xkcd #2976: Time Traveler Causes of Death
xkcd #2976: Time Traveler Causes of Death
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Many a hungry time traveler has Googled 'trilobites shellfish allergy' only to find their carrier had no coverage in the Ordovician.
Asphyxiation checks out
A time machine is a teleportation machine. If we can imagine a time machine existing, a teleportation machine isn't really far fetched.
A time machine is a faster than light drive.
Well, the other way 'round, really, but same difference.
And to come back you need a slower than (but very close to) light drive.
well, if you rewind time and stay in the box, the box would probably stay on earth, but I have no idea how time travel would work.
There is no cosmic frame of reference. Earth is moving, the sun is moving, the galaxy is moving, but you can choose any frame of reference within that. It'd be really silly to use the suns frame of reference, you'd use Earth's.
There is no cosmic frame of reference
There is. Just because we can't correctly find and use it with our knowledge doesn't mean there isn't.
it'd be really silly
What would be silly is thinking that earth is some magical center of the universe.... We have abandoned this concept about 500 years ago.
#1, during all eras: they didn't get the space-travel part in space-time correct.
Wouldn’t that just be asphyxiation?
But what about time travelers who go forward in time
Autoerotic asphyxiation
Lava
Morlocks
Believe it or not, jail
....and asphyxiation.
Robot raptors
Time machine door gets stuck
Flu.
Dad comes home with the milk
Asphyxiation
Mole people.
Cancer
It's a spectrum from "low and slow" up to "broiled."
[off topic]
One of my favorite time travel novels is 'The Big Time' by Fritz Leiber.
The two big ideas in the book. First, that there's a Law of Conservation of Reality. Go back in time and shoot Hitler. He dies. Then gets better, really fast. Twenty minutes after you shoot him, he's fine. Spend your whole life shooting him and the history books will just ignore it. It takes an army of time travelers working night and day to get any changes to stick.
Second idea. There are two armies, both trying to change the past/future. They have been at it since before the Big Bang and will go on until the Heat Death of the Universe. They recruit humans but no human has ever seen the big bosses, just low ranking stooges.
The first one was also used in the short series "11.22.63". Going back to change things results in huge amounts of temporal inertia to overcome.
Which was originally a Stephen King novel.
He dies.
That's an unusual take on it. That would definitely have been recorded somewhere as a miraculous recovery. Usually it's written that the time travelling assassin fails in such a way that no-one notices, and if they do have some kind of effect, generally ends up being the cause of the history they were taught rather than the changer of it.
The author did a few stories based on the 'Change War.'
In one, a time traveler goes back and takes the bullets out of a gun, hoping to prevent a death. There's no gunshot, but the victim is hit by a meteor and dies anyway. The idea is that Time is immutable and almost impossible to change with only one set of hands.
But that neccessitates a predetermined fate.
. It takes an army of time travelers working night and day to get any changes to stick.
Changes do occur in the story. The participants talk about the 'Change Winds' and how people can just disappear because thier timeline has been shifted and their parents never met.
Ctrl+F Hitler, ah, there it is. I feel like the xkcd comic missed an opportunity to have a 1932-1945 segment in there about the biggest cause of death for time travelers being OTHER time travelers killing them before they can successfully go back in time and kill Hitler, lol.
Re: conservation of reality, I feel like if I went back and shot Hitler, I would miss, or be stopped by security, or bad weather, or my gun would misfire, or even if I managed to actually do it, he'd be replaced by a look alike, and then it would turn out the guy we always thought was Hitler was actually just an actor, or something. Like if someone went back and killed baby Adolph when he was six months old, the parents would adopt another kid and name IT adolph, and there you go. Whatever happened happened and can't be undone, not through magic resuscitation of a corpse, but through smooth and natural intervention of reality itself, if that makes sense..
Mammalia are a footnote in earths history.