What would be the least impactful way of using time travel?

JonsJava@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 78 points –

Started as a shower thought (literally in the shower), but decided to make it more open-ended.

My answer to this would be "watch future seasons of anime that I am waiting on".

I don't see how that could cause a huge ripple through time.

78

The world has yet to notice me traveling one day into the future every 24 hours.

There's a quote in a book I like along those lines, that goes: "First of all, we are all time travellers. The vast majority of us manage only one day per day."

I've always really liked that

We travel into the future at the blindingly fast rate of one second per second.

Astronauts, on the other hand...

We’ve noticed, but we do the same thing so the net change is zero.

Going back a few hours and getting some more sleep sounds nice

A full night’s sleep every night does sound good. I wonder what that’s like.

Adequate sleep and infinite gym time would make my life so much better.

I have always argued that virtuous activities should give you more time, not less. So working out, sex, sleep, all should rewind time. When you get done it really ought to be the same time you started, or earlier, no matter how long you take.

At work we have a rule that whenever you come back from lunch, you left an hour before that. It doesn't matter how long the lunch actually was. You could have a two hour lunch, that is a one hour clock out.

Sounds like your looking for a hyperbolic time chamber

Yeah, instead of moving the alarm clock 15 minutes every time it rings, just jump back in time 15 minutes.

Rewind the last 15 seconds of a meal to enjoy the last bite again.

Wow. Great idea! You get to enjoy a great meal again, but without getting overfull

Thank you! I think the same idea could be applied to any short, fleeting moment where you'd take no different action, like an enjoyable sunset or a sweet smell, though being able to experience those again and again may diminish their value.

That would just affect you, though, not the timeline as a whole.

But then you'd have to fight yourself for that last bite! Oh the paradox begins, who was it that took the last bite then?!

Let's just say no one's noticed anything yet

I wrote a novel where in future people time travel back in time to watch movies in the theater like the original Star Wars. It's book one of a series.

It's book one of a series.

So naturally it's called part IV, right?

"Alright, it says my microwave meal takes four minutes..."

Instead of rewinding the video, just rewind causality.

And when you skip ads you really skip ads.

Watch Primer, that's the whole point of the movie, how a couple of engineers who discover time travel try to profit from it while causing the least impact possible.

Also easily my favorite time travel movie by a long shot, and I'm a time travel movie fan.

Isn't that the one where the guys who are supposed to be engineers do not even seem to know what a capacitor or battery is? Like they unplug the device and it is still showing signs of being "on", and they say "what does that?" to imply it must be time travel.

I very rarely stop watching movies. I have suffered through some awful movies. But this was so stupid I just couldn't continue. Me and my partner now have a running joke where if we unplug like a power cord with a little light powered by a capacitor then we point to it and go "look, time travel".

The guy who wrote the movie is a mathematician who's worked as a programmer, I studied years of electrical engineering before switching to computer science, and doing a masters in Material Engineering, Perhaps it's you who didn't understood something.

I looked up that part of the movie again to see exactly what you were talking about, they're putting 24V into the machine, but the machine is using more than 24V, even after they unplug it the machine is still pulling more than 24V, perhaps you missed the point that they're looking at a voltmeter (which is never shown on screen), which one of them suggest it's busted and the other tells him that he's tried 3 others. Or perhaps you missed the point that they built the machine, so they know what's in there, they know the machine shouldn't be doing that, so when they ask "What does that?" it means "What part of it does that?" or "What's making it do that?" and not "What other things do that?", the phrase can be interpreted both ways, but only one of them makes sense. The thing is that the movie doesn't try to hold your hand and explain things in detail, the engineers talk like engineers, and that's a very valid question in that situation, in fact I've asked that exact same question of several programs, it's a very common question to ask when trying to understand what's the cause for something.

And no, they're not hinting at time travel there, in fact they go for days not knowing what the machine does, if you had bothered to keep watching you would know the process of them discovering time travel is a lot longer than that, that's just the first mystery behavior from the box, which in fact has nothing to do with time travel but just an inherent way of how the box powers up and down, because it takes time to get into and out of the feedback loop.

They did build it themselves and would know that they didn't put in any capacitors, and yeah that was implying that the time travel field has some kind of capacitance.

Future time travellers going back in time to the moment the first time machine was invented to figure out how that one worked because in the future theirs suck and are locked down to prevent abuse.

Time travel to 12 hours ago so I can get more sleep

It'd feel too weird sleeping with myself, which would result in lower quality sleep, requiring another trip back in time for more sleep, which would put more people in my bed...

Anthropology while cloaked, as the Temporal Prime Directive requires

Just send a GoPro disguised as something else to record history.

Bro, it's a GoPro. You'll get 20 minutes of 1080p footage and then the battery will die.

Going forward three days to when it's $2 beer night at the bar.

He said unimportant not financially responsible. Either way be sure to fast and sell plasma, so you have the needed cash and get the most effect from the blue ribbons.

We are all travelling through time right now with very little impact.

Yes I know, I suck.

Cheap and easy food storage.

Make a dozen extra servings of whatever I'm cooking and just leave it in the pot on the stove. When I'm hungry in the future I'll come back and serve myself up another bowl. When I take the last serving, I leave a note saying when I came from so I know to prepare another batch by then.

Go back in time and prevent your time machine from working.

Nice tight little loop. Minimal interference, hopefully.

I am seeing this comment right after I finished 'Life is Strange'...

::: spoiler Tap for spoiler I think I will stay away from time travel for now :::

Going forward at all seems less harmful than going back, but perhaps more dangerous.

Agreed, but going forward would also then open the risk of trying to capitalise on/prevent what you saw, once you return to your present, which probably wouldn't end well.

Safer way would probably be going forward and staying there, like another comment said. Maybe use it to skip boring stuff, like waiting in line at the DMV, or waiting for your food to be served, etc.

That's the story of the movie "Click"

Traveling a second back in time to scratch that itch before it even happens. Maybe going back in time to tell yourself not to order that taco bell. Skipping forward in time to skip a hot pocket cooking in the microwave. Traveling a couple of minutes into the future to skip a boring conversation with the officer that pulled you over.

Here's the real question, if it's possible to time travel isn't it just part of the timeline even if it doesn't seem like it. If you could traverse forward and backwards in time like a tape deck isn't it already laid out including all of the time traveling you'll ever do.

Oh wow, skipping a microwaving hot pocket just reminded me of the movie Click and how SPOILERS FOR CLICK it just adapts and starts fast forwarding through shit it doesn't think he wants to see until he realizes he misses those things

I like the idea of someone traveling through time like the Terminator for mundain things like this. Always ending up naked, leaving scorch marks everywhere, and just casually doing it in front of people without any warning.

Traveling a few minutes into the future to skip a boring conversation with the office that pulled you over

Skips time ... Cuffed on the floor

Or you travel through time like the Terminator. You find yourself completely naked with the cop having an existential crisis as he questions if any of this is real and the smell of bacon fills the air.

Going massive events that are either completely void of people or full of people.

Star exploding? No one around, nothing to change.

Parade for the astronauts coming back from the moon?

What's another guy standing around, just minding my own business.

Until everybody throughout time, after the machine has been invented I gues, also wants to experience the same parade 🙃….. I mean not until…. It’ll just happen ?….. now my head hurts

Long, but relevant Douglas Adams quote:

One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can't cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.

The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.

Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.

There's a 'theory' the Titanic really sunk under the weight of time travellers going to watch the sinking firsthand

Travel forward in time to when the shower is warm.

Go back in time and fill the lottery, but don't check the winning numbers before going back.

If it were ever possible, I'd say, just as an observer. There are lots of things I'd love to experience for the first time again but I personally have little desire to change the past.

To me the rules of time travel are that it is time travel only. Go forward or back more than a few seconds and you'll find yourself floating in the vacuum of space rapidly dying as the earth, the galaxy and the universe continues moving.

Depends on which model of time travel you subscribe to.

If you're working under "Back to the Future" logic, then the best way is to not use time travel at all. Butterfly effect and all that.

If you're working under "Avengers: Endgame" logic where you're actually in an alternate reality, then you could muck around a bit without destroying your own "present" though you would be meddling with the destiny of that parallel universe (assuming you subscribe to the Prime Directive, that would be a bad thing).

Or the Bill & Ted's time travel where any changes you make were supposed to be there in the first place so you didn't really change anything.

Depends on the type of "time travel". Backwards time travel doesn't seem plausible, so I guess we're talking only about 1 way physical transport time travel. That kind of time travel is achieved either by traveling at speeds approaching the speed of light or via intense gravity, unless you consider something like being cryogenically frozen and then reanimated at some point in the future to be "time travel".

As far as least amount of impact? I guess in terms of impact, its best to travel to the nearest point in the future that you possibly can, so that hopefully very little has changed and you're still more or less the same person living the same life (with just a short gap from leaving the present and arriving in the future). Otherwise, you could take a huge risk and try to travel to the distant future to a time when all traces of your current life have disappeared and peoples' memory of you has long been forgotten.

You can't change the future (...of your original universe)

That die had already been cast, that wave function had already collapsed. The very act of traveling backwards immediately creates a new timeline no matter what.

Any change you make any step you take, is all affecting that new universe while your original universe keeps on keeping on the way that it was, except now without you in it.

So from your perspective, if you were to travel forward again, things would be different, yes. But only because you're no longer in your original universe. The people in your original universe would see no changes because in that universe, the wave function had already collapsed, the die had already been cast.

There is no chance to EVER get back to your original timeline no matter what. Every jump backwards instantly creates a new universe (one in which the wave function collapses to reveal that you have traveled through time) and every jump forward is in THAT new timeline.

Essentially, you can't go home again.

Well I travelled back in time and killed Hans-Johann Scherzlgruber-Vötzfenstein so the world wouldn't have to suffer through his atrocities.

Go back in time and meet Jesus while He was here on earth

Literally impossible to answer without discussing what type of time travel you mean.

Regardless, the cop out answer is that the time travel you do by existing is the least impactful. You are currently traveling forward through time merely by existing.

I didn't set restrictions on the type because that gives everybody the chance to respond how they like.