Too close in time. I’d go back and make Abraham eat lithium… or kill him when he was an child.
If I had time travel I would prevent the big bang - or, at least, prevent the universe settling down and becoming friendly to life.
I don’t think you could even theoretically reach so far back. You can’t time travel to where time did not exist
Why?
“In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”
How?
why time travel when there are brutal dictators today? You can always buy a plane ticket.
Because with time travel you can travel to a time before they are important and under highest security, say when they are 20-years-old and just walking down the street.
don’t worry guys, I just came back from the past, I killed baby Hess Von Macher. the whole German fascism that invaded Poland and killed a hundred thousand people in concentration camps has never happened. y’all welcome.
You’re not going to believe this, but…
I want to go back in time and snuff out that first ameoba.
You’ll have to fight Q for it while Picard watched
Meiosis was a mistake.
I would have a Lovecraftian statue carved out of some sturdy, semi-rare material that can stand the test of time, and bury it in Antarctica tens of thousands of years before homosapiens evolved. Then in present day I would wait…
We can do better than that if we want to abuse a time machine to forge Lovecraftian horror!
I would use my time machine to steal Neil Armstrong’s corpse from his funeral and then dump it right at the landing site of Apollo 11. First thing Neil sees when he hops onto the lunar surface? His own aged corpse.
Why wait when you could just go to the point of discovery?
You need it to be propery aged for carbon dating and shit.
How old does carbon need to be before you can legally date it?
Asking for a friend.
Atoms don’t age. They don’t mature, and they don’t change with time. Unstable isotopes decay at random, but the decay probability never changes.
So you can legally date carbon that’s 0 years old, if you find any. Most carbon will be much older than you.
How do you know how old all of my carbon is?
I mean, my friend’s carbon?
Christ, imagine this being the good timeline.
One head canon I like:
This actually is a good timeline. And our timeline actually has been heavily altered by time travelers! People have actually tried and succeeded at changing the past.
But time travel isn’t like in movies. This isn’t one of those stories where you go back, change something, and then you come back and everything is a little different. No. In this version of time travel, we get maximum butterfly effect. Going years into the past doesn’t just alter history, it completely rewrites it. Go back a hundred years and hang out on a random spot in Antarctica for five minutes, never interacting with another living being? Your presence for that short time will be enough to subtly alter air flows, which will butterfly up to entirely different storms forming in different times and places. Which means that almost everyone born in the last 100 years simply never existed. An entirely new populace is born. No matter how trivial a change you make, any travel beyond a certain length of time into the past results in a complete historical reset.
This is fundamentally not something you can fine-tune. It’s not physically possible to go into the past and make a tiny alteration. Every trip is an entirely new spin on the historical roulette wheel. Every trip completely remakes the world.
As such, there’s only one practical application of time travel - preventing world-shattering disasters. For example, you could use it to undue a nuclear war. Going back to prevent this apocalypse will result in erasing everyone currently alive, but almost everyone is already dead, so little consequence. Same thing for species-destroying plagues, giant asteroid impacts, etc. Because every trip is a historical reset, it’s only useful for scenarios where you’re content on just wiping all current people from existence. Even the Holocaust doesn’t come remotely close to the level of calamity necessary to justify time travel.
No, I was implying that reality simply branched. Specifically when Bowie died, if you’re curious.
But back to your hypothesis: if all of the future is rewritten by travel into the past, then the travel to the past shall not have happened. How do you reconcile this paradox?
You don’t even need humans doing the travel. You just send a 10 kg rock on a one-way trip back and get all the same effects.
Yeah but now these two are hounding you
They’re always on time.
So it’s this guys fault we exist in this shitty trump time line
Plot twist: we’re already in the less shitty timeline, as unbelievable as it can be.
Wouldn’t it be depressing if this were the best timeline?
Ah, well, Golden Ages are defined by what comes before and after them I guess
the implication is that this is the best possible timeline.
I knew they faked the moon landing for a reason
