# What are some of YOUR greatest Time Travel Stories/Ideas that YOU yourself came up with? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Tags:** books-writing-myths\ **Created:** [October 4, 2024, 10:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-some-of-your-greatest-time-travel-stories-ideas-that-you-yourself-came-up-with/1008459 "2024-10-04T22:25:01Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![GuanoLad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guanolad/32/42_2.png) [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2024, 9:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-some-of-your-greatest-time-travel-stories-ideas-that-you-yourself-came-up-with/1008459/21 "2024-10-05T09:07:53Z")
My best Time Travel idea is not really travelling through time as such. I started wondering about observing the past safely and what if someone invented a machine that could view any moment of time and space, like a VR experience, so they couldn’t interact with anything, but could otherwise witness it as though they were there. And then I realised that it would just be used to creep on people, or alternatively if it was a widely known technology, nobody could ever commit a crime again because you could check back on any event to see what really happened. After that I couldn’t think of a way to turn that into an interesting story. ---
**Author:** ![eburacum45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eburacum45/32/8690_2.png) [@eburacum45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eburacum45)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2024, 9:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-some-of-your-greatest-time-travel-stories-ideas-that-you-yourself-came-up-with/1008459/22 "2024-10-05T09:08:03Z")
Here’s one of my time-travel stories. It is based in real, but speculative physics, derived from Kip Thorne’s description of temporally-disposed wormholes. The idea is that you can send a wormhole off into deep space at relativistic velocities, and this will displace the mouths of the wormhole with respect to each other, so when you bring it back it will be a working, and permanent, time gate into the past (and of course, into the future). This is great, at first; when you get to the future the wormhole is still there, so you can go even further into the future, over and over again. And people from the future can come back to us as well. But then discrepancies start appearing; it seems that history can be changed, after all - in fact this is inevitable. Time becomes a wibbly, wobbly, - well, you know the rest. There is, however, one solution. [Out of the Loop](https://www.orionsarm.com/page/612) (note that in order to shoehorn it into the Orion’s Arm Universe I had to add segments establishing it as a simulation). ---
**Author:** ![eburacum45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eburacum45/32/8690_2.png) [@eburacum45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eburacum45)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2024, 9:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-some-of-your-greatest-time-travel-stories-ideas-that-you-yourself-came-up-with/1008459/23 "2024-10-05T09:18:07Z")
> [@DPRK](#): > > In quantum mechanics, there is the same number of “futures” as “pasts”. Just saying Unless you consider the fact that the universe has a distinct starting point, before which there were (presumably) no earlier pasts. So there must be more futures than pasts, even though both quantities are very large indeed. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2024, 11:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-some-of-your-greatest-time-travel-stories-ideas-that-you-yourself-came-up-with/1008459/24 "2024-10-05T11:04:32Z")
> [@DPRK](#): > > In quantum mechanics, there is the same number of “futures” as “pasts”. Just saying I don’t think so, not in the Many Worlds Interpretation. It proposes a branching multiverse, as I understand it. ---
**Author:** ![Tibby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tibby/32/17030_2.png) [@Tibby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tibby)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2024, 11:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-some-of-your-greatest-time-travel-stories-ideas-that-you-yourself-came-up-with/1008459/25 "2024-10-05T11:33:13Z")
A loner survivalist, thoroughly fed up with humanity, decides to take matters into his own hands. He builds a time machine—complete with a feature that shields him from any pesky time-travel paradoxes—and sets the dial to ~7 million years ago, targeting what is now Chad. His objective? To wipe out Sahelanthropus tchadensis, one of the earliest known hominins, in a bid to erase the evolution of humans (not to mention chimps, gorillas, and orangutans). With a decisive zap, and a machine gun, he accomplishes his goal. Triumphant, he returns to the present day, eager to enjoy a pristine world untouched by human hands. He finds himself in a lush, unspoiled wilderness. No cities, no pollution, no social media nonsense, no Kardashians, no P Diddys—just peace and quiet. He spends his days wandering the idyllic landscapes, living off the land, and feeling quite pleased with himself. That is, until one afternoon while foraging, he comes face-to-face with a saber-toothed cat. _Wait, aren’t you supposed to be extinct?”_ he blurts out. He had overlooked the fact that without humans, many other species would thrive, including those that consider solitary time travelers a delectable snack. As the saying goes, sometimes you’re the hunter, and sometimes you’re lunch. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/the_other_waldo_pepper/32/12370_2.png) [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Other_Waldo_Pepper)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2024, 12:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-some-of-your-greatest-time-travel-stories-ideas-that-you-yourself-came-up-with/1008459/26 "2024-10-05T12:23:23Z")
> [@GuanoLad](#): > > if it was a widely known technology, nobody could ever commit a crime again because you could check back on any event to see what really happened. > > After that I couldn’t think of a way to turn that into an interesting story. IIRC, there’s a story where, given that sort of tech, someone plots the only perfect crime he can think of: accomplices are right out — sure as he can’t say or do anything that would serve as evidence of premeditation — but as long as he mentally rehearses each planned action instead of physically rehearsing any of it, he could lethally hit back in what looks like startled self-defense. Granted, the key is calculatedly goading the other guy into throwing the first punch. But if he thinks through enough _if-then_ playlets, then he’ll just need to act like he’s having an off-the-cuff interaction with no such intent, and then react as if he’s suddenly in unexpected pain… ---
**Author:** ![ZonexandScout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zonexandscout/32/544_2.png) [@ZonexandScout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZonexandScout)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2024, 1:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-some-of-your-greatest-time-travel-stories-ideas-that-you-yourself-came-up-with/1008459/27 "2024-10-05T13:44:40Z")
I don’t want to be “that guy,” but plenty of time travel stories and characters deal neatly with the movement of the earth by having the time travel take place when circling the earth. Superman does this and I think that Rip Hunter’s time sphere did this as well. They orbit (?) the earth at high speed and then land again wherever they choose. They apparently follow the earth’s center of gravity…wherever that may be. And many other stories use time-travel methods that are not simply “walking though an apparatus or fixed field located somewhere on earth in its current position.” ---
**Author:** ![Push\_You\_Down](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/push_you_down/32/9095_2.png) [@Push\_You\_Down](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Push_You_Down)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2024, 5:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-some-of-your-greatest-time-travel-stories-ideas-that-you-yourself-came-up-with/1008459/28 "2024-10-05T17:30:21Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > All I’ve got is the equivlanet of a footnote in category 4. Brilliant inventor successfully develops a time travel device. Then spends the rest of his life trying to find a way to compensate for the fact that the planet isn’t where it would have been at any not-immediately-recent time in the past. Even the damn galaxy itself is moving. I had a similar story idea years ago–it was a forward time travel device that basically froze you dimensionally and you’d unfreeze in the same space. The whole “universe is always moving” threw the idea off for me (sure you can handwave it but…) ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2024, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-some-of-your-greatest-time-travel-stories-ideas-that-you-yourself-came-up-with/1008459/29 "2024-10-05T17:48:51Z")
> [@GuanoLad](#): > > After that I couldn’t think of a way to turn that into an interesting story. Is that a dig at Asimov? The story was not that bad. ---
**Author:** ![eburacum45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eburacum45/32/8690_2.png) [@eburacum45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eburacum45)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2024, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-some-of-your-greatest-time-travel-stories-ideas-that-you-yourself-came-up-with/1008459/30 "2024-10-05T18:17:07Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > All I’ve got is the equivlanet of a footnote in category 4. Brilliant inventor successfully develops a time travel device. Then spends the rest of his life trying to find a way to compensate for the fact that the planet isn’t where it would have been at any not-immediately-recent time in the past. Even the damn galaxy itself is moving. I would also point out that this conundrum doesn’t apply to the ‘temporally-displaced wormhole’ method of time travel or the ‘FLT spaceship’ method of time travel. In both of those the traveller is moving in entirely predictable ways, and there is no question of getting left behind in deep space. Indeed, the FTL method requires the use of a very fast spaceship, so you can travel back to Earth with relative ease, assuming you have kept enough fuel in reserve. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2024, 6:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-some-of-your-greatest-time-travel-stories-ideas-that-you-yourself-came-up-with/1008459/31 "2024-10-05T18:55:02Z")
Real time machines don’t travel in only one dimension. Having the machines move in time and also space means they could pop into existence anywhere on earth or anywhere else in the universe. It’s simply a common storyline device to have them move to the same location on earth that they started from. ---
**Author:** ![Typo\_Knig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/cdc98d/32.png) [@Typo\_Knig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Typo_Knig)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2024, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-some-of-your-greatest-time-travel-stories-ideas-that-you-yourself-came-up-with/1008459/32 "2024-10-05T19:43:17Z")
Not my idea, but here’s a clever take on tine travel: One Minute Time Machine [https://youtu.be/w3sSQ9RYvS8?si=5RzmmOAfQJvNLp7x](https://youtu.be/w3sSQ9RYvS8?si=5RzmmOAfQJvNLp7x) ---
**Author:** ![Ponderoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ponderoid/32/19221_2.png) [@Ponderoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ponderoid)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2024, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-some-of-your-greatest-time-travel-stories-ideas-that-you-yourself-came-up-with/1008459/33 "2024-10-05T20:07:18Z")
> [@GuanoLad](#): > > After that I couldn’t think of a way to turn that into an interesting story. Damon Knight managed it. [“I See You”](https://www.zanotowane.pl/1086/8676/) ---
**Author:** ![The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/the_other_waldo_pepper/32/12370_2.png) [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Other_Waldo_Pepper)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2024, 8:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-some-of-your-greatest-time-travel-stories-ideas-that-you-yourself-came-up-with/1008459/34 "2024-10-05T20:13:19Z")
> [@eburacum45](#): > > I would also point out that this conundrum doesn’t apply to the ‘temporally-displaced wormhole’ method of time travel or the ‘FLT A nice FLT – Frog, Lettuce, and Tomato sandwich — where the frog is nice and lean, and the tomatoes are ripe? They’re so perky; I love that. ---
**Author:** ![GuanoLad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guanolad/32/42_2.png) [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2024, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-some-of-your-greatest-time-travel-stories-ideas-that-you-yourself-came-up-with/1008459/35 "2024-10-05T21:00:13Z")
> [@DPRK](#): > > Is that a dig at Asimov? I’m not into reading SF, and I very much figure any idea I come up with was already thought of and fully explored by better creative minds than me decades earlier. ---
**Author:** ![Typo\_Knig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/cdc98d/32.png) [@Typo\_Knig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Typo_Knig)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2024, 10:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-some-of-your-greatest-time-travel-stories-ideas-that-you-yourself-came-up-with/1008459/36 "2024-10-05T22:47:09Z")
> [@ParallelLines](#): > > The ship speeds up and hits FTL according to the sensors, but the actual effects are the ship “bounces” off of spacetime and begins heading backwards in both time and space, on a reciprocal course to Earth. I had an idea similar to this. Time travel spaceship is supposed to try to cross the relativistic light speed barrier, and bounce off to travel back in time. Doing this unintentionally causes the ship to split into multiple copies, each in a its own parallel universe, some going forward in time and some back. There could be lots of stories set there. ---
**Author:** ![Typo\_Knig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/cdc98d/32.png) [@Typo\_Knig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Typo_Knig)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2024, 10:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-some-of-your-greatest-time-travel-stories-ideas-that-you-yourself-came-up-with/1008459/37 "2024-10-05T22:53:09Z")
> [@don\_t\_ask](#): > > The reason every movie about time travel is nonsense is that the Earth moves, constantly, always. You travel back one day, you don’t end up in the same location—you end up in the gaping vacuum of outer space. There’s an SF story where a detective is investigating the disappearance of a CERN physicist. It turns out the missing guy was a major jerk to his wife, also a CERN physicist, He stole her ideas, diminished her reputation, and was otherwise awful. He was working on a time machine. The detective figures out that the wife realized the husband would materialize a few seconds behind Earth, and die in space. She didn’t say anything. As I recall the story ends with the detective wondering if he can prove she murdered her husband by letting him use the machine he invented. ---
**Author:** ![Whack-a-Mole](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/whack-a-mole/32/141_2.png) [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2024, 11:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-some-of-your-greatest-time-travel-stories-ideas-that-you-yourself-came-up-with/1008459/38 "2024-10-05T23:01:26Z")
I never wrote it but I had an idea that time travel is invented and then, in (say) 1935 at Nuremberg when Hitler is giving a big speech, millions of people poof into existence around him trying to kill him as every future person comes back to that one time to kill him. Then expand that to every point in Hitler’s life and maybe beyond to his parents and grandparents. ---
**Author:** ![Orr\_G](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/ee59a6/32.png) [@Orr\_G](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Orr_G)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2024, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-some-of-your-greatest-time-travel-stories-ideas-that-you-yourself-came-up-with/1008459/39 "2024-10-05T23:47:52Z")
Suddenly, he was struck with a sense of dread as he stared at the remains of the fly on the crumpled napkin. _Christ_, he thought. _Have I learned_ **nothing** _from Bradbury?_ ---
**Author:** ![De\_La\_Rue](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d07c76/32.png) [@De\_La\_Rue](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/De_La_Rue)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2024, 11:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-some-of-your-greatest-time-travel-stories-ideas-that-you-yourself-came-up-with/1008459/40 "2024-10-05T23:50:48Z")
> [@Whack-a-Mole](#): > > millions of people poof into existence around him trying to kill him as every future person comes back to that one time to kill him [The _Subnormality_ webcomic take on it](https://viruscomix.com/page382.html). (I have my own take on a time-travelers-kill-Hitler story; I should probably continue the bit I started writing.) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-some-of-your-greatest-time-travel-stories-ideas-that-you-yourself-came-up-with/1008459.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-some-of-your-greatest-time-travel-stories-ideas-that-you-yourself-came-up-with/1008459.md?page=3)