Would time travel actually be that bad?

[skykiii]

For some reason I often see people say time travel would be a bad thing.

And I mean, I can see that if its in the hands of the government or in the hands of a crazy person. But very often the sentiment seems to be that because some people shouldn't have it, that nobody should have it.

Likewise, the idea that because some alterations to the past could go badly and end up making things worse, we should never alter the past at all. To be fair, a part of me agrees with this--if I had a time machine I would have a personal ban on major alterations before 2010 (and I'm still undecided about what alterations I'd consider "minor" enough to allow).

I dunno though... to me, by this reasoning, I could wind up stepping on a nail today so I better just stay in bed. That seems ridiculous.

What do you think?

Possibly more fun bonus question: If you could time travel, what would you do?

 

[Tsukasa Kadoya]

If I could time travel I would do several things.
1-steal from the Library of Alexandria JUST before the fire.
2-smother Karl Marx in his crib.
3-bang some of the golden age movie stars (me and my nigga @The Last Stand)
4-Kick the shit out of Edison and his goons before they ruin Tesla's reputation.
5-Tell Bob to wear a condom
6-Relive the 2016 election purely for the salt
7-Invest in bitcoin and hodl!
8-Witness the golden age of the Roman empire
9-Tell myself to not be a fucking weeb loser
10-unbang OP's mom

 

[Ultrapenguin]

In the instance of single-timeline travel the time traveler's paradox would always be present, i.e if you go back in time to change the past, then the intermittent timeline would play out differently and you wouldn't wind up getting in the time machine at that moment to go back and change the past.

And even if they're "minor" alterations, every moment you spend out of your timeline is basically a game of Russian roulette where every action you take is another chance to get instantly blinked out of existence.
In fact it would probably be a guarantee, since if you changed your past experience in any way you'd no longer be the same you as the one who walked into the time machine.

Just by being physically present in the past you're constantly bending and warping the timeline; even if it's subtle, it won't wind up in exactly the same place.

It's an irreconcilable conflict. You can't take actions that perpetually alter the factors leading up to that action.


And even if you take that out of the equation, no, nobody should have it.
Once you cross the line and start playing god people naturally go off the deep end. It would start out with "minor" alterations only to get more and more extreme as a person kept trying to fix what they saw as flaws and imperfections, then re-fix mistakes they believe they made.

There's a comfort in knowing what's done is done and any imagination of "what if" is purely fantasy. Giving a person access to single-timeline time travel would be a guaranteed recipe for insanity, at least until they inevitably got reckless and pushed things too far and vanished from existence.

Bad idea, very profane and against the natural order. If someone gave me access to time travel I'd destroy the machine because in the hands of a human being there's a 0% chance it wouldn't wind up annihilating our timeline.

 

[The Gifted Kid]

Honestly I think I'm the same way. I wouldn't want to change anything, just live and experience different time periods. Obviously just the act of going back in time would create a paradox but it'd be cool if it would only create an alternate reality and you could return to your original reality with nothing changed.

 

[Maurice Maine]

I think doc said it best... You can't change history! Not one line. (Unless if it's like in full dive vr)

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

If it creates a new timeline/universe, then it's great. Just go back far enough to the civilization of your choice with a bunch of technology and become a God King.

 

[We Are The Witches]

Time traveling introduces inevitable uncertainty of how much the timeline will change, and it will, simply because there's now an extraneous element that shouldn't be there (e.g: you going to the pharaonic era). Causality changes, and that will create an avalanche effect (in this case, "errors"/different events that trigger more and more) of different events that go astray from the ones that "happened", shaping the world into who knows what, unless you're omnipotent.

There also needs to be details on the logistics of this, like for example, do you innately have this ability, or are you going with the help of a "time machine"? How big and fast is it?

You popping at the wrong time and place will get you arrested/killed/etc, and then it'll depend on your ability of getting away, which I don't think you'll be able to if you depend on the stereotypical, bulky, slow machine. Then, it will be at the mercy of the authorities/your captors for them to use. Knowing about this great power, the one who gets to use it will (probably) do irresponsible things, given that it could be a retard from thousands of years ago.

And like someone else said, the selfishness aspect of allowing one person to have this is always present. Who gets this power and how they use it, as well as how lucky they get, it'll all play until you end up with a world shaped in an unpredictable way: could be destroyed, with minor changes, or for the better.
But given the choice, people may prefer the statu quo rather than take the chance, so they'll say it's generally a bad thing to have.

What would I do with it? Probably minor changes that shape my life into a better one, not from millennia ago. Does that sound boring? I might go full adventurer at some point, but knowing that it could create absolute chaos, or me getting seriously hurt/dead.

 

[Don't Tread on Me]

Time travel would be the literal worst thing that ever happened to humanity, because it would introduce new ideas to old people. Imagine if, rather than all the PC racist shit we dealt with today, imagine if someone came back and did it from the start before England even left on the boat. "No, you can't bother ANY niggers or Indians, that's colonialism and that's bad!"

Imagine how shit the world would be if Britain never colonized anything. For starters, that would make me British instead of American. Could you imagine? Absolutely awful.

If I could time travel I would travel back in time to the moment JFK got shot, and I would time travel over and over until I found the exact spot of the shooter, film it, and then return to the present and sell the footage for 50 million dollars.

 

[Johan Schmidt]

Depends on what 'type' of time travel.
Is it meme comics multiver style branching timelines? If so, then it's literally no different from space travel, without any of the danger that giving any random retard a nuclear powered rocket provides. Safe as fuck.
Is it 'one timeline that can change', then it's complete madness, since we have no real idea about how powerful the butterfly effect is. How paradoxes work, how any of that sort of shit would even go. It'd be giving that person infinite power, but also probably killing them in the process.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Like I said, I believe the "Novikov self-consistency principle" applies to time travel, at least in this timeline.

That is, any attempt to change the past is part of history all along: it would take "magic" to really change time.

(yet if the "Novikov self-consistency principle" is true it means free will could only exist from a timeless view)

 

[Hyperbola]

What time travel does depends on how causality works.

If we live in some many-worlds multi-verse anything-goes world where history can be changed, then the effects of time travel are nerfed somewhat.

If history must be self-consistent, then what time travel does fundamentally alters the way events in space and time depend on each other. In partial differential equations, if you have a particular type of equation called an equation with "hyperbolic dependence", then any given point depends only on a particular event cone, and can effect only a particular event cone. This allows you to figure things as an initial value problem (where what happens at a point only depends on things that happen over a finite region in the past. That our physics seem to work like this is why we have the ideas about causality that we do.

Change this to elliptical dependence in the time dimension, and now what happens at a given point suddenly depends on what happens over all of space and time, and you can only solve for the behavior as a boundary value problem (where you need the state of the far ends of space and time to figure out what happens at a given point.)

(Trying to solve certain problems as "steady-state" problems, where the system is assumed to have settled out into some kind of equilibrium value and time doesn't matter (though it is usually there implicitly, because our physics are causal), usually is some kind of elliptical equation. In this case, what has "settled out" is the entire space-time history of the region under consideration.)

If time travel is possible in general, then it really doesn't matter where or when the time-travelling civilization is in space and time, it can reach out and effect things.

 

[skykiii]

So here's what I would do if I could time travel (and for this I would be hoping to travel back in my own timeline and not to an alternate universe):

1. Record the complete broadcast days of every local television network in the area I grew up, from the first of 1980 to somewhere in the ballpark of Y2K. Or at least find some way to archive these broadcasts.

2. Go to the site of famous mysteries like Hinterkaifeck or the death of Elisa Lam and see what actually happened, maybe even prevent the murder (but revealing to them that I'm a time traveler so that one mystery will be replaced with another one).

3. On a similar note, go back in time to see stuff like the filming of the Patterson-Gemlin Bigfoot film, bringing my own camera from the future and recording what really happened. I don't know what I'd actually do with the footage though.

4. Copying what a guy above said about backing up the books from the Library of Alexandria before the burning/sacking. Just in general art/lit preservation is a huge deal to me so I would be going around saving things like the lost episodes of Doctor Who et al.

 

[MadStan]

Pure Science fiction; and always shall be. Sadly. The science and math on it is solid.

If I could travel in time I would probably go back in time and be that asshole in the waiting line at the movies and reveal to everyone that Darth Vader was Luke's father. I'm that kind of asshole.

 

[Hollywood Hitler]

I would definitely go back in time to the Old West, turn of the century. Just seems like a time where I can be left alone.

 

[High Level Rad Waste]

The way I see time travel working without creating some kind of paradox is there will be 2 parallel worlds created. One where time was not altered, and progressing as normal; and the other where time was altered and the course of its history was changed. You exist as an outsider, able to do whatever.
Otherwise, time travel simply wouldn't work: you'd alter the past, which would alter your future, which could prevent your ability to have access to time travel.
Closer to multiverse theory than true time travel.
As for what I'd do? Get new papers while it was easy using a dead relative so I could exist within the system without too much drama, profit on shorting airline companies during 9/11, buy a majority stake in Taco Bell, and prevent them from cancelling the Volcano Burrito. I'd also archive the shit out of all the music that's been lost to youtube's new gay algorithm and rules. I'd probably also hire dedicated political agitators to get tenured at universities in Cali to make the gay shit look bad before it really became a problem.

 

[Saint Agustin]

Your premise is based on science fiction. Time, and its science, is something really hard to study, even theorize.

Time, as we percieve it, is linear... However, time theorically isn't linear. Our brain percieve it like that due to limitations in our organism.

Time is a circle. Going "back in time" it's both a logistical and technical nightmare and something humanity can't and will never achieve unless we evolved to either A-Develop more advanced senses B-Evolved beyond our physical frame.

When Time Traveling you use energy. Fuck ton of energy. More energy a country like France uses in a day just to "travel" 1 second.

And even if you travel back in time you won't be able to do anything, not even observe. Your own time will be displaced by the current one you are inhabiting.

 

[PipTheAlchemist]

If time travel were a thing, we'd see a lot more time travellers in our world. They'd be easy to spot just by their clothing. Try blending into a medieval peasant crowd when you're wearing a T-shirt and jeans. It just won't work

 

[Bionicle of War]

If time travel were real, we would go through several different time lines until we arrived at one where time travel was never invented. Then time time wouldn't be real.

 

[Table Country]

Yes it would be that bad. I've seen enough time travel plots in media to know that they almost all universally suck.

 

[Fortune Rabbit]

Time travel as realized may only be possible with great compression of information. Currently understood it is theoretical to send incredibly small amounts of data in the past. Models simulating the transfer of a qubit of information from black hole to wormhole has been conducted in success, though nobody knows what it could mean if done realistically. It is largely a study of quantum gravity from what I understand.

In broadest sense, it is maybe not a good idea to time travel at all even if possible.