I mean, technically displacing the air with that time machine on such a massive time scale is just as likely to result in returning to a civilization of dolphin people as riding a dinosaur would.
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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Or you shedding some of your microbiome's bacteria and fungi into the environment and whoops: they outcompeted something "local" and now whole species change.
I honestly don't think there'd be any way to avoid doing something that could possibly change the future in a dramatic way, because that far back incredibly minute changes could possibly lead to huge differences (because chaos theory), to the level of "a butterfly didn't flap its wings because I accidentally squashed it with my time machine, and now humanity never happened. Oops." But any change that means you didn't ever go on your trip means you have some sort of paradox on your hands, and then it becomes a question of how timelines work
I think you could drastically minimize any impact by doing the time travel in space and merely observing from high orbit, assuming your time machine has no form of exhaust, which if you have a time machine seems like a relatively small engineering challenge by comparison.
You might displace a few atoms in the void, but it's the safest way one could go about it.
Oh yeah, like an observation platform. That's probably the only way you'd be doing time travel anyhow since it's also space travel because the Earth now isn't where the Earth was 200 million years ago; doing an atmospheric re-entry across time when you're not 100% sure where exactly everything will be sounds like an occupational health hazard and inadvisable at best. Gods fucking help you if anything goes wrong and you violently scatter pieces of your fancy time machine across a few square km of densely populated (by animals including genus Homo) area.
What do you think happened to the dinosaurs?
nothing, theyre still here
Just don't take any annoying mathematical prodigies with you.
Well, I don't think time travel backwards in this manner is possible, but if it is, it would have to operate under the laws of thermodynamics which means the energy (and maybe even some of the atoms) that was "transported back in time" would represent a paradox.
The energy and/or some of the atoms in you and the time machine were already somewhere in the past when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Which presents a paradox (and this is probably not even the only paradox), so how does the universe conserve energy in that situation?
Somehow the "original" atoms and energy that became you and the machine would need to be reconciled with the duplicates that suddenly turned up.
So maybe there's a mysterious process that obliterates energy? What would it be and how would it work? Would that be equivalent to the false vacuum that could fundamentally destroy the universe as we currently know it?
Or maybe there's nothing to actually stop duplication of energy and atoms and it's entirely feasible to go back in time. You take the time machine back, see some dinos from space, and you managed to otherwise not change a thing. That means in some dozens of million years, you and that machine will be sent back to exactly the same time and location again because nothing has changed. Bam, now you and that time machine are in triplicate. But, with nothing really changing, the same process will occur again and again. Does it reach a point where there's so much duplicated energy / matter that something fundamentally different has to happen? Would all those duplicate yous and time machines coalesce into a giant cosmic object that comes crashing down to the Earth like a giant asteroid, thus killing off most dinosaurs and paving the way for human evolution? Hmmm.
The only safe method of time travel is via Christmas ghost.
You could still cause a stampede.
That would require the Dinos to believe in me, so I'm safe
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Luckily, as far as we understand things, there's no way to go back in time (only less fast to the future, which isn't the same). For one thing, because there's no backup mechanism for reality to jump back to.
Timelines are fiction. They hurt some fundamental principles of how the universe works. Time isn't like a river or a line at all; better start thinking of time like the air around you: it's just there, can be formed, affects things but there can't be less than none.
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So your saying we can ride the dinosaur?
You know what?
WHAT THE HELL! 🦕🤠
Yes, but....
fuck the butterfly effect, do what you want. you've thrived in chaos once already.
I just want you to know this is one of the most beautiful comments I've ever read, and it came from a random comment section from an ok comic strip. So much so that I upvoted it once I saw it and came back hours later just to save it.
I forget where I heard it from, but somebody said that it's strange how we believe that if we go back in time and make a small change, it will have a huge effect on the future, but we also believe that making small changes today won't make any difference in the future.
This is so inspiring.
Take chances. Change doesn't mean worse only different. What's the point of time travel if you can't ride a damn dinosaur!?
"I'm gonna assume this will just create an alternate timeline and do whatever!"
send a nuke to blast the asteroid extinction event
If you ride a dinosaur in the past then it already happened.
Like going to Bangkok. For a thing.
Yes,it's really about going to Bangkok, even if it doesn't seem like it at first
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They are going to "ride" the dinosaur, aren't they?
If heroin is "the dragon" which drug is "the dinosaur?"
Weed!
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