of time, and bury it in Antarctica tens of thousands of years before homosapiens evolved. Then in present day I would wait...
We can do better than that if we want to abuse a time machine to forge Lovecraftian horror!
I would use my time machine to steal Neil Armstrong's corpse from his funeral and then dump it right at the landing site of Apollo 11. First thing Neil sees when he hops onto the lunar surface? His own aged corpse.
I'd get my stone from far in the future, then bury it in the past, so if they date it they'll be like..."this is from 10 million years after today, that doesn't make any sense."
Plis, you could start a new conspiracy. Instead of "The Earth is only 6000 years old", you can be all "The Earth is actually MUCH older, what is science hiding????"
iirc carbon dating wouldn't really work since that's for organic material specifically. But instead of the age of the statue being the main point of concern, I can do you one better. If you make it out of some kind of alloy that doesn't occur in nature, it would further indicate that something has far more advanced knowledge than the era would ever permit. Also, I'm pretty sure that because of nuclear testing putting specific elements into the atmosphere, a lot of materials carry some form of these trace elements, which would indicate knowledge of atomic weapons! (though idk if this would still be a thing or not after thousands of years of the statue being exposed to the elements)
This actually is a good timeline. And our timeline actually has been heavily altered by time travelers! People have actually tried and succeeded at changing the past.
But time travel isn't like in movies. This isn't one of those stories where you go back, change something, and then you come back and everything is a little different. No. In this version of time travel, we get maximum butterfly effect. Going years into the past doesn't just alter history, it completely rewrites it. Go back a hundred years and hang out on a random spot in Antarctica for five minutes, never interacting with another living being? Your presence for that short time will be enough to subtly alter air flows, which will butterfly up to entirely different storms forming in different times and places. Which means that almost everyone born in the last 100 years simply never existed. An entirely new populace is born. No matter how trivial a change you make, any travel beyond a certain length of time into the past results in a complete historical reset.
This is fundamentally not something you can fine-tune. It's not physically possible to go into the past and make a tiny alteration. Every trip is an entirely new spin on the historical roulette wheel. Every trip completely remakes the world.
As such, there's only one practical application of time travel - preventing world-shattering disasters. For example, you could use it to undue a nuclear war. Going back to prevent this apocalypse will result in erasing everyone currently alive, but almost everyone is already dead, so little consequence. Same thing for species-destroying plagues, giant asteroid impacts, etc. Because every trip is a historical reset, it's only useful for scenarios where you're content on just wiping all current people from existence. Even the Holocaust doesn't come remotely close to the level of calamity necessary to justify time travel.
No, I was implying that reality simply branched. Specifically when Bowie died, if you're curious.
But back to your hypothesis: if all of the future is rewritten by travel into the past, then the travel to the past shall not have happened. How do you reconcile this paradox?
Another timeline is created, every timeline is their own universe and universes can interact between each others, universes are part of a "multi verse" which is basically a cluster of universes always expanding;
The time traveler will travel back in time, do their change which create another universe, now they are in this new universe and they aren't in the old one anymore, the time continue as if nothing happened, the universe will do EVERTHING possible but also impossible to mantain the order of the thing such as creating a new universe just because of you
I’d go back and save Sergei Korolev from dying in 1966, leading Soviet cosmonauts to land on the moon first and keeping the space race kicking for far far longer.
Yes, I just started watching For All Mankind, what tipped you off?
You succeeded! Now there is more matter than antimatter due to your body being there, so instead of immediately annihilating itself, the universe still exists!
Actually the 10/12/26 massacre seems pretty on pace to happen. It's what kicks off the USA's final decent into authoritarianism and eventual nuclear holocaust.
But yeah, if I had another time machine I'd probably prevent that too.
Running around fixing and improving things because: "have to." Viciously cursing any person, place, or thing not apparently and actively helping. Diverting disaster after disaster that they may not may not be the origin of and spending a peculiar amount of time erasing evidence they exist.
I'm still trying to find the asshole who prevented the 6th world^[Shadowrun reference. In that setting, magic comes back to Earth in 2011] from happening
I really feel like a fungible timeline would land us in a similar spot as "you deserved everything that ever happened to you." It would be a kind of hell or purgatory. Let me explain.
To put this succinctly, imagine that our current timeline is "optimal." That with a potentially unlimited number of meddling parties from other times, they have already done the very best they could to "fix" our current timeline. Maybe the job is done, maybe they destroyed their own ability to invent time-travel in the process. Either way, this is all we get. The optimal timeline means that every tragedy is a better outcome than would otherwise have been actively prevented, without causing even bigger tragedies later down the timeline, until more changes would only make things worse.
At the same time, it raises all kinds of thorny questions around the idea of free-will. You might actually have free-will, but the mere existence of powerful beings with the ability to erase your mistakes from history, suggests otherwise.
72 Comments
A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world · 62 pts · 92d
Yeah but now these two are hounding you
Lydia_K@lemmy.world · 17 pts · 92d
They're always on time.
TheEighthDoctor@lemmy.zip · 10 pts · 91d
Better than these ones
aldhissla@piefed.world · 9 pts · 91d
They do have a bad track record
I VILL FUCK WIV TIME!
LePoisson@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 91d
I fondly remember watching that movie on TV with my grandparents at their place one summer.
I mean, it was terrifying and might have given me some nightmares since I was pretty young but still, fond memories nonetheless. The movie is just very unsettling, like the horror lies in how alien the whole experience is for the protagonists and it does a great job of encapsulating the weirdness they're going through.
Been many years since I watched it though so it might be actual trash for all I know.
TheEighthDoctor@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 91d
I started it like you as a child but never finished (don't know if my parents had something to do with it) and then recently finished it.
Wyb@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 91d
Source? Looks interesting
_stranger_@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 91d
The Langoliers. They eat time.
LePoisson@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 91d
It's from Langoliers.
To find that answer I took a screen cap of the pic and used Google image search. Edit: or if you're on an android (I'm sure iPhone has something similar) mine has an option where I can press and hold the little bar on the bottom then do a circle of my screen and it'll search that.
Wyb@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 91d
Aight, i do not use google apps in my Android phone so that does not work, but thanks for the recommendation!
Skullgrid@lemmy.world · 54 pts · 92d
why time travel when there are brutal dictators today? You can always buy a plane ticket.
lauha@lemmy.world · 48 pts · 92d
Because with time travel you can travel to a time before they are important and under highest security, say when they are 20-years-old and just walking down the street.
FatVegan@leminal.space · 9 pts · 92d
Then you just killed a guy
youcantreadthis@quokk.au · 7 pts · 91d
Yeah but not one who matters so its not illegal
IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world · 52 pts · 92d
don't worry guys, I just came back from the past, I killed baby Hess Von Macher. the whole German fascism that invaded Poland and killed a hundred thousand people in concentration camps has never happened. y'all welcome.
SuperNovaStar@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 39 pts · 92d
You're not going to believe this, but...
SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 8 pts · 92d
https://youtube.com/shorts/G1nKTfbzr4s?is=FqXeuOIwVPlG7qv0
AskMeForADickPic@lemmy.world · 35 pts · 92d
So it's this guys fault we exist in this shitty trump time line
morto@piefed.social · 29 pts · 92d
Plot twist: we're already in the less shitty timeline, as unbelievable as it can be.
SystemDisc@feddit.org · 10 pts · 92d
Wouldn’t it be depressing if this were the best timeline?
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social · 2 pts · 92d
Ah, well, Golden Ages are defined by what comes before and after them I guess
sidelove@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 91d
Voltaire coming in hot with the "best of all possible worlds"
IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 92d
the implication is that this is the best possible timeline.
mr_account@lemmy.world · 24 pts · 92d
I would have a Lovecraftian statue carved out of some sturdy, semi-rare material that can stand the test of time, and bury it in Antarctica tens of thousands of years before homosapiens evolved. Then in present day I would wait...
isleepinahammock@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 20 pts · 92d
We can do better than that if we want to abuse a time machine to forge Lovecraftian horror!
I would use my time machine to steal Neil Armstrong's corpse from his funeral and then dump it right at the landing site of Apollo 11. First thing Neil sees when he hops onto the lunar surface? His own aged corpse.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 92d
Why wait when you could just go to the point of discovery?
RamenJunkie@midwest.social · 10 pts · 92d
You need it to be propery aged for carbon dating and shit.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 92d
How old does carbon need to be before you can legally date it?
Asking for a friend.
Saledovil@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 92d
Atoms don't age. They don't mature, and they don't change with time. Unstable isotopes decay at random, but the decay probability never changes.
So you can legally date carbon that's 0 years old, if you find any. Most carbon will be much older than you.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 92d
How do you know how old all of my carbon is?
I mean, my friend's carbon?
RamenJunkie@midwest.social · 3 pts · 91d
At least 18 Billion Years.
Zagorath@quokk.au · 2 pts · 91d
I'd get my stone from far in the future, then bury it in the past, so if they date it they'll be like..."this is from 10 million years after today, that doesn't make any sense."
RamenJunkie@midwest.social · 2 pts · 91d
Maximum confusion!
Plis, you could start a new conspiracy. Instead of "The Earth is only 6000 years old", you can be all "The Earth is actually MUCH older, what is science hiding????"
mr_account@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 91d
iirc carbon dating wouldn't really work since that's for organic material specifically. But instead of the age of the statue being the main point of concern, I can do you one better. If you make it out of some kind of alloy that doesn't occur in nature, it would further indicate that something has far more advanced knowledge than the era would ever permit. Also, I'm pretty sure that because of nuclear testing putting specific elements into the atmosphere, a lot of materials carry some form of these trace elements, which would indicate knowledge of atomic weapons! (though idk if this would still be a thing or not after thousands of years of the statue being exposed to the elements)
RamenJunkie@midwest.social · 0 pts · 91d
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 92d
Christ, imagine this being the good timeline.
isleepinahammock@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 6 pts · 92d
One head canon I like:
This actually is a good timeline. And our timeline actually has been heavily altered by time travelers! People have actually tried and succeeded at changing the past.
But time travel isn't like in movies. This isn't one of those stories where you go back, change something, and then you come back and everything is a little different. No. In this version of time travel, we get maximum butterfly effect. Going years into the past doesn't just alter history, it completely rewrites it. Go back a hundred years and hang out on a random spot in Antarctica for five minutes, never interacting with another living being? Your presence for that short time will be enough to subtly alter air flows, which will butterfly up to entirely different storms forming in different times and places. Which means that almost everyone born in the last 100 years simply never existed. An entirely new populace is born. No matter how trivial a change you make, any travel beyond a certain length of time into the past results in a complete historical reset.
This is fundamentally not something you can fine-tune. It's not physically possible to go into the past and make a tiny alteration. Every trip is an entirely new spin on the historical roulette wheel. Every trip completely remakes the world.
As such, there's only one practical application of time travel - preventing world-shattering disasters. For example, you could use it to undue a nuclear war. Going back to prevent this apocalypse will result in erasing everyone currently alive, but almost everyone is already dead, so little consequence. Same thing for species-destroying plagues, giant asteroid impacts, etc. Because every trip is a historical reset, it's only useful for scenarios where you're content on just wiping all current people from existence. Even the Holocaust doesn't come remotely close to the level of calamity necessary to justify time travel.
mokus@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 7 pts · 92d
You don’t even need humans doing the travel. You just send a 10 kg rock on a one-way trip back and get all the same effects.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 92d
No, I was implying that reality simply branched. Specifically when Bowie died, if you're curious.
But back to your hypothesis: if all of the future is rewritten by travel into the past, then the travel to the past shall not have happened. How do you reconcile this paradox?
ben_dover@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 91d
this guy bootstrap-paradoxes 👆
Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it · 1 pts · 91d
Another timeline is created, every timeline is their own universe and universes can interact between each others, universes are part of a "multi verse" which is basically a cluster of universes always expanding;
The time traveler will travel back in time, do their change which create another universe, now they are in this new universe and they aren't in the old one anymore, the time continue as if nothing happened, the universe will do EVERTHING possible but also impossible to mantain the order of the thing such as creating a new universe just because of you
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 91d
I've actually considered this on multiple occasions
Jaycifer@piefed.social · 12 pts · 91d
I’d go back and save Sergei Korolev from dying in 1966, leading Soviet cosmonauts to land on the moon first and keeping the space race kicking for far far longer.
Yes, I just started watching For All Mankind, what tipped you off?
derry@midwest.social · 12 pts · 91d
There's an oglaf for that https://www.oglaf.com/chronotherapy/ NSFW
RamenJunkie@midwest.social · 12 pts · 92d
I want to go back in time and snuff out that first ameoba.
BodilessGaze@sh.itjust.works · 7 pts · 92d
Meiosis was a mistake.
smeenz@lemmy.nz · 6 pts · 92d
You'll have to fight Q for it while Picard watched
TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works · 11 pts · 92d
If I had time travel I would prevent the big bang - or, at least, prevent the universe settling down and becoming friendly to life.
pressanykeynow@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 92d
Why?
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social · 36 pts · 92d
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."
Tonava@sopuli.xyz · 4 pts · 92d
Shellbeach@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 92d
When?
Siethron@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 91d
...How do you think the big bang happened originally?... It's your fault!
Tonava@sopuli.xyz · 0 pts · 92d
TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 92d
to a moment after the big bang then
humorlessrepost@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 92d
You succeeded! Now there is more matter than antimatter due to your body being there, so instead of immediately annihilating itself, the universe still exists!
Maelvie@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 91d
New big bang theory, formed from a time traveler who went too far back
snoons@lemmy.ca · 11 pts · 92d
I knew they faked the moon landing for a reason
froufox@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 9 pts · 92d
i would prevent 10/12
AdolfSchmitler@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 91d
Actually the 10/12/26 massacre seems pretty on pace to happen. It's what kicks off the USA's final decent into authoritarianism and eventual nuclear holocaust.
But yeah, if I had another time machine I'd probably prevent that too.
Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it · 1 pts · 91d
Nah, i like the nuclear holocaust, don't prevent that
I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 91d
14/12 with rice
krisevol@lemmus.org · 2 pts · 91d
I prevented 8/1. You're welcome.
SethTaylor@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 91d
I prevented 4/20
I was universally disliked
Went back and restored it
trashgirlfriend@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 91d
Ah, the old Hitler baby murder fiasco
bufalo1973@piefed.social · 6 pts · 92d
Too close in time. I'd go back and make Abraham eat lithium... or kill him when he was a child.
birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 5 pts · 92d
Abraham was a fucking lunatic for hearing voices and acting on them, trying to murder his own son, and later killing an animal.
Escape13@slrpnk.net · 5 pts · 91d
You dont need a Time Machine to make better choices today.
BeMoreCareful@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 91d
Time travelers are the OG BOFH.
Running around fixing and improving things because: "have to." Viciously cursing any person, place, or thing not apparently and actively helping. Diverting disaster after disaster that they may not may not be the origin of and spending a peculiar amount of time erasing evidence they exist.
ICastFist@programming.dev · 4 pts · 91d
I'm still trying to find the asshole who prevented the 6th world^[Shadowrun reference. In that setting, magic comes back to Earth in 2011] from happening
tgirlschierke@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 91d
i feel like i would've either died via VITAS or lived a long life as an ork or troll after being goblinised in 2021
qevlarr@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 92d
Reminds me of Capricorn One (1977)
dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 91d
I really feel like a fungible timeline would land us in a similar spot as "you deserved everything that ever happened to you." It would be a kind of hell or purgatory. Let me explain.
To put this succinctly, imagine that our current timeline is "optimal." That with a potentially unlimited number of meddling parties from other times, they have already done the very best they could to "fix" our current timeline. Maybe the job is done, maybe they destroyed their own ability to invent time-travel in the process. Either way, this is all we get. The optimal timeline means that every tragedy is a better outcome than would otherwise have been actively prevented, without causing even bigger tragedies later down the timeline, until more changes would only make things worse.
At the same time, it raises all kinds of thorny questions around the idea of free-will. You might actually have free-will, but the mere existence of powerful beings with the ability to erase your mistakes from history, suggests otherwise.
Fontasia@feddit.nl · 2 pts · 91d
Amazing that all you needed to do was give him a pen