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I think it was Orson Scott Card, he wrote a book about how they changed the past so that Columbus wouldn't commit so many atrocities, but in doing so they realized that Columbus committing those atrocities was itself a previous time-correction because of the horrible future that happens if he doesn't!
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Jan 31, 2024 03:50
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mysterious frankie posted:Imagine you’re the detective interviewing that suspect and you ask “Well, why didn’t you stop Hiroshima?” And they say “I would have gotten around to it… if you hadn’t stopped me.” And he’s really convincing so you’re left thinking daaaaaaaaaamn, good answer, but also, sorry Japan, I still gotta book this guy for strangling that (admittedly nefarious looking) baby. Quantum Leap rules. Affecting anything prior to your birth and you affect the odds of the traveler existing at all.
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Jan 31, 2024 03:56
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mysterious frankie posted:Then I'd go back and stop you. Then I'd go back, Jack, and do it again.
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Jan 31, 2024 03:57
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Darth Brooks posted:I had an idea for a Dr. Who episode where the inhabitants of an alien planet decide that the Doctor was obligated to stop some disaster of their own making. They then took that further and convicted him in abstentia of failing to stop every dead that had occurred in the History of their plane. Because he could have possibly saved any life in any part of time but had not saved all. If I had a time machine, I'd just tape the missing Doctor Who episodes as they aired and deposit them in the present. One of the major tenants of time travel is to not do something too big, so as the create ripples of unknowable horror. Sorry, world, but I've seen Back to the Future Part II.
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Jan 31, 2024 04:01
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The timeline is self restoring actually. You can try and change a lot of stuff but the timeline will find a way to wobble back to how it was. It's very particular you see.
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Jan 31, 2024 04:08
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Mister Speaker posted:Then I'd go back, Jack, and do it again. You and I, rivals trapped in a single eternal moment, constantly thwarting and counter thwarting attempts on the life of the band that made Everyone’s Gone to the Movies.
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Jan 31, 2024 04:20
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credburn posted:I think it was Orson Scott Card, he wrote a book about how they changed the past so that Columbus wouldn't commit so many atrocities, but in doing so they realized that Columbus committing those atrocities was itself a previous time-correction because of the horrible future that happens if he doesn't! Stephen Fry wrote a novel where they time-jump sterilizing drugs into hitler's parents and the the timeline changes to one which had New, More Competent Hitler instead. Although the book's kinda weird and not that great. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 06:13 on Jan 31, 2024 |
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Jan 31, 2024 06:04
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I'd prevent the Hindenburg disaster so that airships would become the dominant form of air travel in the future.
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Jan 31, 2024 06:19
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numberoneposter posted:I'd prevent the Hindenburg disaster so that airships would become the dominant form of air travel in the future. Yay so we're squashed in like the economy section of a 747 because it's still gonna be all about maximising profit, but now we're stuck there for days.
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Jan 31, 2024 06:20
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seriously this thread is making me wanna rewatch travelers
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Jan 31, 2024 06:36
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credburn posted:I think it was Orson Scott Card, he wrote a book about how they changed the past so that Columbus wouldn't commit so many atrocities, but in doing so they realized that Columbus committing those atrocities was itself a previous time-correction because of the horrible future that happens if he doesn't! remember that time orson wrote several profoundly homo-erotic books and then posted on his blog about how evil gay people are? hahaha, but no, he's a piece of poo poo
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Jan 31, 2024 06:43
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The obvious answer is to travel back about 1300 years and assassinate baby Mohammed.
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Jan 31, 2024 07:21
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came here to vote 1, 
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Jan 31, 2024 08:07
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numberoneposter posted:I'd prevent the Hindenburg disaster so that airships would become the dominant form of air travel in the future. You'd also have to prevent the many other, not nearly as famous airship disasters for that to pan out I think. There's a reason we stopped using them in the US too even though we were like the only country in the world that had a sufficient helium supply.
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Jan 31, 2024 09:23
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hazed glam posted:came here to vote 1, Add baby hazed glam to the list
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Jan 31, 2024 10:34
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credburn posted:I think it was Orson Scott Card, he wrote a book about how they changed the past so that Columbus wouldn't commit so many atrocities, but in doing so they realized that Columbus committing those atrocities was itself a previous time-correction because of the horrible future that happens if he doesn't! I dont know anything about this book, but that does sound convincingly like Orson Scott Card also I just learned Brandon Sanderson is Mormon and a big OSC fan. It doesn't necessarily detract from his work, but I feel like it explains its very contrived blandness
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Jan 31, 2024 10:35
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Mr_Companie posted:First, study Ancient Greek and Latin. Set the machine for Constantinople, 50 BC. Spread covid-19 throughout the population, introduce the rest to fentanyl. Any remaining rivals are to be blinded, as was the custom of the time. this is just an unpublished Robert Heinlein manuscript
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Jan 31, 2024 12:14
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syntaxfunction posted:The timeline is self restoring actually. You can try and change a lot of stuff but the timeline will find a way to wobble back to how it was. It's very particular you see. Preventing 9/11 only to cause 9/12
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Jan 31, 2024 12:16
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BAGS FLY AT NOON posted:Preventing 9/11 only to cause 9/12 But if they tried to crash into the twin towers on 9/12 the earth would be 2.6 million km's away from where they were on 9/11, so they would of just crashed into, um empty space I guess? Seems like the better option TBH.
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Jan 31, 2024 12:19
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dr_rat posted:But if they tried to crash into the twin towers on 9/12 the earth would be 2.6 million km's away from where they were on 9/11, so they would of just crashed into, um empty space I guess? thats not how time travel works due to observational reference frames
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Jan 31, 2024 14:20
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Nope earth just leaves in it's wake a whole bunch of frozen time travelers. It's why you can't change things with time travel, cos you're all like dead and what not. Just a whole big ball of frozen time travelers 73,320 million km's from here. You could almost mistake it for a small moon.
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Jan 31, 2024 14:32
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dr_rat posted:Nope earth just leaves in it's wake a whole bunch of frozen time travelers. It's why you can't change things with time travel, cos you're all like dead and what not. I covered this when discussing the need for a "Space-Time" machine.
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Jan 31, 2024 14:34
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MikeJF posted:Stephen Fry wrote a novel where they time-jump sterilizing drugs into hitler's parents and the the timeline changes to one which had New, More Competent Hitler instead. I'm starting to get the vibe that a not inconsiderable amount of time travel literature is a metaphor for the author's untreated anxiety disorders, or just a general sense of unease about committing to any significant course of action. Q: We should kill Hitler A: What if that results in Mega-Hitler??? Q: We should convert to solar power. A: What if the sun went away? We'd be ruined! RUINED! Q: We should go out to eat. A: What if I start choking and the waiter is a Mega-Hitler who invented Her own multiverse transversing time machine and she is both going around timelines collecting subordinate Normal Hitlers, and killing all the versions of us off so that we don't go creating competing Mega-Hitlers?
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Jan 31, 2024 15:53
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I mean, on the upside being dumped into the megahitlerverse did allow the protagonist to realise he was gay and get a boyfriend.
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Jan 31, 2024 15:57
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"Remaining Perfectly Still So I Don't Make A Hitler" is going to be the title of my autobiography. Which I won't write, just in case it would have made a Hitler.
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Jan 31, 2024 16:01
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mysterious frankie posted:"Remaining Perfectly Still So I Don't Make A Hitler" lmao, conceptually
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Jan 31, 2024 16:04
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MikeJF posted:I mean, on the upside being dumped into the megahitlerverse did allow the protagonist to realise he was gay and get a boyfriend. No, you're thinking of the omegahitlerverse. Common mistake.
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Jan 31, 2024 16:04
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There’s no way to stop yourself from creating hitlers. All you can do is keep killing them
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Jan 31, 2024 21:11
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Smugworth posted:It's crazy there aren't more murders where the killer admits they were sent back in time to stop a global catastrophe that the deceased enabled I thought an interesting explanation for all those motiveless* mass shootings that end in the killer's suicide or death by cop could be time travel to prevent even worse catastrophes but it would be distasteful to write the book and depressing to do the research.
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Jan 31, 2024 21:44
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The Management posted:There’s no way to stop yourself from creating hitlers. All you can do is keep killing them Wasn't there a comic or story where Hitler ends up like Doomsday because of all the time travelers coming back to try and kill him?
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Jan 31, 2024 21:45
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last thing you want is to do is inadvertently make an osama bin robohitler who does 9/11
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Jan 31, 2024 21:57
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i would travel back in time to 5000 BCE and start researching cloning, and then i would put 50 copies of myself on each of the airplanes they tried to use and fight the terrorists to death i would also foretell this in stone tablets which i would present and then i would take over the world E: honestly i probably wouldnt bother stopping 9/11 but i'd probably short enron
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Jan 31, 2024 22:04
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id sire thousands of children with the cave babes and create a new empire in my likeness
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Jan 31, 2024 22:35
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If I had a time machine I would be a god and would not be beholden to human notions of good and evil.
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Jan 31, 2024 22:37
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I'd probably use a time machine to go back and watch/record performers from before recording performances was possible: Shakespeare's Globe theatre and the Marx Brothers in vaudeville and/or on Broadway would be at the top of my list, alongside a lot of classic pro wrestling shows I wouldn't know where even to begin preventing major tragedies and frankly I'd be terrified to try
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Jan 31, 2024 22:42
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I would simply build three even taller towers so the terrorists crashed some planes into them instead
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Jan 31, 2024 22:50
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Now I wonder what would happen if Hitler, say, died in prison and wasn't replaced by Megahitler. The German far right probably still winds up with a plurality of the Reichstag but let's suppose no one is able to install themselves as dictator (because then they'd be Megahitler.) They still purge a bunch of commies and push through rearmament, maybe pursue some reannexations, but without a charismatic and ambitious leader would things have fizzled out there without a full fledged war in Europe? Japan would still be invading China regardless, but would probably be less eager to expand the conflict without Germany wreaking havoc on the Western Allies--and if they did, provoking the undivided attention of the US would be even more disastrous for them, and they would not necessarily have the benefit of a swift rebuilding effort since the USSR would not be emerging as a postwar superpower. But without the war the US would be even less of a superpower. Does FDR just retire after a peaceful 3rd term? Nukes would happen eventually, the fears that spurred research into them would still be there, but without the same sense of urgency. I remember an Isaac Asimov story that speculated that we may have lucked out by developing nukes at the very end of a war when everyone's fighting capacity was stretched to the limit, and that civilizations that develop nukes in peacetime tend to die in nuclear fire since they're able to amass stockpiles before they've seen the implications firsthand and then wind up unleashing them all at once. I don't know that I really buy that though.
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Jan 31, 2024 23:06
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im not gonna read that
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Jan 31, 2024 23:09
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redshirt posted:... and the big M. Night twist at the end was the Time Traveler was always one of the hijackers. Basically this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90HljiOmunA&t=89s
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Jan 31, 2024 23:16
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A Strange Aeon posted:I thought an interesting explanation for all those motiveless* mass shootings that end in the killer's suicide or death by cop could be time travel to prevent even worse catastrophes but it would be distasteful to write the book and depressing to do the research. I've thought of a short story idea where there's an interdimensional agency that gets hired by people to go kill certain people in ways that look like tragic accidents in as many timelines as possible before they do the things that ruin their image forever; kill OJ before he commits his murders, kill Rudy Guilani in 2002 before he pisses away all the goodwill he got from 9/11, deserved or not, kill Michael Jackson shortly after Thriller (no idea when the child molestation started so I just said that), etc. So while in the core timeline all that happened, in many other alternate timelines it doesn't.
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Jan 31, 2024 23:17
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