Poll of the Day > One thing that always bugs me about time travel movies/shows...

(+) Yeah! (+)

The time travelers are always stupid about it. They run around trying to warn people about what's about to happen or they try to prevent it. And they never think about how they'd be changing history if they stop some disaster.

I'm watching the first episode of the Time Tunnel, in which Doug and Tony find themselves on the Titanic. So what's the very first thing Tony does? Find the captain and try to convince him the Titanic is going to sink.

"I'm from the future and the Titanic is going to hit an iceberg and sink!"
"Riiiiiiight..."

I guess that's what happens when you hire Moondoggie to work on your time machine.

lots of times they don't do that

captpackrat posted...

The time travelers are always stupid about it. They run around trying to warn people about what's about to happen or they try to prevent it. And they never think about how they'd be changing history if they stop some disaster.

I'm watching the first episode of the Time Tunnel, in which Doug and Tony find themselves on the Titanic. So what's the very first thing Tony does? Find the captain and try to convince him the Titanic is going to sink.

"I'm from the future and the Titanic is going to hit an iceberg and sink!"
"Riiiiiiight..."

I guess that's what happens when you hire Moondoggie to work on your time machine.

It would be interesting if we had one where they actually succeed.

I mean, even though it'll mess with the timestream, you kinda *have* to try something. Plus everybody always focuses on things being made worse when they could also be better. What if saving the Titanic prevented WWII... somehow?

Revelation34 posted...

It would be interesting if we had one where they actually succeed.

There probably have been a few with dire consequences.

what about the one where homer goes back in time and kills a bunch of dinosaurs and eventually goes to a timeline where everything is perfect (although he flees because he thinks that timeline doesnt have donuts, whoops what a blunder!)

My problem with time travel is it never accounts for the movement of the earth, the solar system, or the galactic plane. The Delorian would hit 88.8mph and more than likely *bamf* in another time out in the cold vacuum of space...and that's not even accounting for conservation of angular momentum.

in endgame how did captain America come back as an old man? Hulk says they cant go back and change the past earlier so wtf?

I always figured that nothing changes. Everything already happened the way it happened. But if they did change something, it would be a different timeline I have all kinds of problems with time travel, though

The_Viscount posted...

I mean, even though it'll mess with the timestream, you kinda *have* to try something. Plus everybody always focuses on things being made worse when they could also be better. What if saving the Titanic prevented WWII... somehow?

There probably have been a few with dire consequences.

I guess it just depends on what changes. I feel like you could really fuck things up, though. Like you change something so the time machine was never built or something. Which is fine if you have the person who built it. But you might not

JimBeamMeUp posted...

My problem with time travel is it never accounts for the movement of the earth, the solar system, or the galactic plane.

I remember someone talking about that, as well

Mensis posted...

in endgame how did captain America come back as an old man? Hulk says they cant go back and change the past earlier so wtf? He should have just disappeared from their timeline entirely

Marvel magic

The_Viscount posted...

I mean, even though it'll mess with the timestream, you kinda *have* to try something. Plus everybody always focuses on things being made worse when they could also be better. What if saving the Titanic prevented WWII... somehow?

There probably have been a few with dire consequences.

I meant with no consequences. Just an alternate history.

JimBeamMeUp posted...

My problem with time travel is it never accounts for the movement of the earth, the solar system, or the galactic plane. The Delorian would hit 88.8mph and more than likely *bamf* in another time out in the cold vacuum of space...and that's not even accounting for conservation of angular momentum.

How would a car get into space if it started on a planet?

Mensis posted...

in endgame how did captain America come back as an old man? Hulk says they cant go back and change the past earlier so wtf? He should have just disappeared from their timeline entirely

It's tortured, but Banner and The Ancient One figured out that removing an Infinity Stone at a certain point in time created a branching reality. Their solution to this was to put the stones back at the moment they were taken as soon as the Snap was undone, so they would never have gone anywhere.

After Steve put the Space Stone back, he just stuck around to find Peggy, which in itself created a new branching reality. The implication is that he didn't come back to the 'regular' timeline until after she died.

Does being able to move at the speed of light necessarily mean that you can time travel?
What about having no mass, could you time travel then?
Can beings made of light time travel as a rule?

The_Viscount posted...

I mean, even though it'll mess with the timestream, you kinda *have* to try something. Plus everybody always focuses on things being made worse when they could also be better. What if saving the Titanic prevented WWII... somehow?

There probably have been a few with dire consequences.

Ww2 was responsible for a ton of technological advances tho

I read some story about some lady who traveled back in time to see the Titanic and ended up messing up her leave time and ended up dying on it.

It made me really sad, I still think about her.

Backwards time travel always creates paradoxes, and should generally be avoided if you are looking to make a coherent piece of media.

Notschmendrake posted...

Backwards time travel always creates paradoxes, and should generally be avoided if you are looking to make a coherent piece of media.

and future time travel doesn't?

Fam_Fam posted...

and future time travel doesn't?

Not really no. You're traveling into the future right now.

All future time travel does is increase the rate at which you are going forward.

So long as you dont come back after the fact its fine.

Notschmendrake posted...

Not really no. You're traveling into the future right now.

All future time travel does is increase the rate at which you are going forward.

So long as you dont come back after the fact its fine.

Future time travel (and any stories in the future really) have the problem of not aging very well once you get to that point irl

Muscles posted...

Future time travel (and any stories in the future really) have the problem of not aging very well once you get to that point irl

I'm referring more to the coherence of the story than anything else.

Also I thought time machine did a decent enough job once it stopped going into the past and started going into the future

He even meets one of the brainbois who tells him exactly why backwards time travel is dumb. The act itself is paradoxical.

Whatever you went to do will be done, negating your need to go back and do it, causing it to need to be done again, causing you to go back and do it again, negating your need to go back and do it, causing it to need to be done again and just keep repeating like that.

Notschmendrake posted...

I'm referring more to the coherence of the story than anything else.

Also I thought time machine did a decent enough job once it stopped going into the past and started going into the future

He even meets one of the brainbois who tells him exactly why backwards time travel is dumb. The act itself is paradoxical.

Whatever you went to do will be done, negating your need to go back and do it, causing it to need to be done again, causing you to go back and do it again, negating your need to go back and do it, causing it to need to be done again and just keep repeating like that.

I like when stories tie up those loop holes and make it so that going back in time and trying to change things is how they got to this point

Notschmendrake posted...

He even meets one of the brainbois who tells him exactly why backwards time travel is dumb. The act itself is paradoxical.

Whatever you went to do will be done, negating your need to go back and do it, causing it to need to be done again, causing you to go back and do it again, negating your need to go back and do it, causing it to need to be done again and just keep repeating like that.

This is one of my problems with time travel. Which is why I think time travel is fine as long as you dont mess with anything. The problem is, thats almost impossible to do.

That said, it also depends on what you do. For example, if someone disappeared from the past with no trace and you wen to back to see what happened to them, its possible you were the cause. And maybe you took them to the future. In that case, you didnt change the future, but caused it to happen. But that goes back to my original theory or everything that you go back to do has already happened. Kind of like you go back in time to try to fix something, and end up causing it to happen

LinkPizza posted...

This is one of my problems with time travel. Which is why I think time travel is fine as long as you dont mess with anything. The problem is, thats almost impossible to do.

That said, it also depends on what you do. For example, if someone disappeared from the past with no trace and you wen to back to see what happened to them, its possible you were the cause. And maybe you took them to the future. In that case, you didnt change the future, but caused it to happen. But that goes back to my original theory or everything that you go back to do has already happened. Kind of like you go back in time to try to fix something, and end up causing it to happen

Its nonsense as well. You never would have gone back in the first place to cause whatever is making you go back every other time.

It's just bad writing anytime it happens.

Notschmendrake posted...

Its nonsense as well. You never would have gone back in the first place to cause whatever is making you go back every other time.

It's just bad writing anytime it happens.

You could, though. Because its possible the first time, you werent planing to do whatever, and it happened. Every other time is you going back to stop it and it still happening. Especially if youre doing the same thing you did the first time Of course, time travel will always have issues Which is why the timelines should never be messed with Though, if anyone goes back in time, they should, in theory, just create another timeline. And we would most likely never see them again

What really shows how bad movie and TV writers are is they never really have one where someone went back in time and "saved" a failed event is already part of the time line to the best of my knowledge.

Like say, the first nuclear reactor blew up(I know they don't really blow up, don't @ me) but someone went back and stopped it.

Revelation34 posted...

How would a car get into space if it started on a planet?

Because the planet isn't where it was anymore relative to when you left. The entire solar system has fucked right off by thousands upon thousands of miles relative to when you left your initial point in time space.

Even if you jumped just a few minutes the point in time space has moved considerably. Depending on which side of the planet you were on relative to it's orbit around the sun, you'd either have the misfortune of popping out several miles into the Earth's interior or several miles above it, and that's not even taking into account the movement of the entire solar system within the milky way, or the movement of the entire milky way within the local group, etc.

If you're already in deep space when you make a time jump, yeah the odds get much higher of at least "getting somewhen and somewhere", but if you're on a planet with some kooky machine I don't think it's gonna work the way literally all fiction portrays it.

Mensis posted...

in endgame how did captain America come back as an old man? Hulk says they cant go back and change the past earlier so wtf? He should have just disappeared from their timeline entirely

He went back to the alternate timelines and stayed in the past with Peggy for several decades and then returned to the main timeline. It was apparently intentionally left ambiguous as to how he returned without using the time pad thing they had set up. Probably a thread they will pick up when Kang shows up
Or it could all be TVA shenanigans

https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/ghosts

Revelation34 posted...

It would be interesting if we had one where they actually succeed.

The closest I can think of are the Butterfly Effect movies but that's on a very small scale of events.

Tutoria posted...

what about the one where homer goes back in time and kills a bunch of dinosaurs

I often question how things like that are supposedly connected in time travel stories. Like while in the past the main character alerts someone that their shoe is untied. Then upon getting back to the present they learn a race of sea creatures have overrun California. What is the sequence of events that lead from the one thing to the other?

JimBeamMeUp posted...

My problem with time travel is it never accounts for the movement of the earth, the solar system, or the galactic plane.

Gravity is a weak force because it's influence extends to other dimensions. While traversing between points in time you are pulled along the gravity well. The real issue is that conservation of energy would mean you maintain the original momentum and not match the rotation of the planet. 71% of the Earth's surface is ocean. The other 29% has drastically varied elevation.

Mensis posted...

in endgame how did captain America come back as an old man? Hulk says they cant go back and change the past earlier so wtf?

Also, they would have created a bunch of other timelines where one or more of the infinity stones vanished since even after returning them it wasn't to the same timeline it was taken from. So there wouldn't have been a "snap" for them to undo.

Timeless messed up some stuff in their timeline. I believe they stopped the Hindenburg disaster in the pilot if I recall correctly.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

I often question how things like that are supposedly connected in time travel stories. Like while in the past the main character alerts someone that their shoe is untied. Then upon getting back to the present they learn a race of sea creatures have overrun California. What is the sequence of events that lead from the one thing to the other?

Maybe in the past, when his shoe was untied, they trip and fell. And when they fell, they squashed the first and only of the pre-evolved sea creature. But when you told him about the shoe, he tied it and didnt trip. Meaning he never killed the creature. Meaning it evolved, asexually reproduced, and took over

AltOmega2 posted...

Does being able to move at the speed of light necessarily mean that you can time travel?
What about having no mass, could you time travel then?
Can beings made of light time travel as a rule?

Time moves faster than light.

DrPrimemaster posted...

I read some story about some lady who traveled back in time to see the Titanic and ended up messing up her leave time and ended up dying on it.

It made me really sad, I still think about her.

Not really sad since it's fictional.

Notschmendrake posted...

Backwards time travel always creates paradoxes, and should generally be avoided if you are looking to make a coherent piece of media.

It doesn't since time travel is hypothetical. We wouldn't k is if any paradoxes could be created since it's impossible to know.

Revelation34 posted...

Not really sad since it's fictional.

I think they mean sad story. Like how certain books, movies, tv shows, amor games make me cry when they have a sad part. I think they way they said it was a little weird, though

Tutoria posted...

what about the one where homer goes back in time and kills a bunch of dinosaurs and eventually goes to a timeline where everything is perfect (although he flees because he thinks that timeline doesnt have donuts, whoops what a blunder!)

It's raining again

captpackrat posted...

The time travelers are always stupid about it. They run around trying to warn people about what's about to happen or they try to prevent it. And they never think about how they'd be changing history if they stop some disaster.

There's plenty of fiction that doesn't do that, though. Where the main characters are like "we have to be careful not to change the past or we'll erase our own future!" And then the emotional conflict of the story becomes whether or not you can resist the temptation to stop bad things from happening to good people simply because you know they're supposed to happen. Or just the mechanical effects of trying to "fix" the past back into its original shape if you've already accidentally broken it (like Back to the Future).

There's also the type that falls somewhere in-between, where the protagonists will find a way to change the past, but do it in such a way that it seems like the past remains unchanged. Like saving the life of someone who is historically recorded to die at such-and-such a point in such-and-such a way, but you just fake their death instead and they go into hiding. Or exploiting the Observer Principle (ie, you know someone dies because you read a newspaper article from the era - but it turns out after you save the person's life you just ask the newspaper reporter to file a false story).

And all of this is complicated by variations over whether or not time is elastic (the past can be changed, and likely even relatively small changes can completely alter the future), plastic (the past can be changed, but history has inertia and will generally fall back into the same patterns unless you're making huge changes), or immutable (where you literally cannot change the past at all, because any action you take is either something you already did, because you were always part of the past, or because anything you do in an attempt to alter a major event will fail as the universe itself is seemingly acting to prevent you).



Revelation34 posted...

It would be interesting if we had one where they actually succeed.

There's quite a few, honestly.

Related to what I said above, there are stories where time travelers change the past but it gets covered up so the future doesn't actually change, stories where the past is changed and the future is radically changed (and the time traveler either ceases to exist, loses the ability to go home, or returns home to see a completely different world), stories where the past is changed but only in a minor way that only the main characters are aware or, or even stories where even the slightest change immediately fractures the timeline so any changes you make don't actually alter your own future at all, but create an entirely new world (and travel back to the future either takes you back to your original timeline, fast-forwards you on the new timeline, or becomes impossible because you can no longer access your original timeline by going "forward" - you'd essentially have to travel back to your point of divergence and then double back down the "right" timeline).

Time travel physics can get confusing. And since they're all mostly hypothetical anyway, they tend to differ across different stories, and most of the details get handwaved away as not being all that important.



JimBeamMeUp posted...

My problem with time travel is it never accounts for the movement of the earth, the solar system, or the galactic plane. The Delorian would hit 88.8mph and more than likely *bamf* in another time out in the cold vacuum of space...and that's not even accounting for conservation of angular momentum.

Most sci-fi stories assume those mechanics are built into the device you're using to travel, presumably anchoring you to a specific point in spacetime and then projecting that point forward or backward in time, and simultaneously sideways in space. Or are based around wormhole physics where the ends of the wormhole are physically stationary in some way and compensate for spacial movement. It usually gets glossed over because it's rarely important and most of the audience won't understand or care anyway.

Most fantasy time travel stories simply don't give a shit, because a wizard did it, and you should probably go outside more.



Mensis posted...

in endgame how did captain America come back as an old man? Hulk says they cant go back and change the past earlier so wtf? He should have just disappeared from their timeline entirely

The writers and director actually disagree about this.

One of them (I forget which) says that because he went back and changed minor things and wasn't obvious about it it "didn't count", so the timeline didn't split. He's basically been hiding out until time caught up with the point where he left, so he could show up at the meeting. He's been in our timeline the whole time.

The other says the timeline absolutely split, so basically Cap spent most of his life in an alternate universe, shacked up with an alternate universe Peggy, and then only returned to "our" timeline after she died, so he could close the loop and pass along the shield.

Personally, I tend to favor the latter theory, but some people don't like it because it implies he was cool hooking up with someone who wasn't "his" Peggy and letting the alternate universe version of himself stay on ice for decades when he could easily have told people he was still alive and where to look.

So it's ambiguous enough for the audience to make up their own mind.



DrPrimemaster posted...

I read some story about some lady who traveled back in time to see the Titanic and ended up messing up her leave time and ended up dying on it.

It made me really sad, I still think about her.

Could be worse. Could be like the love interest character from the second season of Heroes, who wound up getting sent to a dark future, before said future was retroactively prevented and erased, which theoretically implies she ceased to exist as well.

Though the idea of people from the present traveling back to the past and falling in love with people from the past only to die in a famous disaster of some kind is pretty common in time travel stories. With about a 50-50 chance of the traveler bringing the love interest to the future with them instead, thus saving them from their own fate (after all, if you're on the passenger list of the Titanic when the ship goes down, and you're not among the survivors they rescue, everyone's going to assume you died... but maybe you're just living off the grid or under a fake identity in 2012).

Notschmendrake posted...

Its nonsense as well. You never would have gone back in the first place to cause whatever is making you go back every other time.

Depends on how time travel and the past works.

In a chrono-stable universe, the past cannot be changed. Anything that happens has always happened and will always happen. You were always the one that made that person disappear, and your going back to investigate was always the thing that caused it to happen in the first place. It's a simple stable closed time loop. Basically, it boils down to us trying to understand four-dimensional reality with a three-dimensional brain. It makes perfect sense even if we have a hard time understanding it (because honestly, we have a hard time understanding a lot of things).

Conversely, in a universe where time can be changed, there would have been an original inciting event without you (say, the missing person falls down a ravine and no one ever finds the body), but your actions in the past change events, and you essentially create a closed time loop (wherein you make the person disappear, which in turn becomes the impetus for you to go back in time in the first place). You have altered history, but from the perspective of outsiders nothing has changed, and future iterations of the time loop will seem like they've always been how things work (ie, there'll be no evidence left of the original timeline).

The latter is actually the easiest solution to potentially change the past in universes where altering the past seems impossible. It was my immediate thought while watching the Time Machine remake with Guy Pearce (spoilers):

Guy Pearce invents a time machine to go back in time and save his fiance who died. But every time he saves her she's pretty much immediately killed in a different way, as it seems like the universe is twisting fate to guarantee she winds up dead. He eventually realizes she cannot be saved, because it was her death that motivated him to build the time machine, so if she doesn't die, he won't invent the time machine, which means he won't be able to use it to save her. So it creates a universe-shredding paradox, and reality itself will always manipulate events to stop him from saving her to protect itself. So he has to learn to accept her death and move on.

Meanwhile, my immediate reaction was "So go back, fake her death, then either hide her or bring her forward in time so your past self thinks she's dead, thus inventing the time machine, thus preserving the loop. Stop being a wuss and letting the universe boss you around - you're supposed to be a genius!"

Again, the problem is that a lot of this is all hypothetical - we really have no idea how time travel would work, if it's even possible at all. So we're mostly just making shit up.

(And the real problem with time loops is uncreated eternal artifacts - if I travel back in time, and give myself an object, and I keep that object for years before eventually going back in time and giving myself in the past that object, -I- have completed a closed loop, but the object itself is trapped in an infinite and never-ending loop, wherein it has no origin and no end, and somehow defies the effects of entropy, never breaking down or changing over time.)



SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

I often question how things like that are supposedly connected in time travel stories. Like while in the past the main character alerts someone that their shoe is untied. Then upon getting back to the present they learn a race of sea creatures have overrun California. What is the sequence of events that lead from the one thing to the other?

It's assuming that time is very elastic.

Realistically, the moment you appear in the past you have irrevocably altered the timeline. Each breath you draw is moving molecules in ways they didn't move in the original timeline. Every move you make is displacing matter and energy in ways that are different from their original patterns. Each molecule and particle moves, displacing others, setting off chain reactions that never happened in the original history. Even if you never even speak to another human, you have already left a massive ripple in the water.

And once you throw human interactions into the mix, things get even worse. A 30 second conversation you have with someone slows them down by 30 seconds - which may be the difference between whether or not they get stopped at a red light on the road later. Which in turn may lead to them either meeting or failing to meet someone. Meanwhile, them being in different places means they can slow or avoid other people, who's own behavior is likewise changed. As the snowball of changes slowly spreads and becomes an avalanche, major changes can occur (like in the mostly forgotten movie Sliding Doors, where the difference between missing or catching her train is the difference between the main character either discovering her boyfriend is cheating on her or not, which radically changes her entire life).

Actual conversations can alter things even more - flirt with a waitress and it might change how she feels about her boyfriend, causing (or preventing) a break-up. Pissing someone off might cause them to take out their frustration on someone else, causing a fight that never happened before you changed things. History is made up of a million billion variables constantly interacting, and you've just thrown a bowling ball into a pinball machine. Over a long enough span of time, the constantly rippling changes may lead to radical differences - people living different lives, entire cultures taking different paths, wars being fought (or not fought).

In settings that are relatively chrono-plastic, this doesn't matter - whatever changes you make are smoothed out almost immediately, and almost nothing beyond what you specifically do matters. But in realities where time is both elastic and volatile, even the slightest change in the past can potentially lead to a world ruled by Nazi dinosaurs.



SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

Also, they would have created a bunch of other timelines where one or more of the infinity stones vanished since even after returning them it wasn't to the same timeline it was taken from. So there wouldn't have been a "snap" for them to undo.

Not really. The Ancient One basically says the real problem isn't that they need to undo the snap, but that simply removing one stone from a universe creates an imbalances of forces that will eventually destroy the entire universe. Which is why she's adamant that they can't have her stone (at first), or that they need to return her stone to the exact point they took it from if they do.

The implication is that bringing the stones back to the exact point you took them from doesn't create yet another alternate timeline, but is just preserving the original timeline, and preventing them from suffering cosmic decay once the stones are gone.

But yes, it does imply that if they screwed up their timing, they just destroyed multiple parallel universes.

It also raises the question of whether or not having ALL SIX STONES in our universe destroyed simultaneously has a much more significant side-effect than anything we see. Though that might be a moot point since Doctor Strange went on to break all of time and space anyway.

And yes, I absolutely love talking about hypothetical time travel in fiction. It's always been one of my huge interests. I read a LOT of alt-history fiction and time travel sci-fi.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

There's quite a few, honestly.

Related to what I said above, there are stories where time travelers change the past but it gets covered up so the future doesn't actually change, stories where the past is changed and the future is radically changed (and the time traveler either ceases to exist, loses the ability to go home, or returns home to see a completely different world), stories where the past is changed but only in a minor way that only the main characters are aware or, or even stories where even the slightest change immediately fractures the timeline so any changes you make don't actually alter your own future at all, but create an entirely new world (and travel back to the future either takes you back to your original timeline, fast-forwards you on the new timeline, or becomes impossible because you can no longer access your original timeline by going "forward" - you'd essentially have to travel back to your point of divergence and then double back down the "right" timeline).

Time travel physics can get confusing. And since they're all mostly hypothetical anyway, they tend to differ across different stories, and most of the details get handwaved away as not being all that important.

The Mandela effect is just the result of time traveler shenanigans.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It also raises the question of whether or not having ALL SIX STONES in our universe destroyed simultaneously has a much more significant side-effect than anything we see. Though that might be a moot point since Doctor Strange went on to break all of time and space anyway.

What would have happened if they used the last stones to create new stones for the present?

Just rewatched the ending of Future Man the other day, they had a really interesting take on the subject over the course of the three seasons. And the revelation at the end that it's actually a documentary about the lives of two black men and an Asian woman that was white washed for television, I mean the evidence was there the entire time when you go back and see it again, brilliant.

Why would any African American voluntarily travel back in time any further than like 1968? The risk seems to outweigh most rewards.

JimBeamMeUp posted...

Why would any African American voluntarily travel back in time any further than like 1968? The risk seems to outweigh most rewards.

Depends on where you go And possibly how far back

LinkPizza posted...

Depends on where you go And possibly how far back

I mean anywhens in the history of the universe, sure you are nearly 100% correct.

For the purposes of relatable storytelling, most of the northern hemisphere of earth at any point in the past 2000 years...not real high on my list of anywhens were I am African American. Ymmv. You'd have to whitewash a lot of history to make this anything but dreadful.

JimBeamMeUp posted...

I mean anywhens in the history of the universe, sure you are nearly 100% correct.

For the purposes of relatable storytelling, most of the northern hemisphere of earth at any point in the past 2000 years...not real high on my list of anywhens were I an African American. Ymmv. You'd have to whitewash a lot of history to make that anything but bleak at best.

Go back before slavery?

Revelation34 posted...

Go back before slavery?

Like I said, between relatable story telling and the entirety of creation, there's wiggle room.

But like if all of history was an hour, we're barely the last second and I'm pretty sure slavery existed well before the written word. Like back to when Neanderthal and Denisovan we're still vying for the championship.

JimBeamMeUp posted...

Why would any African American voluntarily travel back in time any further than like 1968? The risk seems to outweigh most rewards.

the ignored it in the legends of tomorrow aside from about two times....

until the past season when they complain about how women are treated almost every episode.... which was also ignored before.

Krazy_Kirby posted...

the ignored it in the legends of tomorrow aside from about two times....

until the past season when they complain about how women are treated almost every episode.... which was also ignored before.

Yay! Pandering to an audience that doesn't even consume your product!

JimBeamMeUp posted...

Why would any African American voluntarily travel back in time any further than like 1968? The risk seems to outweigh most rewards.

Once you go back past 1500 or so, they're no better or worse off than anyone else.

The racial component of slavery is mostly a comparatively recent thing. For most of human history it was more about your religion (ie, Islam was keen on slavery but couldn't enslave Muslims, so would go after "infidels") or about where you were from (ie, Romans would take slaves from conquered lands outside of the Roman sphere, while Roman "citizens" were immune). Or about wealth (ie, if you were poor and in debt you could be pressed into slavery to pay off your obligations). Or just heritage (ie, if your parents were slaves, you're born a slave, and so on).

Black slavery mostly became a thing because the Portuguese had easy access to African tribes, and Africans were better adapted to the hot conditions of tropical islands in the New World than most other options.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Once you go back past 1500 or so, they're no better or worse off than anyone else.

The racial component of slavery is mostly a comparatively recent thing. For most of human history it was more about your religion (ie, Islam was keen on slavery but couldn't enslave Muslims, so would go after "infidels") or about where you were from (ie, Romans would take slaves from conquered lands outside of the Roman sphere, while Roman "citizens" were immune). Or about wealth (ie, if you were poor and in debt you could be pressed into slavery to pay off your obligations). Or just heritage (ie, if your parents were slaves, you're born a slave, and so on).

Black slavery mostly became a thing because the Portuguese had easy access to African tribes, and Africans were better adapted to the hot conditions of tropical islands in the New World than most other options.

Fair. Pedantic, but fair. Of course once you're that far back we're already taking a ton of liberties with the story the storytelling since once you go much further back than Shakespeare a modern English speaker an English speaker from the era you're traveling to have about as much in common as we do with a Klingon linguistically and it only gets worse the further back you go.

JimBeamMeUp posted...

Fair. Pedantic, but fair. Of course once you're that far back we're already taking a ton of liberties with the story the storytelling since once you go much further back than Shakespeare a modern English speaker an English speaker from the era you're traveling to have about as much in common as we do with a Klingon linguistically and it only gets worse the further back you go.

True, but that's a problem for literally everyone, not just blacks.

A white person of is still going to be incredibly lost and barely able to communicate in any meaningful way even if they travel back to England, if they go back more than a few hundred years. You're never going to be able to blend in perfectly just because you kind of look like everyone else (even just having an odd accent might get you accused of being a foreign spy and killed).

The only people who kind of sidestep this would be if you were Han Chinese and traveling back into China's past, but even there you're still dealing with some linguistic drift and cultural idioms that are going to make it difficult to communicate and which are going to make locals extremely suspicious of how weird you're being.

JimBeamMeUp posted...

Even if you jumped just a few minutes the point in time space has moved considerably. Depending on which side of the planet you were on relative to it's orbit around the sun, you'd either have the misfortune of popping out several miles into the Earth's interior or several miles above it, and that's not even taking into account the movement of the entire solar system within the milky way, or the movement of the entire milky way within the local group, etc.

Yep. The earth orbits the sun at ~30 km/s, which is in turn is flying through space at ~370 km/s (it orbits the centre of the Milky Way, but its orbital period is ~226 million years, so we can simplify it as linear motion on the time scale of humanity's brief blip of existence), so depending on where the earth is in its orbit, it's going to move somewhere between 340 and 400 km for every second you travel through time, without you. Most fictional time travel either ignores this or comes up with some vaguely plausible explanation for why it's not an issue, but if you're attempting to travel only through time and not space, there's virtually zero chance of you ever ending up on the surface of the earth again, let alone in the spot you want.

As much as absolute coordinate systems are common in sci-fi, they really do not respect how dynamic celestial bodies really are. Even space itself is not static; there's really no absolute frame of reference from which to measure anything.

adjl posted...

Yep. The earth orbits the sun at ~30 km/s, which is in turn is flying through space at ~370 km/s (it orbits the centre of the Milky Way, but its orbital period is ~226 million years, so we can simplify it as linear motion on the time scale of humanity's brief blip of existence), so depending on where the earth is in its orbit, it's going to move somewhere between 340 and 400 km for every second you travel through time, without you. Most fictional time travel either ignores this or comes up with some vaguely plausible explanation for why it's not an issue, but if you're attempting to travel only through time and not space, there's virtually zero chance of you ever ending up on the surface of the earth again, let alone in the spot you want.

As much as absolute coordinate systems are common in sci-fi, they really do not respect how dynamic celestial bodies really are. Even space itself is not static; there's really no absolute frame of reference from which to measure anything.

What if you stay within earth's gravity as you travel back? You'd pretty much get dragged with the earth back into time

Muscles posted...

What if you stay within earth's gravity as you travel back? You'd pretty much get dragged with the earth back into time

https://youtu.be/7aVpiGzsCBI?t=144