Time Travel and Secondary Super Powers

[digipinky75910]

Forum users are likely familiar with the trope of Secondary SuperPowers: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RequiredSecondaryPowers

Been thinking about Time Travel and all the things needed to make that work..

Ignoring ethical and temporal complications, skipping grandfather paradox,

First you'd need to be inoculated against past diseases - some that have currently been eradicated (thus vaccines are hard to come by) and if you're going back farther than vaccines or disease history, potentially prepare for health problems not encountered in recorded history.

You also need a way to teleport - unless you intend traveling in increments of a single year to the exact same spot, the planet will be in a completely different spot as it both rotates and revolves. (Short of teleporting, kinda curious how else this problem could be solved - if you have a time-traveling space-ship, how long would it take to travel, say, from one end of earth's orbit to the other? This could be a thread all on its own..)

Being able to fly or become incorporeal would be helpful if not essential, to protect against re-entry to a landing space that is not clear.

Might be smart to at least start by sending drones back in time first just to collect life-support data on when you might appear...

What other Secondary technological breakthroughs would be essential in making Time Travel work effectively and safely?

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

Well, you got the disease angle down. Sort of. You'll probably want to bring your own food and drink too, or alternatively need something to decontaminate anything local you consume, lest you end up with raging diarrhea.

You got the teleportation down to prevent ending up in somewhere in interstellar space instead of on Earth (cuz the Solar System also moves at 230km/s and the Milky Way Galaxy at 600km/s). Sort of. You'll still need something to calculate where you'll end up when you time travel so you'll know where to teleport to.

You'll need something to get around the language barrier. Go back a few hundred years and you'll have a very hard time understanding people, even if they're speaking English. Go back 500 or more and you can probably make some sense of writing, but spoken language will be unintelligible to you.

If all the precautions you've made rely on advanced technology, make sure it is resiliently constructed, has a lot of in-built redundancies, and a lot of juice to spare. Cuz if anything important breaks or you run out of power, you are NOT going to be able to Macguyver up a replacement.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Disease, yes, that's a problem, but I don't think it'd be that bad, especially if you take basic precautions. Don't drink ground water straight, but you shouldn't do that nowdays either.

Languages don't all change over time by the same amount, English would be particularly bad for time travel, but Latin, say, not nearly so much.

 

[Palindromemordnilap_v1legacy]

Disease, yes, that's a problem, but I don't think it'd be that bad, especially if you take basic precautions. Don't drink ground water straight, but you shouldn't do that nowdays either.

Languages don't all change over time by the same amount, English would be particularly bad for time travel, but Latin, say, not nearly so much.

Latin might be helpful for reading things, but the lingua franca in the Roman Empire tended to be Greek. We also know little about how Classical Latin or Greek were actually spoken; might be there were a ton of dialects or differences in the spoken form that don't show up in official written versions.

While we're worrying about you catching diseases from the past, be warned that it also goes the other way. You're probably covered in microbes that the past hasn't encountered yet, and yours are more used to dealing with modern medicine. They'll have a field day in a world without antibiotics at all. So make sure you're nice and sterile if you go backwards anywhere

 

[digipinky75910]

Disease, yes, that's a problem, but I don't think it'd be that bad, especially if you take basic precautions. Don't drink ground water straight, but you shouldn't do that nowdays either.

Languages don't all change over time by the same amount, English would be particularly bad for time travel, but Latin, say, not nearly so much.

Latin might be helpful for reading things, but the lingua franca in the Roman Empire tended to be Greek. We also know little about how Classical Latin or Greek were actually spoken; might be there were a ton of dialects or differences in the spoken form that don't show up in official written versions.

While we're worrying about you catching diseases from the past, be warned that it also goes the other way. You're probably covered in microbes that the past hasn't encountered yet, and yours are more used to dealing with modern medicine. They'll have a field day in a world without antibiotics at all. So make sure you're nice and sterile if you go backwards anywhere

All excellent points we often forget about.
I guess primarily, I just wanna go see dinosaurs, at a minimum. I mean what's the use of time travel if ya can't do that

Prolly want to bring own medical care if I go back in human history far enough.

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

I guess primarily, I just wanna go see dinosaurs, at a minimum. I mean what's the use of time travel if ya can't do that

Honestly, if you want to see dinosaurs, cloning them Jurassic Park style would be easier, relatively speaking. I mean, it would still be extremely improbable that you'd be able to pull it off, but at least it would not break the laws of physics and/or create a singularity.

 

[digipinky75910]

I guess primarily, I just wanna go see dinosaurs, at a minimum. I mean what's the use of time travel if ya can't do that

Honestly, if you want to see dinosaurs, cloning them Jurassic Park style would be easier, relatively speaking. I mean, it would still be extremely improbable that you'd be able to pull it off, but at least it would not break the laws of physics and/or create a singularity.

I suppose, it's another thing to see them in their own habitat - recreating dinosaurs outside of evolution would present their own problems for the dinosaurs. I'm just curious as to what it would take.

 

[Squilookle]

Even a jump of one year would put you in space. While the Earth orbits the sun, the sun moves around the Milky Way too, which itself is still expanding outwards from wherever the Big Bang happened.

While contracting disease is an issue, a bigger one is the infections the locals might get from you- which could alter the entire lineage of families and generations to come.

I'd also say that the time travel vehicle (better to have a vehicle than a device- because the risk of appearing in space) Should look as mundane as possible- preferably like an everyday object from the time and place its going to. A Delorean appearing in the sky over Times Square during the Wall Street Crash for instance... now that is going to get noticed.

Can I ask, is this all research for a story you want to write?

 

[Terminal Blue]

Remember that time and space are not actually separate things. They appear as separate things to us because that's how we experience the universe, but we also know mathematically that time is relative, and is therefore not uniform across all of space. The GPS satellites orbiting the planet have to actually account for the fact that time passes slightly faster relative to our frame of reference here on Earth.

If we're talking aobut things moving in space, then that's always relative to a particular frame of reference. We only know that the earth moves at a particular speed because we have an external frame of reference (the sun). So the idea that if you got in a time machine and went back in time you'd remain in a static point in space would mean that there was some kind of universal frame of reference which.. I guess isn't beyond the possibility. But, more likely, moving along the "time" dimension is also going to mean travelling in the three spatial dimensions as well.

Heck, if you're seriously thinking about travelling along the time dimension, you're probably really really good at travelling along the other dimensions by whatever hyper-advanced physics breaking means are allowing for time travel in the first place.

 

[digipinky75910]

Can I ask, is this all research for a story you want to write?

Of course you may ask my friend. ALthough I have writ stories in the past - this was more a shower-thought kind of thing.

One of my fav threads here is this: https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.1034709-For-Discussion-Time-Travel-Myths?page=1

I just love the thought experiment and the discussion with my fellow nerds who clearly have thought about this a bit more than I.

Thanks for all your comments!

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

snip

I suppose, it's another thing to see them in their own habitat - recreating dinosaurs outside of evolution would present their own problems for the dinosaurs. I'm just curious as to what it would take.

Sure, A controlled environment wouldn't be the same, I get that. You'd need a complete set of DNA for cloning, but I can't think of any way DNA could be preserved over 65+ million years. The 'blood trapped in amber' think from the movie wouldn't work. Nor would using frog DNA to fill in the gaps. Assuming 'filling the gaps' even works, you'd want to use DNA from closest living descendants of theropod dinosaurs anyway, which aren't amphibians, but avians i.e. birds. Then end result would not really be a genuine dinosaur.

As for what it would take to travel back in time? There's a bunch of hypotheses of situations or things that could theoretically allow for backwards time travel, but they pretty much all involve fucking around with forces and energy that would be super super bad for everyone if anything went wrong, possibly also if everything actually goes right.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Latin might be helpful for reading things, but the lingua franca in the Roman Empire tended to be Greek. We also know little about how Classical Latin or Greek were actually spoken; might be there were a ton of dialects or differences in the spoken form that don't show up in official written versions.

Oh sure, I was thinking more how Old English of a thousand years ago is almost totally different from modern English, but the same doesn't apply to Latin.