@Nifflas@buckysrevenge By the time I get access to time traveling technology, it will be so popular visiting the dinos will be a massive tourist trap and I'd have to queue for hours ;(
@Tijn Not necessarily! The dinosaurs existed for a very, very, very long time! There should be enough time * surface area to distribute a lot of time travelers. Depends on how many ofc :)
@Nifflas I’m actually voting for the first. Creating multiple timelines means a potentially infinite amount of immutable suffering in infinite timelines caused by time travel, an unchangeable closed loop is too boring, and back to the future is fun but much too ridiculous.
Single changeable timeline means time travel has stakes and people aren’t just making their own timelines - we get one and need to do our best with it.
@Sophie@Nifflas I was tempted to go for single changeable timeline too, but then I thought of how it would scale to millions or billions of time travelers and well... that wouldn't be great, would it.
@Tijn@Sophie Good news is, everyone would be unaware of reality changing every few milliseconds :)
And all that's needed for the chaos to stop is one preventing the invention of time travel. Or maybe they'll keep the invention to themselves only and shape reality to their liking!
@Nifflas@Sophie idk, would they? The fact the one timeline changes doesn't mean everyone's memories get updated too. I fear the world would lose all coherence and causality.
@Nifflas@Tijn that makes the most sense imo, your memories are created in the time you experience. It gets a little funky if you have a single timeline which is changed while you’re out of your time, but by most logic I think it would just undo your current trip and you’d not remember.
@Sophie@Tijn Yeah! One way to resolve it is when you travel back in time you keep your memories and matter even if you cause yourself to not be born/decide to not time travel. So you may be the only person with memories of events that happened to you which you caused to not happen.
Though, I have no idea how this scales up to having tons of people time traveling.
@Sophie@Nifflas if this is how it works, then every time someone makes a change in the past, all events must happen again, from the moment of the change up until the current day.
But given the fact the universe is not deterministic, it would mean even the tiniest change could have wildly different outcomes down the line.
@Tijn@Sophie I fully subscribe to the idea that the tiniest changes will cause absolutely enormous changes in the long run. Except in the third "closed time loop" option of the poll.
And who even knows what happens in the "Back to the Future" version
@Nifflas@Tijn yeah I think it’s hard not to be invested in the idea of the butterfly effect wrt time travel if you’ve ever done any programming. One little change will consistently ruin EVERYTHING.
@Nifflas For the separate timeline option, the absolute foundational work is Bruce Sterling's Mozart in Mirrorshades, which is getting pretty old by now but I would claim has lost none of its punch.
(William Gibson cites it as a direct inspiration for The Peripheral.)
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