r/Showerthoughts • u/Nagi21 • 2d ago
Casual Thought There is a non-zero chance humans may have already gone back in time to keep humanity from suffering worse historical and current events than we already have, and this is actually the brightest timeline.
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u/A-Plant-Guy 2d ago
What do we want?
TIME TRAVEL!
When do we want it?
THAT’S IRRELEVANT!
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u/Obvious-Secretary151 2d ago
I love seeing that meme every single time
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u/pppppatrick 2d ago
It's my turn to post it yesterday.
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u/micerl 1d ago
I did that a week from now.
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u/halfashell 1d ago edited 1d ago
So have I technically time travelled by being born and then by eventually dying?
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u/Bipogram 1d ago
Yup. Most folk do the latter after the former.
The trick.is to be the first to do it the other way around.
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u/juli968r 1d ago
Die inside the womb and get revived right after birth. Set for (the rest of) life.
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u/Clover-Snow 1d ago
Lmao okay but real talk… if this is the brightest timeline, I don’t even wanna peep the drafts.
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u/Throbbie-Williams 1d ago
It's amusing at first thought but when would be 100% relevant, if it were invented after my death it's almost certain I'd never get to use it.
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u/A-Plant-Guy 1d ago
You’re not thinking fourth dimensionally
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u/Throbbie-Williams 1d ago
If it's invented In the future that doesn't mean they'd give that technology to those of us in the past
Anyway time travel is somewhat technically possible but only in the forward direction!
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u/Commentator-X 2d ago
This timeline could also be the result of people meddling with time travel and fucking everything up.
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u/arlondiluthel 2d ago
The only thing I can think of is that we're currently in a paradoxical bubble: without these things happening, time travel isn't invented, and any attempt to come back and every attempt to change it results in a future where time travel isn't invented, thus preventing time travel from being invented by the "new" future not needing to come back and fix things.
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u/strippermonopoly 2d ago
You just made everything make sense and not make sense at the same time.
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u/Beginning_Book_2382 2d ago
That's the exact reaction of people when they introduce time travel in movies
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u/redvodkandpinkgin 1d ago
that's because time travel is inherently paradoxical
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u/onejoke_username 1d ago
No, that's because time travel is inherently paradoxical.
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u/trisikol 1d ago
Time travel is only paradoxical if travelling in time redefines the time line such that time travel becomes paradoxical. If the time line is able to maintain that time travel is not a paradox, then time travel is not paradoxical.
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u/Evilsushione 1d ago
It’s the only paradoxical if you think of time as a single line. If you think of it as a branching tree then hopping from one branch to another different branch isn’t so paradoxical.
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u/Warrx121 1d ago
So basically, limiting the safe altering of time to after it was invented to prevent irreversable fuckups, meaning we'll never know if it's possible until we get there, and would be be used to change the future from that point onwards not the past
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u/trisikol 1d ago
That. And you can also build a paradox detection tool that would safely guide you through a time travel path that prevents a paradox. Just make sure your tools are not unintentionally creating multiple timelines otherwise someone is going to notice and "tune" your prime timeline.
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u/Th3Element05 1d ago
That's the problem with time travel (to the past). If people can travel back in time and change things to effect the future, then the past/future will always have been getting changed. The only stable timeline is reached when things are changed so that time travel is never discovered or invented.
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u/Senorbob451 1d ago
I’m of the opinion that all times and universes exist in quantum superposition, so traveling to another time only feels like it, when in fact you’ve just altered the course of history for a separate universe, and I’d wager that sort of thing is policed in some sense by now.
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u/TheWiseScrotum 1d ago
Sooooo….the TVA? Lol
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u/Senorbob451 1d ago
That would be a cartoony anthropocentric view of it but I suspect there is something like that
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u/RusstyDog 1d ago
It could also be limited time travel. It's only possible to travel to a point where the time machine exists. It acts as a receiver for all future time travels, but you can't go to a point with no receivers.
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u/Buttonskill 1d ago
This is the only way for so many reasons.
The biggest one that never gets talked about is how it has to be a teleporter too.
The earth is moving 67,000 mph around the sun, which is going 514,000 mph through the galaxy, which is going 1.4m mph through the local group, and
..you get the picture. Now, what are the exact coordinates you want to go back in time to again? Relative to?
It falls apart real quick.
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u/WillOCarrick 1d ago edited 1d ago
If they are smart enough to invent timetravel, they are smart enough to calculate the spacetime coordinates... probably.
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u/CaBBaGe_isLaND 1d ago
That's ignoring the possibility of multiple timelines. Once you change the past, you're on a different timeline. Time travel is never invented, doesn't really matter. The time travel already happened. That timeline doesn't not exist, it's just not this one.
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u/Whipfire 1d ago
Time travel only affects the time traveller. They are the only ones with a notion of what was vs what is. For the rest of the world/universe it’s just “now”
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u/rizzyrogues 2d ago
Fuck man.... I just got home from ketamine treatment.
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u/Girevik_in_Texas 1d ago
Why the fuck are you on Reddit?! You are in danger of fucking up your plasticity!
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u/fastlerner 2d ago
Reality may just be a simulation and every moment is a save state in a sea of infinite snapshots. "Time travel" would just be restoring to a snapshot and creating a new branch. Maybe we're on the main timeline, or maybe we're on a dead branch destined for pruning/reversion. No way we can ever know but it's just as real to us either way. But if there's only one main timeline with nearly infinite branches, then it's almost a certainty that our branch is one of the dead ends.
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u/Funky_Smurf 1d ago
Why would there need to be a "main branch". Are you saying we are like Sims?
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u/OrdinalNomi 1d ago
The whole time travel is self-suppressing theory. It does make sense the Universe would evolve into a state where time travel is nowhere to be found.
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u/ak_sys 23h ago
You've just fundementally disproved time travel. Genius.
Lets assume time travel exists and we can discover it. In our hubris, we go back and kill Space Hitler as a baby.
Well the Space Germans invented time travel, so it takes a little longer. Space Stalin now reigns, and great pain is brought on the land. Once again, it is invented, and the past corrected. Every time history is altered, so does the invention of time travel. Sometimes the timeline is moved up, sometimes its moved back, and our timelines become more and more absurd the more we change. Until a singularity is reached. We go back, and we kill the future leader of the Ape Federation, and just like that, Harambe, the LAST individual that could have brought about time travel, via a generations long chain of events, is dead. The timelines all collapse into one. There is no escape from our new, Dicks Out reality.
If time travel exists, the past will inevitablly be altered again and again, until the universe settles in a time line where time travel is no longer possible.
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u/TehMephs 1d ago
I’m sure we could take the Moffat way out and just believe it back into the timeline
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u/karl2025 1d ago
Not only could, would most likely be.
Good, intelligent person scenario:
"I've invented a time machine!"
"Neat! But this raises all sorts of problematic moral issues surrounding changing the timeline. Not only are the infinities of causality inherently unknowable, but the question of consigning all who reside within a timeline to annihilation to create a better one raises so many ethical concerns. Killing Hitler might save millions of lives, but billions of lives would cease to have ever been and we don't know what world we would be creating in its place. This technology must be studied, considered, and used carefully, if it is to be used at all."
Average person:
"I've invented a time machine!"
"Sweet! I'll write down the lotto ticket numbers!"
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u/Ut_Prosim 1d ago
Average person:
"I've invented a time machine!"
"Sweet! I'll write down the lotto ticket numbers!"
Basically the plot of Primer (2004).
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u/LonePaladin 1d ago
I remember reading an idea someone had, of a TV series where time travel is accessible, and the show focuses on a group who is permanently stationed in 1940s Germany in order to prevent the constant stream of would-be assassins.
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u/Highlander198116 1d ago
I think OP is treating it like there is only one Universe and that if time travel is possible, then all changes to the timeline have already happened or are predestined to happen.
However, I dismiss that because I don't believe a temporal paradox is possible. If time travel is possible, then any time someone does it, I believe it would spawn a new universe thread split from its original timeline which would remain unchanged.
It ultimately means that changing the past to impact the future of your timeline is impossible.
This is why sci fi stories where someone goes back in time and it turns out they are their own ancestor are annoying. Biologically that just couldn't happen.
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u/SemperVeritate 1d ago
There is a non-zero chance that...
There's a difference between there being a non-zero chance and you thinking that there is a non-zero chance. There could actually be a zero chance and we just don't know it yet.
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u/ChubbyTrain 1d ago
Some asshole went back in time to 2011 to mine a Bitcoin, and everything goes to hell from there.
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u/Swackhammer_ 1d ago
Aka billionaires. All of this theorizing assumes it’s to save innocent lives when it will just be billionaires
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u/AlisonChained 2d ago
Even Doctor Strange knew that Thanos had to win in order to save everyone. But none of that is actually comforting.
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u/zxc123zxc123 2d ago edited 2d ago
Was going to some in to say something similar to this. For all we know they have made time travel and just didn't use it to fix things for everyone else. Rather only used it to change the immediate past for those who matter (aka those who invented it using it to change their immediate past rather than the far past as to avoid unforeseen consequences). Also technology has never resolved ALL problems, but merely resolved old problems are created new issues: electricity and lighting allowed nightlife but also meant longer work hours, cars meant more mobility but also infrasture now built around cars means it's basically a necessity, and the internet explosively increased out ability to be productive but also reduces our productivity by being addictively distracting. The real clear winners of these technological innovations are the billionaires who fully utilize electricity/automation, global travel via private jet/yacht, and mine all our info via internet.
Also just fucking around with time isn't just a "A so then B" sort of thing. Lots of butterfly shit happening. For example, if you went back in time and made sure the racists lost in the Civil war, then made sure the fascists/Nazis lost in WW2, and then made sure the communists lost in the cold war. There's no saying that America wouldn't become a semi-fascist authoritarian state where the racists are given free reign while the President strongarms companies like Intel into giving share to the US government like some communist regime.
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u/cbstuart 1d ago
There's no saying that America wouldn't become a semi-fascist authoritarian state where the racists are given free reign
Wait a minute...
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u/aschapm 1d ago
There were literally infinite possibilities and he only looked at 15 million. Thanos didn’t have to win shit, Strange just took the first chance he could
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u/montyxgh 1d ago
Don’t know why you’re downvoted, that’s exactly right. He only had time to look at 14.something million possibilities and he only saw one in that time that was a winning scenario. There was probably many others he didn’t get time to see
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u/cdqmcp 1d ago
Multiverse of Madness shows that the alt Earth's heroes defeated Thanos on Titan so clearly there were options out there that worked, and even better than MCU earth cuz alt earth Thanos never snapped
but yeah he only looked at 14+ million outcomes and apparently didn't see that one, also shown in MoM by Strange being unaware of the Illuminati and why there's a giant-ass Strange statue
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u/Eastern_Hornet_6432 1d ago
Nah, this was before Loki went to the TVA so only one outcome was allowed. Every other sequence of events resulted in the TVA showing up and pruning the timeline.
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u/hornwort 1d ago
Trump’s speed run to already ending US hegemony and global economic influence, careening toward total sociopolitical collapse, could very well do more to mitigate species-ending climate catastrophe in the long run than any partial-measure policies to allow Western imperialist hyperconsumerism to limp along for decades.
So, there’s that. As a Canadian it sure sucks the Murkins’ terror of difference led them to vote to fuck themselves and and their future, but as long as that total collapse happens before calamitous (e.g. nuclear) war is waged on other nations, the whole situation may very well end up a net positive for the rest of the world. Y’all have been a genocidal cancer on the planet for a very, very long time.
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u/Eastern_Hornet_6432 1d ago
Jesus Christ dude, do you realize how fucking vitriolic your rhetoric has to get to make me feel like you're being too hard on AMERICA, of all places? An American collapse would not be positive for the human race.
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u/zcas 2d ago
You just described the plot of The Lazarus Project on Netflix.
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u/BellaMentalNecrotica 2d ago
Also Travelers kind of
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u/Dr_DanJackson 2d ago
I know there is lots of controversy about the author but Orson Scott Card wrote a book called, Pastwatch:The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. It is...interesting, nothing wild just the author being himself but the premise is people in the future have developed a way to watch anyone in the past with lots of detail but can't interfere, or so they think. I won't say more in case you have an interest in reading it
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u/truddles 1d ago
Thanks for the recommendation. Loved Ender's Game. It's unfortunate about OSC. He has some interesting premises for books.
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u/Dr_DanJackson 1d ago
I've read a lot of his stuff, the Ender universe was by far my favorite, it has 20 or so books in it I think. His other stuff definitely has some interesting ideas that overall I enjoyed
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u/truddles 1d ago
I have only read 4 books in the Ender universe. Besides Ender's Game, Ender's Shadow was my favorite. I'll definitely check out Pastwatch
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u/nagato188 1d ago
Sounds a bit like Tony Scott's Déjà Vu with Denzel.
The cops have this brand new technology that allows them to use satellites to see like a few days into the past. But it gets more complicated.
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u/DontWreckYosef 2d ago
Non-zero implies a future where backwards time travel is possible. Will it ever be possible though?
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u/WittyAndOriginal 2d ago
Theoretically it's impossible.
Intuitively it's impossible.
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u/StressOverStrain 1d ago
Most of the things humans do every day are incomprehensible to all other life on earth…
It’s a bit presumptuous to say there isn’t higher-order life or beings in the universe doing things we aren’t capable of understanding.
Of course then it wouldn’t be humans time traveling… other things might time travel and mess with our understanding of time and reality, just like how a human can alter an ant’s environment in ways the ant will never understand.
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u/stockinheritance 2d ago
The speed of light could more accurately be described as "the speed of entities without mass." You and I have mass, so it would require infinite energy for us to go faster than the speed of light and that would just result in going into the future, not the past.
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u/appoplecticskeptic 2d ago
But that only allows for time travel while also moving in the other dimensions. True time travel allows movement through time while motionless in every other dimension.
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u/BreakfastBeerz 2d ago
If time travel is not possible, there is a 0 percent chance.
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u/tesserakti 1d ago
Exactly. It's incorrect to say there is a non-zero chance. We don't know that. There may be a non-zero chance.
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u/DJanomaly 1d ago
Which is to say it may have happened…or not. Which isn’t really very scientific.
Also time travel is possible but only forward. There’s a very good chance that traveling backwards in time is not possible due to causality paradoxes.
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u/PuzzleheadedDuck3981 1d ago
I remember going to a talk years ago by a physicist. He went into great depths as to how it was possible, but you couldn't travel further back than when the time travelling device was created. Apparently all you have to do is get a few (four or more if I remember correctly) neutron stars and line them up. The funky gravitational field/black hole that results is the key part apparently. Being a physicist he, of course, said "my work here is done, it's just an engineering problem now."
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u/Rough-Mango258 1d ago
If I had to bet, my life depended on it, I'm definitely saying time travel is impossible for the duration of human history.
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u/NeuroDividend 1d ago
Not only time travel but teleportation would have to be possible for it to matter. If we were to just go back in time, from our current position, we would be in outer space because our solar system/galaxy/etc... are constantly moving.
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u/zaminDDH 1d ago
Only if you "jump" from one time to another.
If you remain stationary and, instead, experience negative time relative to your own surroundings, then you should be fine. This, however, introduces other problems, like you'd be in the way of the building of said machine unless you could create some sort of time bubble around your machine.
Or, it could involve creating a wormhole, with one end here and one end there, a la Rick and Morty. But then, the placement of your exit hole would have to be precise. Not only of exactly where, because you could end up 30 ft in the air or 6 inches below the ground, or you might just kill someone or destroy something by opening your exit hole. Ideally, you'd be able to see through and fine tune the drop point.
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u/ShortyGardenGnome 1d ago
Ideally, you'd be able to see through and fine tune the drop point.
No offense but the idea that a goddamn space and time machine would be calibrated by sight fucking sent me
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u/fanclave 1d ago
My favorite time traveling theory is that we don’t experience it because you need a receiver first.
It’s not that time traveling isn’t possible, but that it’s not possible until the receiving end is ready.
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u/hangfromthisone 1d ago
Also technically space is being created in between everything so it not only go back to X position because now there is a very large added space between both points (then and now)
Physics is hard dude
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u/Kairamek 2d ago
That's why I like the "Universe is a simulation" theory. If it's possible to simulate a whole universe, there is no reason not to run thousands of simulations at once, in which case our life is almost 100% chance of being a sim. If it's not possible to simulate a whole universe, then there is 0% chance.
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u/stockinheritance 2d ago
Just like time travel, "we live in a simulation" is a theory that lacks any evidence to support it. And it is ultimately meaningless because there's nothing we could do with that information.
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u/I_AM_FERROUS_MAN 1d ago
If it's possible to simulate a whole universe, there is no reason not to run thousands of simulations at once
Have you seen graphics card prices lately? /s
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u/MelodicSasquatch 1d ago
In order to make a simulation of the universe, you need space on your computer memory for every subatomic particle in that universe. Or, if we're going to be generous to the engineers, maybe there's some way to simulate those particles based on the behavior of atoms. That's still one piece of memory for every atom in the universe.
Now, even if you could create memory technology that could fit that simulation state for that atom in the smallest space possible, that space is not likely to be smaller than an atom. (I'm cutting out some logic here, but I think that assumption is fair).
Which means, in order to simulate all the atoms in our universe, you need a computer memory with the same number of atoms as the universe being simulated. Basically, you need a computer the size of our universe to simulate our universe.
Am I arguing against the possibility of our universe being a simulation?.No. I'm arguing that if our universe is a simulation, then the universe in which the simulation is running is going to be much, much, much, much larger than ours.
Edit: now, what happens if that universe is also a simulation.
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u/SirButcher 1d ago
Or, it is possible that our universe is a simplification of another, more complex universe, where storing all subatomic particles' 3D data is about as complex as storing every pixel of our planet on a 2D surface.
It is simplification aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall the way down!
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u/gofo-for-show 2d ago
Sorry guys. I used my one shot at time travelling to travel back to the "big game" to tell coach to put me in and he did. We still lost by 40. - Uncle Rico.
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u/doubtfurious 2d ago
The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
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u/Theron3206 1d ago
Meanwhile the Department of Temporal Investigations would really prefer you not mess with any timelines, but they'll make exceptions for getting Kirk's autograph.
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u/cwx149 1d ago
I mean they explicitly have FTL travel in trekverse which is basically time travel already although for the most part only forward
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u/kingdead42 1d ago
This is said several times by T'Pol in Enterprise before the Vulcans had evidence for Time Travel.
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u/fastfreddy68 2d ago
If no one travels back in time to stop you, is it really that bad of an idea?
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u/appoplecticskeptic 2d ago
Not necessarily good logic even if time travel is possible. It’s entirely possible that your decision, terrible though it is, is on the critical path of decisions that leads to time travel being invented in the first place which means they can’t change it.
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u/fastfreddy68 1d ago
You just blew my frickin’ mind with that.
Counter point to your counter point, either it’s not bad enough for a time traveler to come stop me or it’s a mistake critical to the invention of time travel, and therefore should be done anyways.
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u/TomasKS 1d ago
People make up weird scenarious when it comes to time travel, putting odd constaints on how, why and where time travel is actually invented.
Chances are that any meddling in our history, with any concievable outcome, including preventing life to develop at all on Earth, done by our industrious time travelling friend would have 0 impact on whether time travel was invented or not, 2 billion years ago somewhere deep inside the Andromeda galaxy.
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u/opisska 2d ago
If someone comes back and changes something, what happens to the previously existing timeline? If another one branches, does it mean that the people living in the original one simply continue living? Does every time travel create another and another timeline?
If yes, then, purely statistically, we live in one of the intermediate attempts before they got it right.
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u/waffle299 2d ago
Quantum Electrodynamics states that travel backwards in time is equivalent to becoming antimatter.
That we don't have a mysterious smoking crater where a research lab used to be is the best evidence that quantum electrodynamics is correct. Aside from the experiment that, you know, proved it accurate to over seventeen decimal points...
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u/Flashyshooter 1d ago
If this is the brightest timeline that is insanely depressing. Because the world is fucking terrible right now.
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u/AdMaximum7545 1d ago
My dude, in another timeline there waa nuclear winter and most of life was destroyed. Suffering and starvation beyong imagination, still births for decades.
We still have nature here. We still have science and some very clever people, we can still figure things out over time.
We just have to focus on the important things, instead of the obvious diversions forced onto.an already exhausted population
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u/Flashyshooter 1d ago edited 15h ago
In the US we don't really have science anymore. We have the boot of fascism on it. Cutting the funding for it. A bunch of leaders in scientific field have been gutted by Trump and replaced with people who are actively dismantling it. And he's gotten rid of a lot of environmental protections and injected climate change deniers into power and are enacting legislation destroying nature. And he has cut a ton of funding towards science. The world has multiple large scale wars going on right now with immense amount of civilians being targeted. It's a lot worse than you think it is. Yeah of course things could always be worse. But I really don't believe that I should be grateful. The world is absolute shit. There's so many problems that are major like the concentration camps for immigrants. What diversions? I'm talking about the things that are actively fucking us. If you're living in the US things your safety is in danger due to the anti-science and fascism.
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u/McFuu 2d ago
If time travel in reverse in a functional manner is actually possible, that just means we are either A: on the original timeline and time travel simply hasn't been invented yet, or B: time travel causes a new timeline and whatever timeline we are on with whichever change was made, we are stuck with moving forward.
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u/aDeepKafkaesqueStare 2d ago
I think it was Leibniz who thought of something similar.
In essence, if you assume god is almighty, then he has the capacity to create an infinite amount of worlds. And if you assume he is benevolent, then this must be the best possible world.
How he did not look at the world and doubt the assumptions is beyond me.
Fun fact btw - he developed calculus at the same time as Newton.
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u/F1incy 1d ago
As one Burnie Burns of Roosterteeth once said "I know time travel hasn't been invented in the future. Because if it had, it would have always existed."
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u/Periwinkleditor 23h ago
We will never know the sacrifice of the man who time travelled back to defeat Mecha-Hitler in that bunker.
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u/Subject_Response_353 2d ago
I mean if there really was an event which will be devastating, then the event will one of the reason to invent a time machine (the event maybe a small one or a big one, one leads to another, like the butterfly effect) then if someone stops the event from happening then there wouldn't be an event related to the invention of time machine, maybe that event is the sole reason of the invention.
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u/gold-plated-diapers 1d ago
Literally the plot of a sci fi tv show that aired 2022-2023 in the UK, and is now available on streaming in the US and elsewhere. The Lazarus Project.
Real original shower thought OP
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u/Stag-Horn 1d ago
If this winds up being true, I wanna be dead. If this is the brightest timeline, humanity is fucked.
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u/Jack-of-Hearts-7 2d ago
If the good timeline is the one where Hitler came to power and started the bloodiest war in human history as well as one of the worst genocides, imagine how bad the alternative was.
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u/mjm132 2d ago
To be fair, star trek is considered a utopia to many but even there, the past is full of war and destruction. It took almost destroying ourselves in the eugenics war to become united and who humans are in star trek.
Obviously fiction but sometimes dawn is only after the darkest night.
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u/CJBill 2d ago
Alternatively you may think being a blood thirsty monster is a good thing and be aiming for that...
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u/Motorsav 2d ago
The alternate could be Stalin crushing Europe in a war instead.... making things even worse for all of us.
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u/Innalibra 2d ago
Hell March intensifies
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u/Highlander198116 1d ago
Ironically in the Red Alert timeline, Einstein was trying to save Europe from war by eliminating Hitler and it created an infinitely more fucked up timeline, lol.
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u/Dahak17 2d ago
The reason I don’t believe it is how easy it would be to make that war easier even if it had to happen. A few thousand dollars to buy and modify radios, a Cessna, and a decent research budget would overturn battles, especially naval battles, and that’d shorten the war massively. The other option is to simply live in the 1910’s to 1930’s and join a military production company (I would actually believe the American 5 inch 38 gun is the result of such a time traveller so maybe this one isn’t a gotcha). There are so many ways to give people “luck” or even just counter axis luck that it doesn’t make sense for the axis to be so lucky.
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u/Theron3206 1d ago
If you subscribe to that idea it's perfectly possible that the current version of WW2 is in fact the least worst version that gives a good outcome for future humanity at the time that the time machine is invented.
All sorts of issues arise, because you might need specific people to die heroically (or not) or things go off the rails 100 years later or something.
Star trek Voyager has a couple of episodes on this, a guy invented a machine that could erase an entire species from existence,but his definition of perfection required his wife to be alive and she died as a side effect of his first change and no matter how many races he exterminated never came back.
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u/Shot_Independence274 2d ago
Or how about this is the worse? And we are heading to 100% self annihilation?
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u/mrdungbeetle 2d ago
It's far more likely that all the heroes on our timeline went back in time, creating a new timeline and leaving us on the old broken one.
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u/hoops_n_politics 1d ago
There is no such thing as time travel, because there is no such thing as time. There is only the relentless march of entropy.
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u/discernible_sky_orbs 1d ago
If you take a zero and twist it in the middle, you get the infinity symbol. Non-zero therefore is and isn't a numerical Mobius strip of the timeline.
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u/Greensparow 1d ago
Either you just watched or really should watch the Lazarus project
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u/flamming_python 1d ago
I don't think that's likely
Anyone born in the era of time travel technology (or any other era) wouldn't care about what terrible event happened 50, 100, whenever years ago. It would be just part of history. Why would humanity want to change their own history which is beyond that of living memory? Unless it was so devastating as to wipe out civilization; but then they wouldn't have time machines around post that either.
And if a terrible event happened during the era of time travel technology well then they'd just go back a few months or years and fix that event, they wouldn't need to go back to our time or earlier
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u/Aprilias 1d ago
This book is worth a read (from wiki)
Replay is a fantasy novel by American writer Ken Grimwood, first published by Arbor House in 1986. It won the 1988 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. The novel tells of a 43-year-old man who dies and wakes up back in 1963 in his 18-year-old body. He relives his life with all his memories of the previous 25 years intact. This happens repeatedly, with the man playing out his life differently in each cycle.
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u/Hawke1010 1d ago
The thought that THIS is the best it gets is deeply unsettling to an unfathomable degree.
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u/AGrandNewAdventure 1d ago
"I've tried everything I could to keep Hitler alive! The best I could do was get Trump elected..."
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u/EDNivek 1d ago edited 1d ago
That would be a extremely depressing thought
Although I did think about this as a concept for a series of novels based around the Titanic (seriously really look into that timeline (here referring to the time line of events) how everything had to perfectly align to go the way it did) and ultimately end with the "Titanic Accords" which end up rules governing the use of time travel.
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u/neighbours-kid 1d ago
There's a much higher chance that the wealthy people invented time machine using their money and went back in time to create a system that keeps them in power and lets them hoard all the wealth they want.
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u/kirksucks 1d ago
I wrote a blog post half joking that in a 12 Monkey's like scenario, the only timeline that worked was where Trump has to become president. And this poor time traveler has to ensure he gets elected or else everyone dies. https://kirknoggins.blogspot.com/2024/02/what-if-we-did-slip-into-new-timeline.html?m=1
" How bad did it have to be that the reality we are in now was the better option?"
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u/SurroundNearby3600 1d ago
Whoever invents time travel will be fucked. From our perspective they will annihilate themselves when they step onto the machine.
From their perspective they will travel back and cause a butterfly effect and will cease to exist since it will change all events leading up to it just by being present in the past.
But in turn they will repeat everything and travel again and will get stuck in a time loop for all eternity
We will move on with our timeline even with the heat death of the universe or great crunch or whatever they will still repeat this into infinity and will never remember they did it again and again.
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u/Shloomth 1d ago
How tf do you figure that?
Like, hey there’s a nonzero chance aliens have already visited earth. Because I said so?
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u/emptyfish127 1d ago
Say in the future humanity becomes the scourge of the multiverse. We consume everything life like there is everywhere we go now almost so how much different would things be if we got access to the rest of space and time even? As I see it humans are capable of every evil we can imagine and just as much delusion. So as far as I can tell we are in fact likely to ruin the universe if we get the chance.
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u/LollygaginNewt 1d ago
Arguably according to statistics anything is possible despite zero probability in infinite sample spaces, so technically the probability of this is zero, but only because time is infinite and the likelihood of this amounts to zero. However by the laws of physics and mathematically speaking, in an infinite sample space, everything is possible and nothing is impossible so it’s possible but infinitesmally unlikely
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u/robertsihr1 1d ago
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. ~Douglas Adams
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u/LeanderT 2d ago
Yeah, so about that.
We feel an urgent need to ask you friendly to please go back in time a bit and unpost that.
Can't have people accidentally having more silly thoughts like that, now can we?
Tjeesh!
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u/PolarBailey_ 2d ago
There's no shot this is the brightest timeline when there's a timeline where slavery never happened and thus civil war never happened meaning everything leading up to Trump never happened
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u/mountains_and_coffee 2d ago
Yeah, but who knows what the ripple effect of no slavery back then would have meant 1000 years from now in the future.
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u/fastlerner 2d ago
That's why we're running the simulation. We have to test all the possibilities and this is the one we're on.
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u/PolarBailey_ 2d ago
Well if we're talking infinite timelines then there's one where there's no slavery and also Christianity didn't have a choke hold on scientific development meaning we didn't have a multi century period of darkness (as it pertains to knowledge) and we land on the moon in 1400s rather than 1900s
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u/Doyoueverjustlikeugh 2d ago
You do realize other countries didn't have slavery or Civil War and still got a populist dickhead in charge? Ignorance and greed are not products of specific historic events.
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u/diener1 2d ago
What an incredibly American-centric view. Slavery existed for thousands of years all around the world, it would be impossible to prevent it from ever happening
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u/PolarBailey_ 2d ago
If we're talking multiversal time travel then there's a timeline where slavery never existed.
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u/EidolonRook 2d ago
Humans existed. They felt righteous by the values that justified them and allowed them to do as they pleased at the expense of others.
There was never a humanity where we truly sought out the best in each other and ourselves and the only times throughout history where we did so, others suffered directly or indirectly.
I think that was the whole reason we latched on to the concept of morality and developed it to this point, beyond it serving to justify our broken insatiable hearts.
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u/PolarBailey_ 2d ago
I mean the first accepted evidence of society was a healed femur bone. Showing that humans cared for someone completely useless to them until they got better.
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u/EidolonRook 2d ago
And your children aren’t a part of you? Your tribe? The people around you that feed and clothe you until you are capable? The people who both benefit and love others like them?
Individualists can’t understand. It’s like asking an average Christian to understand morality is secular, not religious in nature. Morality is its own social religion.
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u/Gilpif 2d ago
In the grand scheme of things Trump is unlikely to be that bad. Him being president is horrible for the people who live in the world right now, but I doubt his legacy will be that significant in 300 years.
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u/Theron3206 1d ago
Frankly, there are several worse leaders right now, doing far worse things to large groups of people (just look at Africa for several examples).
The US is only in a poor state compared to its very recent period of unprecedented peace and prosperity, it's nothing like places like Uganda or Haiti.
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u/Standard-Square-7699 2d ago
Why would we expect future humans to make things better?
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u/coconutstopper 2d ago
because present us is trying to correct the past humans issues still to this day
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2d ago
In order for this to be true (assuming time travel is even possible), humanity would have had to survived to the point of the invention of time travel while enduring those worse historical events. Presumably they would also have time travel forever after (well, at least until extinction) that point and no one in all future history felt it was worth undoing any of the horrors in our history, such as Ghengis Khan, wiping out the population of the New World, the Black Death, Climate Change, the burning of the Library of Alexandria, the sack of Baghdad, the cancellation of Firefly, etc. And I just can't buy that time travel exists and baby Hitler didn't have to fight off infinite assassins.
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u/VillageBeginning8432 1d ago
Logically the rich and powerful would be the ones to have that ability to time travel.
And so you'd expect them to do what the rich and powerful always do when giving more power.
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u/sudomatrix 2d ago
If time travel were possible, that would mean for ALL OF TIME from the moment it was invented forward it would be possible for people to time travel. There would be billions and billions of time tourists hanging around EVERY historical event.
Maybe *some* eras would have strict controls around time travel, but in all eternity there would be some eras that are a free-for-all.
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u/InfelicitousRedditor 2d ago
Time travel at that scale, if possible, is something that will be in the far future. Maybe a few thousand years from now. The current world will be seen as tech-neanthertals and irrelevant to history.
Much of current events will be "ancient" and whatever damage we can do now is peanuts to the damage we can do in the future. A nuclear war will be seen as damage from trebuchets from the medieval times.
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