I was thinking about this yesterday whilst playing with my dinosaur-obsessed nephew. I want to see a goddamn dinosaur. I really wish someone could invent time travel so I can see dinosaurs. That would be awesome. But here’s the question: if you could time travel where would you go and why?
You can go anywhere: the future, the past. But you can only get one choice. You don’t have to stay there.
Where do you go?
Comments
78 responses to “Off Topic: Time Travel”
How many trillions you prepared to pay? The distance betwen any two points in space-time is change in possibility via superposition. Thats the secret of teleportation and time travel.
What.
The world is constantly rotating around a sun that’s constanting rotating around a galaxy. If you time travel you’ll just appear in space, trillions of miles away from where the planet will be at that time.
Can be calculated. Also space time is conctantly changing and stretching and moving. Isn’t it?
Yes, but most people ignore this fact. Even if it can be calculated, one tiny error can leave you stranded and you won’t know the result until you do it.
Not only that, but how exactly can you move the point of time travel? How can you move the exiting portal to another different area of space?
It’s probably why I liked how in Back to the Future it implies that their method of time travel is anchored to the space they’re traveling on, which explains the fire stream and the loop.
Does this answer the question of “Where are all the time travellers?” then?
LOL floating in space – except for old Mobile Phone lady – she made it!
I’d love to say Medieval Europe – but honestly, it would be scary and dangerous as hell. My second choice would be somewhere in the earlier 20th century – say 1930s to 1950s. I think people would be fascinating – not so behind as the middle ages or some such, but still not exactly enlightened either.
Just visit different parts of the world. lol
To the 80s, change my name to Lou, buy Google, rebrand as Lougle sit in hot tub
rofl, why do you have to change your name to Lou and call it Lougle? if that was already your name I’d understand but what is this I don’t even. I’m actually giggling pretty hard at your comment, you weirdo
http://m.imdb.com/title/tt1231587/
Watch and enjoy 🙂
And what would you take with you to convince people you’re a powerful wizard?
Boomstick
Polaroid camera.
“I have trapped your soul!”
I’ve seen Bewitched, the answer is always a matchbox and some honey.
Past is the obvious choice, at least you know what you are going back to experience.
Dinosaurs would be an awesome choice, seeing a T-Rex chasing and getting a meal ticket.
Pyramids, just how the fuck were they made… (Aliens of course! :p)
Ancient Roman in general, given how advanced they actually were.
So long as the butterfly effect isn’t going to ruin it, I’d probably go forward a week and find out lottery/sport results, return to the present and profit.
I was gonna say the same thing, except if you only go a week, you’re thinking too small 😛 I’d probably go forward several years, note all the results for the intervening years, then head home and cash in. Maybe get hold of a sports almanac like in Back To The Future 2 😛
True. However, you run a higher risk of being assassinated by suspicious bookmakers and alike. :p
Or maybe just stick some money into a high-interest bank account, travel a couple hundred years into the future, collect the compound interest in cash and bring it back with you 🙂
Of course it’d be a problem if they changed the notes in that time. Bringing back a pile of $10,000 notes with Shane Warne on one side and Brynne Edelston on the other probably wouldn’t do you much good in our time 😛
It would be a problem when you come back from the future with a pile of money that doesn’t exist yet and people (specifically government organisations) want to know where your new-found wealth came from.
Screw that. Go back in time when Bitcoin was starting up and buy millions in stock.
Genius.
To the future, become a space pirate.
“You can’t take my sky from meeeee…”
*the sky…
To the future, surf hoverboards & defeat Krang.
I’d go back to this morning and remember to pack my lunch.
Ooh or you could go back in time 5 minutes and convince yourself not to go back in time. Fuck with history in the most irrelevant way possible
I’d like the ability to travel to various events in history that we can’t figure out 100% so I can see what really happened – you know, stuff like witnessing the birth of Christ, catching Jack the Ripper, etc. I don’t want to visit those eras specifically, I just want to see what happened.
As for seeing what an era itself was like, I’d go maybe 100 years into the future. I figure any further than that and may 20th century caveman brain won’t be able to keep up with the advances in technology.
Same.
Yeah I’d love to see some of that biblical stuff in action – the 5 loaves and 2 fishes would be a great one to witness!
I’d suggest reading Arthur C. Clarke / Stephen Baxter’s “The Light of Other Days” – which has some rather interesting ideas about not time travel, but time “viewing.” That is, a read only look back in history, not actually physically travelling back to some other time.
Where would I go though? I’d like to see how Rome worked, or didn’t work, though there’s the language barrier to get past. Otherwise I’d like to see proto-humans and the world they lived in.
That is an excellent book, and has lots of parallels with the way people use social networking and the end of privacy as we know it.
Like the fact that if you can see backwards in time, you can effectively see the present, anywhere, by just looking back one second. So there are no secrets any more, for anyone and what that does to societyEasy: London, every Saturday night from 1963 to 1971. I’d take a TV and computer with a high definition capture card and record every episode of Doctor Who that the BBC would subsequently junk. I’d come back to the present and return them to the BBC in exchange for a cut of the re-release sales. Profit and adoration from fans abound.
How much of a nerd am I that I would go back to the swinging 60s, the era of free love and easy sex to tape a sci-fi show?
You! And this!!!
Awesome!
Or you could just convince the guys there to not burn them. Or just steal the ones they have marked for burning.
What a brilliant idea!
To the year 3000. I mean, my parents, my co-workers, my girlfriend- I’d never see any of them again.
It’d be great.
You could meet a cute lady with one eye and have a robot as a best friend!
Sound like an amazing premise for a TV series!
You’d still have Zoidberg.
You’d all still have Zoidberg!
I’d go and see some of the Ancient Civilizations.
Ancient Egypt, actually see how the pyramids were built and what that whole complex looked like in it’s day. Walk around the streets and temples in all their glory.
Similar to Ancient Rome, I’d love to actually see what those cities really looked like.
I’d also like to see dinosaurs. Now I assume my time travel machine is also a space craft? I’d also like to watch from space the impact event that lead to the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Then while I’m flying around in my time travelling space ship, I would go and visit mars and see what it was like when it had water on the surface and a thick atmosphere.
Unfortunately, I don’t think it is possible. If it was any change ever influenced by a time traveller would be unnoticeable anyway. Though tourism as a tame traveller could be interesting, though wouldn’t work as it would automatically have an influence on the timeline and would cancel itself out. Eventhpugh it’s referred to as a time line I don’t think works anything like a line. More like a blob? This is the kind of stuff quantom physics and string theory would explain, or be capable of explaining and I don’t know anything of those besides the titles and vague ideas from understanding the words writhing the title. lol
Id be going back to try and stop a whole of shit from happening. id help the brits win the coloinal civil war, Prevent the stolen generation from happening, prevent the exile of jews from isreal, prevent the crusades and world war 2 (not world war 1 though) prevent the african slave trade and introduce some pf the present day technology earlier in time such as the old push powered lawnmower and solar power and wind technology . Oh and id help nikoli tesla defeat tomas edison
Instead of going back in time to kill Hitler, I’d arrive before he was born and woo the shit out of his mum.
So you’d be Hitler’s dad?
Naw, I’d just steal her away from Hitler’s dad then leave her at the altar. Not very classy, but better than murder.
And she’d end up jilted, unknowingly pregnant and filled with bitter resentment. No way her child could be anything less than a saint…
Why does she have to be pregnant?
Are you asking that in exasperation? If not, I’d guess a predestination paradox where you were always Hitler’s deadbeat runaway dad.
Its all fun & games until you inadvertently cause the holocaust…
I’m trying to comprehend the severity of the repercussions that would follow somebody killing Hitler before he did anything bad. How much would the present have changed?
Its questions like this that make me want to be able to save a backup of the universe onto a flash drive and then tinker about with time. That way I can restore the backup if things go badly
I suspect it would depend if there was another Nazi capable of riling up the public the way Hitler did. He seemed to be pretty good at playing to the darker side of human nature and the crushing reparations after WW1 that were really just designed to punish Germany would have made it pretty easy to harness that anger.
Either that or if you killed Hitler early enough, Russia would rise to prominence under Stalin but he’d really be just a pawn manipulated by Kane & the Brotherhood Of Nod
There is plenty of alternate timeline fiction that tries to answer this stuff, some of it is great.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternate_history_fiction
There’s nowhere I’m really dying to see, so I’d go one week into the future, get some lotto numbers, and then come back to the present.
Don’t you mean “nowhen”, Shane?
hue
I’d go back in time to see a dinosaur… and then I’d be hugely disappointed because they look like giant budgerigars.
I’m sorry, dinosaurs just haven’t been able in create the same sense of wonder in me ever since I learned they had feathers.
Isn’t that still scientific conjecture? Personally, I like Professor Ferrington’s theory: dinosaurs are just discarded chicken bones left over from some giant aliens’ picnic.
Well there’s that whole archaeopteryx thing
To the past, bringing every game console released in the last 20 years and giving them to Sega to reverse engineer and release themselves ahead of their competitors.
They’d just fuck them all up anyway.
Surely they couldn’t do a worse job of the WiiU than Nintendo
Sorry… I was assuming you’d give that one a miss 😛
You’re assuming that someone hadn’t tried that with Nintendo already. *Points at Virtual boy*
I would travel to medieval Japan. Just to experience it… and maybe learn some skills along the way.
I would travel forward in time and get genetic and cybernetic enhancements.
I would go far into the future and hope there are less people, or at least hope that everyone has learned to “Be excellent to each other”.
I would travel 2 hours back in time and tell myself not to eat that whole tub of chocolate soy ice cream
You will feel sick, you will feel sooo Sick!
I read that as soy-sauce ice-cream…
my brother added wasabi to our ice cream once, most unpleasant.
I’d go back and shoot the JFK assassination from a different angle with a period camera, come back, and pretend I’d found the footage In my aunt’s old cardboard boxes full of junk in her attic. Then, I’d post it on the internet and spend my days running from the CIA, because life can be boring sometimes.
I’d hide out in the book depository with taser and take out Lee Harvey Oswald and see if Kennedy still got shot!
Time Travel is impossible, I’ve thoroughly researched it, it’s a carrot that doesn’t exist, feel free to prove me wrong but from my research there is only 1 type of “time travel”, that is, point A to point B within real-time, not into the past or future, just the present to the present, aka wormholes, connecting near or distant parts of the universe, but going into the past or future just doesn’t work, not for 3d mortal humans anyway, as for higher dimensional beings made up other things that’s another story.
I would go back to see my own birth (weird..?).
Are we assuming the Copenhagen or the Many Worlds theory of quantum collapse? For traveling into the past, that is. (Copenhagen assumes a single world line.)
If Copenhagen, nothing you did could have any impact. If Many Worlds, you could write yourself out of reality (very easily) so you effectively couldn’t return home.
There’s a lot of the past I would love to observe, but I really, REALLY wouldn’t want to live in any of those times. No indoor plumbing for most of history. No computers. Almost any time and place would not understand your language.
Traveling to the future could be even worse. Suddenly you’re a caveman, confronted with technologies you can’t possibly grasp… if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, there’s some form of Armageddon ahead of us which will leave the entire planet in rotten shape.
For now I’m happy with my current rate of time travel – one second per second.
(If I had to pick something, I would go back in time with a history of key stocks and sporting events, and key technologies to patent.)