I could be wrong as I didn’t even finish the book but I was talking about it last night and promised myself I’d start this thread.
Would I be correct in saying that there was a huge inconsistency in the book?
IIRC it is stated in the book that time travel is impossible and what they are doing is actually going to different dimensions which are experiencing events that have already happened in our dimension? If that’s the case, how the hell did one of the guys leave a message for his colleagues in the future. Wouldn’t the message be in another dimension and not be seen by his colleagues?
If you’re talking shite yojimbo, then you and I are up the same creek. I noticed the same problem and if there was any explanation in the book, I missed it.
In our dimension hundreds of years ago, people traveled here from a dimension that was several hundred years ahead of ours. These people are identical in form and function to the ones that traveled into the “past” to save their friend from our time.
Uh-oh I’ve gone cross-eyed.
The thing I didn’t agree with in that book was the thought that it’s really really hard to do something like go back in time and kill Hitler.
He says, I think, to think about it like right now in the present–say you want to go kill Saddam by yourself–pretty darn hard plan to carry out.
I disagree, though, because you have more knowledge about when and where a person will be if you go back in time. If you wanted to kill Hitler, just find out where he’ll be in say, 1930, and go there and wait.
No because Hitler lived in our dimension. As an individual (or part of a team), could travel to another dimension where Hitler is alive and kill him. The tricky part is that we can’t return to our original dimension because Hitler didn’t die in that one. We would have to travel to a third dimension where Hitler was killed by “time travellers” in its history but the timeline is concurrent (January 27, 2003) with ours.
Didn’t Crichton state in the book that (at least within his little framework) dimensions “close to each other” (i.e., similar in some significant way) could affect each other?
Granted, the dimension they travel to is hundreds of years behind ours, but it is effectively the same universe…which is why they were “close,” which is why he could leave the note…I guess. I’m sifting through mularky here.
