I know there are some dopers out there with great imaginations…so what do people think? For the sake of argument let’s say time travel is possible, but only by a few weeks into the past or future, just to keep some kind of sanity.
I guess one immediate effect would be wealth becomes irrelevant…anyone can become exceedingly rich. Also, almost no-one dies, except of old age, since friends can go back and stop the person walking in front of the bus, etc.
For starters, it would be easy to catch cheating spouses and dishonest bosses - you could go back to catch them in the act.
And people would be much better conversationalists - I should have said? Never again. Just keep notes for a few weeks, then go back in time and be brilliant.
Patent law would be crazy, obviously, and lord only knows how war would be fought. We’d probably annihilate ourselves, what with all the world leaders going back in time to make preemptive strikes…
Didn’t you just ask this very same question tomorrow?
Barry
YOU’RE HURTING MY BRAIN!!!
Language would become irelevant because someone would keep going back in time and changing language around…
For example,
Hello would be
wasdfnka Meebsa qxggfsajk
Then
ajdsflsdahf la
then
asdfhlkjsdaruebt
Ad Nauseam.
More people would die from extremist morons who’d go back in time and kill each other, and everything else, causing time travel to be abducted by a giant angry cheese since some other moron would go and make cheese sentient 743213075156 years from now, change that to 8321749781 years in the past and fuck with evolution, possibly creating a society of beings that look almost like mini cthulus that eat the fundamentalist morons that objected to time travel.
But this message would look like this in TIME TRAVEL WORLD.
jkaslfhjsdahfjdsahfjsdahfjashdlfjahslfsadfjksadhfeiaryeuafitwe489t724358297tdfwj89257vherjtvwrebgu iwehreqnb 5u43h59q3r98ty4 3uq7hrweurb hulghtlerfubvwel hrewtf wenasdfjds fnseafsdja hfsdjfhldansbfhrdsf asdhfde78rew hfbfjaan asfhscbvahsdfvweybqt falrknf asdfjer 8vb4wtf7evbtadshf asdfbjds fshdfdjsabreufyvewarywieary bv4qun!!!dsafhQ@jhdsafj barubgeu %@!#%%^GF VGBYAFY BRUER&EWYR&*#yfdab67rewq76&67
Nothing would ever happen. Ever.
Every time you screw up you would go back and stop yourself or advise yourself. However, somebody is the loser in any sort of conflict so the loser goes back and fixes it so he is the winner. Then the new loser goes back and fixes so he is the winner. So then the original loser is the new new loser but guess what?
So either the outcome always changes or people will just sit at home and never do anything.
What is the point of inventing something? Somebody will just travel back and invent it a day before you do.
Nope you will just sit there and do nothing. The only positive is that if you buy something and the next day it goes on sale you can fix that but then why would a store have a sale? Everybody will only come on those best days so there would probably wouldn’t be any more ‘sales’ either.
Mass confusion and total anarchy within weeks. Imagine what life in Iraq has been like the past few months and spread that to the whole world. Being charged with crimes that you allegedly committed in the future. Don’t like the President, pop in his shower in the morning, do your dirty deed, then poof, your gone. Same goes for anybody.
Another scenario: You pop into GW’s shower naked with large knife. GW pops out and armed FBI agent wearing armor pops in. Second FBI agent pops in with can of WD-40 and sprays agent #1’s armor to prevent rust because the shower is still running. You pop out and a naked Laura Bush pops in. You pop into closet still naked but knife has been replaced by salami. You warped with some guy traving back in time with a salami. The guy had choked and died while eating the salami a week in the future. You feel a warm breath on your neck and realize GW, still naked is standing right behind you and he is getting excited. You pop back into shower but Big Bubba, a convicted sexual predator, is now standing behind you and he is getting excited. You suddenly pop into a prison shower and your time travel/chronograph watch is not on your wrist. Big Bubba is still standing behind you and he just dropped your bar of soap.
I’m pretty sure we’d cease to exist.
Some yutz would go waaaaay back and drop a little Clorox in the primordial cooling earth’s ocean which would change the basic chemistry of the soup that we all came from and “poof” no more us.
Instead, I predict that the earth would now be populated with creatures that resembled large bald men with single gold earrings wearing white T-shirts and pants.
Time travelers would die because they’d go back to a time where the earth didn’t inhabit its current position and they’d die in space.
TAADAA!
If by “yutz” you mean “suicidal, angst-raddled teenager”, then I’ll give that analysis the Bosda Seal of Approval.
I knew guys in high school who would gladly do that.:rolleyes:
If time travel were to ever become commonplace, we would already know about it. The invention of things like time travel, deodorant, and the atomic bomb would be irrelevant because they’d have been available to anyone at any time.
Well, first of all, as a primer to this sort of thing, I highly recommend “The Theory And Practice Of Time Travel,” by Larry Niven.
Y’see, there are a variety of factors to consider, here. First of all, is it possible to alter the past?
The past has HAPPENED. It is IMMUTABLE. Once it’s happened, and led to a future, you CANNOT change it. Some time travel stories are based around this. In one that Niven cites, a man travels backwards through time to prevent his own assassination. He succeeds… only to have a meteorite the exact size and shape of a bullet smash into his head.
Time will repair itself, no matter WHAT we do to it.
ON THE OTHER HAND: what if that’s not true? What if it IS possible to change the past, assuming you’re there to be a part of it? This brings up the “Grandfather Paradox” – you travel back through time and kill your grandpappy before he met your grandmammy, thus preventing the birth of your father, thus preventing YOUR existence… which means you couldn’t have traveled back through time to kill grandpappy, which means…
You get the idea. In the “Immutable Universe” theory, someone else, someone incredibly similar, will take Grandpa’s place, and history will continue unimpeded. In fact, it might be YOU – you are, after all, right there, and you’re already carrying the old man’s genes…
The only theory I’ve ever seen that I really liked here was this: Time travel IS possible… but if you travel back through time and shoot your grandpappy… and then come BACK… you will find that nothing has changed. In fact, if your grandpappy was alive when you LEFT, he will still be alive when you come BACK, despite the fact that you SHOT the bastard, forty years ago!
How is this possible? Simple. When you went back and shot grandpappy, you simply caused the generation of a parallel universe. In one timeline, the original one, your grandpappy is still hale and hearty. The timeline YOU created, the one in which he is dead, is now a “Branch Timeline” and does NOT lead to the future in which you were born.
…which means that unless your time machine has a firm anchor to the reality that you left to shoot grandpappy, life could be very interesting when you get back. What if you get back to the ALTERNATE future, instead of the real one? You are now in an alternate reality in which you never existed, and have no identity… an interesting possibility, assuming you weren’t real anxious to go back and resume the life you left behind to begin with.
Of course, that means that if TVGuy went back and dumped a bottle of bleach in the primordial soup, he’d simply be creating a parallel reality in which life didn’t evolve on earth. Of course, when he tried to get back to his future, he’d simply be going to an equally sterile future. Eventually, he’d die, and then the bacteria in his body would go to work on his corpse, spreading to the outside environment, and finally, spreading into the primordial soup, and then…
TVGuy would be, in some twisted sense… God.
Man, my head hurts. I’m going to go and get a big drink, now.
“What would the world be like if time travel were commonplace?”
Well, either exactly the same as it is now, or completely different from how it is then.
Either you can’t change the past because it’s already been changed because time travel must always have existed to exist at all, see?
Or you can change the past which means there will never be a single correct past, which means it’s never ever the same moment once, see?
Simple, really.
Mass confusion and anarchy INSTANTLY. If you could invent EZ Time Travel tomorrow, the entire continuum of history would go berzerk.
I once sat down and tried to come up with a logical time travel novel. It defies creation. Everything would be screwed up.
And as nitek points out, time travel is dependent upon the time travel machine being able to place the traveller at a certain point in SPACE, not just time. So now anyone can be anywhere and anytime.
Fortunately I went back in time and prevented time travel from being ivented.
“I guess one immediate effect would be wealth becomes irrelevant…anyone can become exceedingly rich”
Not really. If only a small number of people time-travel they could become rich by, say, noting the day’s stock prices and going back in time to use them. But if everyone could do this the financial markets would just go haywire. The same for any other money-making opportunity from time-travel; when everyone can time-travel that opportuinity would no longer be there.