If I recall correctly, Doc Brown only traveled to 2015, and no further. In one of the movies, he pulls out money for different time periods, and none are of future dates. I don’t recall that he makes mention of further travels ahead in time.
I have a suspicion why. Unlike the past, which you can prepare for by studying historical maps, you have no way of predicting where you’ll arrive in the future. Specifically, you’ll have no way of knowing if your intended arrival spot has become a huge building, someone’s living room, or any other potential hazardous location.
Even arriving in the air is no assurance of safety. By 2015 , there were flying cars (we still have time!). So he had no way of knowing if he was arriving in the middle of a traffic pattern.
I guess your best bet is to arrive somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, and hope that the weather isn’t dangerous. But you’d have to be out in international waters - the Bermuda triangle would be best, since people would include you in the legend!
If Doc did make a more trip further in the future, did he outfit the Delorean with any technology more advanced than 2015?
I don’t know exactly how far they went, but at the end of the first movie, when Doc Brown comes back, the DeLorean can now run on garbage and it has become some sort of airship, so they don’t need roads. That would tell me he went a lot further than 2015.
At least, not the time machine as it was last seen. I’m sure some time after 1985 he would have thought to put in a computer-based control panel. But then it comes down to the quality of the software. If the software were written with a 4-digit year restriction, it’d be no better than the wired control panel in that picture.
Iceland. It’s right on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge so it’s not going anywhere, if anything it’d be somewhat wider. There’s still the concern about weather or erupting volcano, though.
Or Hawaii. While the islands drift, the hot spot which created them is stationary and the volcanoes there don’t really spew ash like ones in Iceland. A smart flying time traveler would go in winter to minimize the threat of hurricanes.
As long as he’s still around in the future, he can routinely note blocked-off areas before heading back in time to give himself a list of safe arrival times and locations.
All of the future-tech we saw in use was available in BttF-verse 2015. That said, Doc repeatedly took risks of reentry into occupied space–the riskiest were probably his first trip to 2015, his return to 2015 with Marty, and returning from 1885 on the rails. The first was completely blind, as described in the OP, while the others were subject to potential traffic in the reentry point. In fact, every displacement risks something being in the way, barring meticulous research with photographic or video documentation of the target moment.
Either Doc and Marty repeatedly got very lucky, or we must presume that, for some reason, the vehicle will not reintegrate with the time stream in the same location as a solid object. It may displace or be displaced by such an object (reentry sounds suggest that it displaces air), or it may simply offset reintegration to a point in time when the object is no longer in the destination area.
No, just over the ocean, but close enough to land to get there before you ran out of power. (Of course, given Mr. Fusion, that could be anywhere, even this remote getaway recommended by Cecil.) Being far away from land and at a decent altitude minimizes the risk of bumping into someone else’s flying car on re-entry.
This is a good idea, although it would limit his travels to within his own lifetime (unless he got an associate to carry on with the reporting after he died). It’d be kind of spooky to surmise the age at which you die, though (i.e. if you all of your visits where within 10 or 20 years of the present, you’d know something happened to stop it after that time).
Hm. One of the few aspects of the movies I haven’t overthought yet–what kind of waste does Mr. Fusion produce? Lumps of iron? Iron dust? Does it have a little tray you have to empty? If it dumps it mid-flight, and you have too many reentries over a particular patch of ocean, could you cause an algal bloom?
Okay, I’m done now. At least until someone brings up another obscure point.
[evil grin]He discovers humanity goes extinct in the next 200 years; so he lives in the past hoping to find a way to change mankind’s fate without contradicting his own existence (Or Marty’s, since he ended up being so pivotal to the invention/perfection of the time machine).
Tch. It would be a snap for a scientist as inspired as Doc. When have you seen him take more than a minute or two to come up with a plan? (Or several plans.)
Picture it: One day in mid-2016, an incredible display of lightning breaks out over huge swaths of open ocean. For an instant, the sky is blotted out by countless flying trains, raining dust into the sea below. Then, in another flash, they’re gone. A short time later, the sea turns a verdant green as algae blooms.
Boom, Doc has created an enormous anti-greenhouse carbon sink and disposed of a huge amount of garbage, all as a side application of his primary research.
