If the premise is that outcomes are fixed, then I see no reason why it shouldn’t be shared. I don’t think there are ethical problems about learning “the real truth” about past events.
Ah, the “Bill and Ted” time model. The one where you can go back and do anything you want, but everything you do already happened before you left, so you can’t change history - or more precisely, you can’t change any history that you or anybody else knows. If I know that I had a grandparent who survived puberty, no time traveler can possibly go back and change that fact, whether or not I know that they’re up to.
If this time machine involves people physically going back in their phone booths and being physically present in the timeline, then there is no possible harm in going back or letting anybody else go back - or rather, any harm they might do has already happened and they quite literally can’t make things worse. So there are only two possible negative consequences to this sort of time travel:
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People can go into the past and not come back, either staying until their natural deaths or until their abrupt unnatural deaths. This can be bad if you wanted to arrest them and bring them to trial, or if you just want to spend time in their company.
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People might be able to learn things they otherwise wouldn’t. This might enable them to get ahead in life, which is always a bad thing.
Other than those things though, there’s literally no risk (and no benefit) to letting people go back in the past.
Not that you have a choice. The side effect of the Bill and Ted time model is that the entire timeline, past and future, is fixed and unchanging. There cannot be multiple possible futures - if a bunch of creepy dudes appear in a tomb, steal a body, and pretend to be angels and the dead person’s body double for a while, that means that two thousand and twenty-four years later a group of dudes will hatch a plan, get together costumes, makeup, and drones capable of lifting a person into the sky, and then take all that back with them via their walmart-issue time machine. The future that includes those events is already determined, which means that all future events are already determined. This is an unavoidably true in the Bill and Ted time model.
Asimov’s The Dead Past, one of the stories I was trying to remember.
And it would have huge consequences, negative in the short term. Hard to say how society would adjust to it. In the other story I recall (but not the name of), things were fine - there was just no expectation of privacy. Humans are an amazingly malleable species.
Whether or not there are privacy issues depends on whether your machine actually sends you into the past, or whether it’s a viewer. If it’s just a viewer there are massive privacy issues, but if you actually get physically sent it’s no easier to sneak into somebody’s house and peek into the shower yesterday than it is to do it today.
Actually, not that I think of it, it is easier - or rather safer, because you know you won’t get caught. You might fail utterly (and in fact will probably fail to get anywhere near the house, because your clumsy butt would have been seen by the neighbors and wasn’t), but if you know you weren’t detected/arrested yesterday you can make as many slapstick attempts as you like with no risk of anything worse than an accidental karmic death that leaves your body rotting undetected in the chimney for weeks.
I read the OP such that the time machine is a TARDIS, but is stuck on Earth - so I could use it to materialize directly to an location.
With the Novikov self-consistency principle operative, any journey back by a human would be fruitless, because 1) anything done there has already happened, and 2) there’s no guarantee of return; the traveler dies back there. I’d like to see the return-rate tables - how many make it back from which years? Is 33 CE a sinkhole for temponauuts?
It is even worse in a ‘multiple-timelines’ version of time travel; the traveller might attempt to come back, but returns to the wrong future. You could wander through multiple versions of reality forever, never finding the place where you started.
Or using another model of time travel, sometimes called the ‘radical rewrite’ model, you can change history just by being in the past, and thus destroy the future that you came from. This is more-or-less the model used in Back To The Future and The Butterfly Effect.
Compared to these options, Self-Consistency is relatively benign.
My assumption was the phone booth time machine from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure/Bogus Journey, movies that are extremely blatant about the fact that they use the “you can go back and interact, but everything you do had already happened even before you even decided to go back in time” model being discussed in this thread.
And be it phone booth or police box, neither are short enough to fit in a room with eight foot ceilings without putting a hole in the roof. If you’re using one of those machines you’re not going to materialize inside their house or anywhere else close enough to peek in their windows without attracting a lot of attention. And even if your time machine is a wristwatch, you’re still physically there - you have a distinctly nonzero chance of being observed while peeking. If doing so would have got you caught, when you hadn’t get caught, that means that either you will be (aka were) successfully stealthy - or that events transpired to prevent you being there at all.
And that’s just peeking at somebody showering. A decent set of security cameras and security guards would be sufficient to completely stymie time travelers attempting to infiltrate after the fact into anyplace that didn’t see them there before, and of course if nobody extra was seen infiltrating events in a closed area then there’s nothing for a later time traveler to do. Hordes of thousands weren’t recorded visiting the Last Supper, so time traveling tourists will be out of luck.
They could probably visit some of the sermons, though. BYOLAF.
(Pretending that the bible is factual.)
You would have to be awfully eager to commit those crimes, in order to live out your life in a society without conveniences, modern medicine, etc.
That’s probably “I See You” by Damon Knight.
I see no mention of temporal range limits - how far back can we travel and return? Nothing about spatial displacement either - can a target location be chosen or are we stuck in one spot X km from Earth’s core? I wouldn’t want to slip back a few centuries from suburban Fresno and emerge far under the surface of the lake then covering the San Joaquin Valley.
Quercus may have notched hundreds of trips and taken us on a few, but where to and how long? Consider Larry Niven’s early displacement booths. Vertical jumps cause temperature differentials so with great leaps we emerge freezing or baking. Large temporal displacements should have similar effects. That fireball on the horizon? Just another early time traveler burning up.
What is the temporal displacement mechanism - a booth, body wrap, amulet, implant? How does a downtime voyageur trigger their return or is the duration preset, tightly scheduled? Have they an emergency Bug-Out! switch?
Assuming travelers have some (if unknown) chance of return, and they can’t change things, the ethics / morality of revealing this technology IMHO depends on temporal range limits. Zip back a few hours or days to spy on family, friends, foes, celebs? Not good. Flash back to a dangerous time? There should be cheaper suicide methods.
Oh yes, what’s the energy expenditure? Is power from a small fission reactor needed?
My answer depends on the history of this world. You see, if she goes public and everyone has the ability to use this, then there is no chance that there is not evidence of time travel in the past. Even if everyone tries to be secretive about it, there would be an extremely high number of people using it, and some will slip up enough for it to wind up in recorded history. Not even a secret organization could keep it secret.
So, if there is no such evidence in history, then my conclusion is one of the following: (a) she will decide to not take it public (2) something will happen to her to keep her from going public (III) something happen to humanity to prevent it from being used too much. Of those options, option A seems the least bad, so I would encourage that, while sharing my logic.
If, on the other hand, there is sufficient evidence of time travel in the past, then it seems humanity is destined to learn about it, so she might as well go public. Though I could throw in a little test where I, like Hawking in our universe, set up a party where I invite time travelers after the fact to show up. Assuming I get the word out sufficiently, someone will eventually decide to show up. And then I can just ask them how time travel became public.
If I understand the O.P. correctly:
We cannot change history a hundred years ago.
We cannot change history ten years ago.
We cannot change history ten minutes ago.
We cannot change history one microsecond ago.
Which raises uncomfortable questions about how much free will we have in the present.
“Should it be shared with the world?” Well, if the past is fixed, then the decision is probably predestined anyway.
I would say, go public. Let the history of every corrupt politician be revealed. There’s some embarrassing stuff in my past, but nothing that would ruin me if it were exposed.
Questions nothing - an unchangeable timeline is an unchangeable timeline. If you believe in a free will that requires you to defy causality then your free will cannot exist.
If you’re a compatiblist there’s no problem of course, but most people it seems can’t accept compatiblist free will.
See Mack Reynolds’ short story Compounded Interest…!
It’s neither. It is simply that there is only one universe and time runs in one direction.
You didn’t act ahistorically.
That is certainly what I intended in writing the OP, but it occurs to me that there is another possibility. Perhaps Quercus’s machine creates a new reality each time backwards travel is used, but she also knows how to lock on to the original reality in each return trip. in other words, before her initial time travel trip (assuming she was the first time traveler ever), there were exactly 6^6^6 universes, but the action of her machine added one more, so that the new total was 6^6^6 +1. Each universe has a slightly different technobabble signature, and her technology permits her to home in on her original universe for each trip. thus it is not so much that no changes are allowed as it is that neither the time traveler nor the inhabitants of the “original” universe experience them. Thus no paradoxes.
This also would explain why Quercus works neither for Apple, Microsoft, nor Freedom Scientific .She is too competent to be an engineer for either company.
Well in that case the fact that everybody is going to grab a bunch of weapons and just murder the crap out of everybody in the past is no problem at all; the minute the person returns to the present the alternate timeline effectively ceases to exist as far as the original reality is concerned. Okay, sure, there’s a certain moral factor to the fact that all the damage you did continues on existing in its own isolated dimension, all the injured and dead and infected and irradiated people keep suffering despite your absence. But would anybody in the original reality even know this is happening? For all they know this might as well be a video game that resets each time you play - albeit one that you can die in and/or never return from.
Your mere presence in the past profoundly affects it regardless of what you do or don’t do (the butterfly effect), so the only way this scenario makes sense is that what you’re dealing with is not so much a time machine as a very advanced form of archeology that allows you to see and hear the events of the distant past without actually being there.
If such a device existed and was widely available, we’d certainly have a far more accurate knowledge of history, but culturally, the major impact I think it would have is the demise of all religions.
The way I see it, unless there is some type of intelligence controlling the physics of our universe, what can be sent back in time needs to be all or nothing, butterfly effect or not. Either you can send anything back, or nothing at all. Otherwise, you’d need an intelligent gatekeeper.
No, that elephant can’t travel back in time, he might sit on somebody’s grandfather and that would invoke a paradox. But, Bob can go back as long as he promises to be sneaky and not disturb history. That doesn’t make sense.
And, if organic matter can’t go back, then inorganic matter can’t go back either. Because, who’s to determine what the dividing line is?
We can send that archaeological spy camera back in time, but not that bomb—heck it might blow up Hitler and then the universe would collapse. That doesn’t make sense either.
I would certainly like for advanced archaeology tech to exist whereby we could see and hear the past without physically interacting with it. 4K video resolution and Dolby Digital sound, please!
It would be great to see a real saber tooth tiger from the comfort of my La-Z-Boy recliner without being eaten by one. Seeing mid-1300’s Europe without catching bubonic plague would also be nice. But, short of magic, how could that happen without something from today interacting with something from the past.
Maybe some sort of quantum virtual particles can travel back in time without breaking physical law, but surely nothing that can record and send messages back to us.
To me, time-travel makes no rational sense unless the many-worlds interpretation is correct and infinite time-lines exist.