Submitted 2 weeks ago by REDACTED@infosec.pub to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://infosec.pub/pictrs/image/ba235d0d-4fb7-4b39-95c8-35d8c86f2905.jpeg
Context: He’s in the files
Listen, dude: I’ve got a lot more concerts in my list before I get to your lame-ass party.
Would you have missed Metallica in Moscow for some party you assumed nobody would attend? Fuck no.
Now if you’ll excuse me I’m gonna go sell all your grandmothers some really strong modern weed to get into Hendrix, New Year’s Eve, 1969.
Can’t wait to hear Machine Gun live.
lame-ass party
Since the time traveler would be from the future, he’d have already known that nobody went to the party.
Or… isn’t there the theory that time travel just creates an alternate world. but all timelines exist… so there’s a second line where there’s 50 people that brought their year 3000 band, and their instant ALS cure pod, partied with Hawking then arrested trump for his crimes before he could run for president.
Right? We only show up in some timelines as a fucking joke.
Would you have missed Metallica in Moscow for some party you assumed nobody would attend? Fuck no.
Let’s see… the egotistical pricks that sued anyone that wanted to like them… in an authoritarian shithole… or hanging out with Stephen Hawking…
Tough choice. Can I convince Lars to sleep in the disaster bed? Or help them with arrangements so that songs that have about 1 minute of interesting music don’t have 8 minutes worth of filler?
This was a million and a half people vibing so hard they broke their government. I’m not massing it no matter how much of an asshole Lars Ulrich is.
I’d definitely go see Freddie at Live-aid at least a dozen times.
Been there. Got like a dozen t shirts. Nobody on eBay thinks they’re real tho
No need to assume. You already know nobody attended. And you can also be part of the joke if it’s one.
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.
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.
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.
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
What are the chances that visiting Steven Hawking is the most interesting/fun thing you can do, if you could freely time travel? I’d much rather go look at dinosaurs, or visit the construction of the pyramids, or go listen to Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech.
Even if my goal was to meet a single scientist, I think I’d personally pick any other. Pliny the Elder, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein…
Not to be rude to Mr. Hawking (well, maybe he deserves it, I don’t know what got him in to the Epstein files…), but a thorougly average party is simply not likely to attract very many time travellers.
What are the chances that visiting Steven Hawking is the most interesting/fun thing you can do, if you could freely time travel?
Not only that, apparently the machine he used to speak was rather difficult to use quickly, and drafting responses could take hours or days depending on how much needed said. Pretty much all of his appearances after he was unable to use his voice were heavily scripted ahead of time.
So unless you’re visiting Steven Hawking when he still could talk, it’d be pretty boring as you couldn’t have a proper back-and-forth conversation
I think his party would attract at least a few curiosity seekers.
On the other hand, it would likely include time travellers from various future eras, perhaps hundreds, or even thousands of years apart. Future time travel would have to be heavily regulated, to keep unauthorized people from screwing up the time line. So perhaps future time travellers are expressly forbidden from having contact with other time travellers, making Hawking’s party the one place that time travellers are NOT allowed to visit.
What are the chances that visiting Steven Hawking is the most interesting/fun thing you can do, if you could freely time travel? I’d much rather go look at dinosaurs, or visit the construction of the pyramids, or go listen to Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech.
I would counter that if you have a time machine then you literally have all the time in the world and you can do all of those things, and more.
There is also the idea that time machines work like telephones. You need to have a receiving end made first before you can call it.
Half this comment thread legitimately knows how they work
The other half is speculation
The truth is in the middle, Lemmy people are pretty well versed in science fiction and science :>
Using “Knows how they work” while talking about goddamn time machines cracks me up every time.
It’s like you’re confidently arguing that the inside of a black hole is another universe where time runs backwards and dogs meow ;)
(For tonal clarity I’m not taking the piss, it’s just funny when folk get really into a scifi topic and get all fanfiction about it)
Like that short story with the lead marble?
Or that Austin Powers movie
Honestly, even if time travel were theoretically possible to be invented, there’s also a high chance that we’re just going to destroy ourselves before we get to that point anyway.
Also, what if it uses a lot of resources and potential time travelers didn’t want to waste them to go to parties (thus further progressing your hypothetical conundrum)?
and a mathematical inevitability that eventually we will destroy our own past that gives rise to time travel
You might destroy yourselves but the time traveler would be safe trust me.
What the fuck is he in the files for? What did he allegedly do? He’s bound to the chair!
Likely lots of people who had contact with Epstein did nothing wrong, at least not on that level.
He was collecting powerful people, in science, business, government, anything. One way to do that is to offer access to other important people. The ability to say to someone “I can connect you with Stephen Hawking” is currency.
The pedophilia ring and sex trafficking is the exact same thing – just a way to appeal to certain people.
I think it’s more interesting to talk about who the fuck gave Epstein a private island in one of the most stupidly expensive spits of sand on the entire planet. Likely the same people who killed him.
It’s not like Hawking and Epstein traded a few emails talking about science, or had a one off meeting. It appears they had a fair amount of exchanges over a long period of time.
Epstein was a vile human in the worst kind of way and I see no evidence that Hawking was blind to this fact. Half the people on this app wouldn’t willingly associate with someone of a different political party than them, but to defend a man who willingly spent time with a convicted sex trafficker? The fact that Hawking was paralyzed doesn’t absolve him from willingly enabling (and potentially partaking in) child abuse and sex trafficking.
I know one person IRL who was a frequenter of Little St John Island, aka Epstein Island. Wealthy man who made that trip regularly. He was not particularly attractive but he was wealthy. This is the place old wealthy men would go to get sexual satisfaction when nobody else will give it to them.
It’s a little ableist to suggest that his being wheelchair-bound would necessarily prevent him from being a pedophile.
wheelchair-bound
Dude was fully paralyzed. Come one. Are you really that desperate to attack someone?
little ablist
Oh FFS, cut it out already with the “ablist!!” screeching
The guy literally can only move his eyes, he literally can barely do anything without a support staff. He can breathe on his own, he can think on his own, that’s about it
He cannot be a pedophile is not being ablisi, it’s being realistic.
He was there for a scientific conference that was organized there.
I have thoughts.
It was ridiculous that Hawking thought a time traveler would make it to his party for several reasons. There are a few models of time travel, and only one of them has an internal logic that allows for traveling without paradoxical consequences; multiversal divergence.
Our version of the time traveler party was one of an infinite amount of time traveler parties that hawking hosted throughout the multiverse. A time traveler would be traveling to that time like picking a grain of sand on a beach, where each grain of sand is a near identical party to the last.
As our version of the party diverges from the realities with time travelers who chose to travel to the hawking party, there would be a diminishing set of infinities containing time travelers that were attempting the journey.
Thus while the chances of a time traveler going to the party are 100%, the party being our version of the party approach 0 infinitely fast.
You can spend your entire life thinking about it and you Will never reach a definitive answer. Or, you can spend a day to set up an experiment and throw a party.
Yup
You’re missing the point completely.
You do not actually know if “paradoxical consequences” are a thing. Logic might, like everything we believe right now, turn out not to be true.
Stopping yourself from doing an experiment because “current knowledge makes it seem impossible” is how science never advances.
I have no idea what you’re arguing against, or what point you think I’ve missed. Have you assumed that I have discounted other models because of the model I chose for my comment? Bah! You assume too much. I did not state that doing the experiment was a bad thing; my comment was in humor even!
Hawking knew no one was going to show up. It was done as a sort of proof against it. He just thought it was more likely then the existence of god.
it would frankly be dumb not to throw the party, because at worst you just have a bit of a weird boring party, and at best you meet some fucking time travellers
Say, that’s what he said at the party!
the reason we don’t have time travelers is that the past is no more concrete than the future. [Current science disagrees with the idea that] just like there are infinite potential futures, there are an infinity of potential pasts that could have evolved into the present [instead insisting that the entire past is fully embedded in the present]. [It’s not supported by any current theories that] the probability of reaching a particular past is essentially zero.
I vehemently disagree with many worlds theory. I think its a total mindfuck. However I do think that the future influences the present and the past.
Time is a physical entity that can be warped, but nobody is creating snaphsots of reality to travel back to and future is entirely a human concept.
Spoiler Alert: the time travelers are the ones who took the picture of Hawking.
Lol all the time travelers go to when hawking was on Epstien Island
goddammit
Goddamn so everyone’s a bastard, eh?
Wasn’t it already a known fact? I swear I’ve read about it already like 5 years ago, and I’m not a time traveler.
People have been getting taller over time. Hawking didn’t book a big enough venue.
It’s because if were actually possible and they did it, then all of space and time would have collapsed into something akin to a giant black hole, obliterating everything, bringing a violent and inescapable end to it all.
Yeah, but ol epsein wasn’t just a monstrous blackmailing mossad pedo rapist killer. He was into science for the mossad.
This is a very funny joke.
protist@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
Is it because our solar system is hudling through space at over 1.5 million miles per hour, so anyone who time travels will find themselves alone in an empty void?
Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
There’s no universal frame of reference. Any theoretical time travel would likely need a beacon of some sort to calibrate their arrival point, meaning you could only travel back to the point time travel was established.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You know what they say: the best time to build a time machine is 50 years ago.
I think that’s basically the movie Primer too, they’d turn the machine on, go hide in an apartment for X amount of time, then go back to the machine and emerge 5 minutes after they turned it on and just walked away.
But gravity effects time, sticking close to a planet isn’t going to be hard.
Ironically enough the first (if we ever get them) time machines are going to be a hell of a lot like modern “UFOs” are described. You couldn’t risk landing on the planet, elevation changes are what’s really a nightmare to account for. Show up and hour early and everything is a foot higher because of how fast we’re spinning.
So you’d want a space craft, because space is big and empty. And realistically it’s going to take something bigger than a telephone booth or even the 1980s embodiment of Florida on four wheels with a hood designed to do cocaine off of to house a time machine.
mmmm@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Damn physic laws removing the fun from physics
Cethin@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
That’s not really true. First, if you can invent time travel you can probably do the math to calculate positions of objects. Second, even if you do need a beacon, you could use something that already exists. For example, radio waves. Earth has been shooting off radio waves for a fair amount of time now. That could be used as a beacon. Also, you could do something like having your time machine do small jumps, check it’s relative position, then adjust. This would solve just about every issue.
edinbruh@feddit.it 2 weeks ago
Basically half the plot of quantum break
cynar@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You can easily cross calculate between various, inertial frames of reference. The problem is that earth isn’t sitting still in an inertial frame. We spin around the sun, and we orbit the center of our galaxy. We also get nudged about by the pull of other stars.
Tracking a time jump (or technically a time-space jump) would be easy, if you just wanted to be within the solar system. With measurements the earth-moon gap would not be too hard. Hitting a surface exactly would be another story. Miss by a meter and your cut in half by a wall or floor.
phdepressed@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I’ve seen this take a lot it feels like and it boggles the mind why. If someone figures out time travel they ipso facto will have figured out the space travel as well.
If you can travel through time you can travel through space.
yakko@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Not enough people bust out ipso facto anymore.
Also agree, but mostly chuffed on the phraseology.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
So a more intelligent place than here
Malgas@beehaw.org 2 weeks ago
That logic assumes that there is some universal way if measuring the position of the earth, but there is no absolute system for measuring position in space. Location, distance, velocity, and even simultaneity depend entirely on the choice of a frame of reference. And the frame in which the earth is stationary is no less valid than any other.
Also the type of time machine has a bearing here. The traditional H.G. Wells vehicle-type doesn’t jump, but moves smoothlythrough all the intervening moments in time, so there’s no reason it wouldn’t stay firmly on the surface. And a time portal that forms a connection to the same apparatus at a different time would have no problem either, since the machine itself doesn’t move except in the ordinary way.
ProbablyBaysean@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
If i had a vaccume and a carbon nanotube rotating such that the ends are moving at the speed of light, and another going the opposite direction, I would have a dimensional anchor as moving it would cause spacetime to exceed the speed limit.
Voila, I just created a sci-fi plot device
danc4498@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
My theory is that time travel still follows the curve of the space time continuum.
backgroundcow@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Time travel as a sudden jump seems one of the least plausible implementations, since we have no idea how to do such jumps even in just space or forward in time; and allowing for it would break a lot of physics.
More plausible alternatives include a space-time bridge, meaning both sides can follow Earth’s reference frame; or the Primer-type where one can reverse time in an isolated box, but it means you can only travel backwards along the Box’ trajectory and you have to wait around for some time while you move backwards in time along that trajectory.