Comment on Nope, not visiting that
RustyShackleford@piefed.social 6 days ago
Now, I’m speaking hypothetically, legally, and for educational purposes only… you fast-forward a few decades and suddenly certain names appear in court documents and flight logs, not convictions, not proof of wrongdoing, just… associations. Enough to make a careful chrononaut say, ‘You know what? I’m not popping back in time to shake hands and eat shrimp.’
The absence at that party wasn’t evidence that time travel failed. It was evidence that it worked, and everyone who could come already knew how the story looked later.
History doesn’t just judge actions. It judges proximity. And no self-respecting time traveler shows up early to something that turns awkward in hindsight.
Okay yes but there’s also a bit of dissonance, if I learned that Vlad the impaler had a time travel party to prove it and I had the capability to do so, I wouldn’t give a shit, would go see him and also take a gun just to keep myself safe. Safe. But it’s somebody from hundreds of years ago, why do I care about any of that?
Sure. This statement seems harsh but I’m playing devil’s advocate here, the further you get away from the situation, the less it really matters
Congratulations you took back covid19 and wiped out humanity.
I’d argue it’s the other way around: The further you travel in the past the bigger becomes your impact on current times.
The issue for me is that, let’s say that one day a magical device does allow time travel, it would also have to do teleportation relative to some point since everything is in motion. What would all of time and space use for a relative location? Can’t be the earth or sun since those are moving. Even our galactic cluster is moving. So if you went back in time a year, the earth wouldn’t be at the same point in space even though it’s done a full revolution. I’m no space scientist but I don’t imagine we have a solution.
That ‘everything’s moving’ argument is a convenient shutdown, not a dead end. We already track motion precisely, GPS corrects for relativity every second. That means relative positioning isn’t unsolved; it’s restricted.
You wouldn’t target a spot in space. You’d target a worldline, like Earth’s continuous path through spacetime. Same path, different point.
Saying you’d end up in empty space assumes a cartoon machine that only changes the date. A real device moves you along spacetime itself.
So when people say time travel is impossible because there’s no reference frame, what they really mean is: you don’t have access to the frame that works. Not impossible. Classified.
Uh, why can’t it be relative to the Earth’s surface? We’re already trapped in that gravity well after all, we don’t drift off it because of normal time travel in real time.
May I introduce you to the concept of time travel in the time machine, where you are in a gravitationally bound dimensional pocket
TeamAssimilation@infosec.pub 6 days ago
More pragmatically, time travel for a casual party would be risky because you’re carrying germs many generations apart. Time travelers would wear full-body suits or risk dramatically altering history.
RustyShackleford@piefed.social 5 days ago
Finally. Thank you. Someone thinking past the punch bowl.
Forget paradoxes, pathogens are the real problem. You don’t need to step on a butterfly to wreck the timeline; you just need a 21st-century rhinovirus and a handshake. Entire villages, gone. History rewritten by a sneeze.
Any responsible time traveler would be sealed head to toe. No exposed skin, no shared air, no hors d’oeuvres. Certainly no cake. You don’t know what yeast does to medieval Europe when it’s had a few centuries of upgrades.