If I steal a gold coin from the year 2000, then, with that coin in hand, travel to 1999 and steal the same coin, I now have two copies. I then travel to 1998, 1997, et cetera, et cetera, on down the line, each time I gain an additional copy of the same coin. I then take all these coins with me to the present and spend them. Now just swap out the years for 2 minute intervals and you’ve got an infinite number of coins, or nearly so, anyway.
Comment on Time travel and the economy
deranger@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago2 minutes later, I set my time machine to go 1 minute back in time, collect the coin from myself, bring it to the present. Now I have 2 gold coins.
I don’t follow. If you took the coin from your past self, the coin no longer exists in the present. You still have 1 coin.
dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
Zonetrooper@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This entire “glitch” is posited on the idea that altering your subjective past does not alter your absolute present.
And you’re right - that’s ridiculous. Why wouldn’t taking away something from the past alter the present? This is called causality and thermodynamics, and it’s one of the reasons physics, as we understand it presently, doesn’t really allow for time travel as it is popularly conceived. It’s not about gold coins, exactly, but the idea that you can’t end up with more energy than you started out with (or the mass equivalent of energy).
But OP started with the idea that a time machine which break causality and thermodymnamics exists, so I just pointed out how massively broken such a machine would be.