One of the main problems

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One of the main problems with time traveling back into the past is finding old money to spend when you get there.

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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Charlie: If one is brave enough to risk something like time travel, then one should be brave and tough enough to find the obvious solution:

(1) Travel to a not-too-much-earlier time than the one where you will need the money, so the currency is still the same and its coinage evidence of authenticity, e.g. notes’ serial numbers (if they had those, then) is still valid at the time when you’ll have to use the money.

(2) Bump off, in some place and time appropriate and as safe as possible for such activities, someone who is obviously loaded.

(3) Travel immediately from the place of the crime to the not-too-much-later future time you actually intend to be in, but “later” enough that, while the currency still is the same, there has been sufficient time in that timeline for the bumping off to become classified as a “cold case”, or its current equivalent designation there.

(4) Enjoy fully the unimpeded use of your ill-gotten gains.

I know this requires some extra preparations that might delay your enjoyment of such risky, dangerous form of tourism that violates physical causality in more ways than there is time and space available for me to get into here. To be more precise: even if I had all of the ever-expanding space-time at my disposal for explaining just that one point, I probably might not have enough.

 

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Thanks, but I wouldn’t want to bump off anyone for my own gain.  Even if they didn’t make any great contribution(s) to the future time line, I still wouldn’t.

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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Money? Heck, I’d be happy if I’m allowed to wear my clothing through the mechanism without it becoming part of my dermal layer. (see original Terminator)

But yeah, you can’t take future money expecting to exchange. So you need to acquire goods to barter, or provide a service of value to a wealthy patron. Have a plan to do it quickly before the goons get you for vagrancy.

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Or you starve to death for not being able to buy food soon enough and no other ways of procuring it are available.

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Fictional worlds can be unpredictable and present unforeseen challenges. In Earthbound cultures that have developed the concept of money, it is usually easier to eat within three days than it is to get out of jail without some form of currency. Besides, most jails will give you gruel, hardtack or some form of minimal dietary need. I view liberty to move and a guilt free conscience as higher needs than a fed belly. At least for the first few days. Subject to change on day four or five.

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[Charlie]

Yeah, it would be great to have someone in the time you’re going to that knows who you are and/or would feed you and provide a place to live until you made some big bets on big sporting events that you know the outcome of.

Marty McFly had Dr. Brown and his grandparents for awhile.

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by Charlie.

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[OscarCP]

I imagine someone in such a desperate situation might consider  begging, assuming the locals care at all for beggars, or even selling their body, assuming said body is saleable. But I think my advice is still the best for someone in this particularly dire situation, and one that does not require any special aesthetic physical attributes, knowing how to plead, or anything besides physical courage and strength, as well as a relentless determination: Crime often pays, not matter what you hear said to the contrary. True today, true in 500 BC. Or any time one can think of. I believe this is/will/has been/is being written in the Time Machine Handbook.

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• This reply was modified 4 years ago by OscarCP.

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If you could travel to the future, you could take some pristine money or stamps from today with you and then sell them as ancient money or stamps when you arrive to the future. They would probably be worth a lot about 50 to 100 years from now.

I actually saw this in a movie once. A guy sent his friend to the future. He gave him some coins and advised him to sell them when he got there.

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I saw this one discussed just recently. Pardon that I cannot recall if the source was from classic fiction or a new wrinkle. The spoiler became that the traveler was held on counterfeit charges. Because the material, paper/fabric/metal, was determined to be “new”. it had not aged through the passage of time, as it had come through with the traveler.

In your second paragraph, leaving the goods in trust with a friend or in a deposit box would have the material age appropriately. But with the risk that it will still be available to you when you appear.

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[wavy]

OscarCP wrote:

nd where there is an unreachable boombox that plays loudly and forever the same song by Barry Manilow.

Just remember the number 2 Rule “Don’t PANIC”

The # 1 is don’t travel w/o your towel!

As I was quoting from September 17, 2019 at 2:07 am and in ended up replying to a post from September 14, 2019 at 7:22 pm; I believe we have some REAL evidence that Time Travel IS possible!!
😱

🍻

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• This reply was modified 4 years ago by wavy.

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Traveling into the future is very scary to me and I wouldn’t take more than a two month jump at a time.  The risks are far greater and the return?  Would there even be money 100 years from now or civilization as we know it?

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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Update:  Now you know why I’m squeamish about traveling into the future.  Even a few months can really make a tremendous difference!

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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Charlie: Whether you go forwards to the future or backwards to the past, the return trip will also be problematic, if the hypothesis (*) that we live in a certain kind of multiverse is true (to satisfy some quantum mechanics conundrums). If so, every time someone (person, cat, goldfish, anyone) makes a decision the universe splits in two, with your timeline splitting in two along with it and both being continuous with the original (i.e. with no appreciable changes to be noticed, initially) but not the same as the original, so both “you” experiences diverge more and more as time and life goes by in each timeline, for ever. Both “you” will not notice anything different at the very start and will believe themselves to be the original “you.” But when either “you” tries to get back to the point of departure in the original timeline, that “you” timeline splits again… So, if this multiverse hypothesis is correct (there are others), then you only are “you” for a time, until someone makes a decision and the universe, and everyone’s timelines in it, and “you”, split once more. And the same is true of everyone you know. So you have a problem: you are not really “you” and the people you think you know are not really “them.”

My own position on this: one might just as well live with it and, if you like and can, go back in time to the original public offering of MS shares in March 13 1986. Just don’t forget to bring along those troy ounces of gold to change into 1986 money and buy some of those original shares (see my next entry). Because money shall be money in any timeline “you” might reach within the span of “your” lifetime. Assuming “MS” is still much the same MS when you go back to the past leaving in, let’s say, 2020, to buy those shares and also when you return with them to whatever future 2020 universe you may end up in.

(*)  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

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Charlie

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Have you read Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials Trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass)?

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PK: I did not read the book, but saw the movie (“The Golden Compass”) Have you seen “Tomorrowland”? It flopped in the box office, but is one of the best I’ve seen that have time-travel as the main plot-device. It is, same as “The Golden Compass”, pure fantasy, not hard science fiction, but I have no problem with this kind of fantasy (i.e.: with dragons, swords, wizards, knights on horseback and beautiful damsels in trouble nowhere to be seen.)

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Book’s better than the movie. And there are three of them. The other two are sequels.
It’s not exactly time-travel. It’s parallel universes.

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IMX, this is generally true: the book is almost always better than the movie. Speaking of novels with a time-travel theme, Michael Crichton’s Timeline was a fantastic read, but the film version was just awful.

Nowadays, if possible I’ll watch the movie first so that I can enjoy it on its own terms. Then I can enhance the experience by reading the book.

 

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On one hand I agree with you the book is most likely better than the movie. But for me, to see the movie first puts a mind set to always be expecting a particular outcome or scenario to come into play with a scene from the movie. I’m getting off subject. Focus, time travel.

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I am thinking of getting a HBO trial to watch His Dark Materials. I thought it was available via BBC but it is only for Brits on demand.

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The Golden Compass book goes way past what was in the movie.  Also, there was some controversy about the story which happens more at the end.  The book contains some things that are offensive to religious people. Maybe that’s why it’s called “dark materials”.

I saw and liked the movie first, and then read the book to find out what all the fuss was about.  It was a good read.

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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OscarCP

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This was in my “recommended for you” list this morning.
See description about HBO

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First, about “His Dark Materials” Well, I took notice of your recommendation and bought the “His Dark Materials” trilogy by Pullman. Now I am in the second half of the first one, “The Golden Compass.” It is very well-written, with interesting characters and with its various moving parts meshing together like those of a high-quality mechanical watch. And Pullman must be the most famous writer I never heard of before. He is very famous and popular in the UK, where critics have praised his work as among the finest writing in English literature these days.  So thanks for recommending this to me.

Now, back to the topic of this thread:  However, this is fantasy with a soupcon of parallel worlds connected by magical means to each other. Not the idea, from quantum physics, I was discussing in connection with time-travel paradoxes. Or it is any of other “parallel universes” ideas considered by cosmologists, for example that of “bubble universes” having their own big bangs at distant points in our universe and becoming instantly disconnected, same as black holes, by the gravitational pull of their immense masses, from the space-time we live in. Many, possibly an infinity of such universes may exist, unseen and unreachable, as this is allowed by our current definitions of the laws of physics, but there is no known way of testing this idea experimentally, to see if it is true or not. It merely fills gaps in the present, incomplete system of fundamental ideas of modern physics. Same is true of all the other kinds of parallel universes’ hypothesis, including the one proposed by Everett that I have described earlier.

Now, when it comes to fantastic science fiction and many worlds (not parallel but in the solar system) I wonder if you had ever read C.S. Lewis “Space” trilogy. Or his “Narnia” series, which is somewhat closer in theme as “His Dark Materials”, as “Narnia” can be considered to exist in a parallel universe, sort of.

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[OscarCP]

Or one could travel to March 13, 1986 and buy shares in MS:

“Gates finally acquiesced to the idea of an initial public offering, because the would create a much wider, more liquid market for the company’s shares. Microsoft went public on March 13, 1986, at an opening price of $21 per share.” (Top quotation in a Google search.)

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/19/how-much-a-1000-dollar-investment-in-microsoft-at-its-ipo-is-worth-now.html

All you need to bring along is some 3 troy ounces of gold, worth about $1000 at the time, and directions to some convenient stock broker’s.

 

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• This reply was modified 4 years ago by OscarCP.

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That’s a good idea. Gold is naturally one of the first things that comes mind, along with diamonds and other valuable metals.  To reap the benefits of MS however would require I stop back later on and sell the stock.  I’d have to then try to cash a check from 1986-89 from a bank that is possibly out of business now.  It’s not easy.

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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Charlie: “I’d have to then try to cash a check from 1986-89 from a bank that is possibly out of business now. It’s not easy.”

I would recommend instead that, right away you find yourself in a secluded place after buying them, you put the MS share certificates in a sturdy tin biscuits box (if you spent $1000 in buying them, there would be some 40 certificates for as many shares that will fit snugly in such a box) and leave the box in the attic of a house you’ll still have access when you travel back to the present and know for sure the attic contents kept in a certain place will never be moved, as often happens. Or even a little farther  in the future, where Emperor “Cloudis” et  Orbis Terrarum et in Sistema Solaris Princeps Nadella I rules the world, Moon and planets (plus Ceres, Vesta, Enceladus, Triton and a some other bits and pieces here and there) and the MS shares are worth the same as 3 troy ounces, not of gold, but of Helium 3 from the Moon.

Either way, they will still be accessible to you and suitably aged to pass all necessary authentication tests any present, or even any future technology makes, or will make possible.

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In theory that sounds good but – all those years I wouldn’t know if the people who lived in the house had found that box.  Helium 3 and not Pressed Liquid Platinum?

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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Start by choosing the right house you know its history very well, with an attic and a place in it where the tin is unlikely to be disturbed. Travel back to 1986, put the tin, with something inside, in the attic; come back, see if everything is still there, because nobody yet has moved or taken it, go back, buy those shares… Or make instead this big and exciting gamble: just go back to ’86 and buy those shares, come back and, if the tin with all its contents is still where you left it, you come out ahead. Go on. Be a devil!

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Charlie

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I’d grab myself a good amount of bitcoin, then pop back forward to around it’s peak price, and cash out.

 

Then jump ahead and buy myself a nice quiet planet in an off-the-beaten-path system.

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Thanks Charlie, for such an illustrative topic. Definitely outside the box, and I’m glad it is set in fantasy. Fun to stretch the mind to new experiences.

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It’s just one of a few things that could have an adverse affect on human life on Earth if not used very carefully.  Time travel and SAI (smart or sentient artificial intelligence) superior to human intelligence.  I’m thinking the SAI will come first.

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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I would have thought that the biggest problem with going back in time was communication. Even 200 years ago, English would be quite different, and you would sound weird to them. Just think if you referred to computers or printers or whatever. 500 years ago all bets would be off. And that’s just English.

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Yep, that’s one of the other problems. It would be wonderful to go back and see Athens in its glory, or maybe ancient Egypt.  But the language would be the big factor in not going.  If I could, I would only go back to around 1957, if I had enough money I’d buy a ’57 T-Bird and maybe bring it back with me to the present.  That is unless I decided to stay.

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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Charlie, Travel first to the sufficiently distant future, where money is no longer needed because everyone has one of those replicators seen on TV (when watching Star Trek”) and get yourself a good universal translator you can keep occult in your clothes and lets you speak normally in your language and translates what you say so the other side hears you speaking in their own archaic language and vice versa. As to reading, get some of those future translator glasses to help you with that. Just do not make too much of a show of this equipment, lest you get stoned to death, burned at the stake or subject to any other appropriate treatment of the time for the practitioners of witchcraft.

(Jeez! Do I have to think of everything here?)

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If only!  But would a Star Trek type translator that far in the future do Ancient Greek or Egyptian?  I sort of doubt it but one can hope.

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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Babblefish are timeless, if you can get to Douglass Adams’ Hitchhiker universe. They digest sound and excrete ideas straight to your consciousness, so they are “receive only” translation devices. You would need enough for all your new friends to understand you. Or feign being struck mute. But at least you could learn all the local gossip, and pick up on how to stay out of trouble.

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I though of bringing up the Babel Fish myself, but was deter by doubts that many people, these days, might not get this in reference to the Adam’s books. Or even have, being born considerably more recently, ever heard of them. But it is certainly a great reference to some great books.

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Adams was impressive for a -distinctive- style if humor. It had many layers. Some wouldn’t be obvious for several pages until a call back reference makes you laugh again. And somehow he packed a density of ideas into brief, easy to read prose that makes Reader’s Digest seem like heavy reading. 4 stars – Would recommend again.

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But at least Douglas Adams was pretty clear about one thing: the right answer was really 42.

We have finally confirmed this for sure, in the 24th Century, after a very lengthy, hard and immensely expensive research effort spanning over ten generations of investigators at hundreds of research institutions from all over the Solar System and many other far-flung Federation worlds. Except at the Vogons’ , of course. Because those don’t really care.

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OscarCP wrote:

But at least Douglas Adams was pretty clear about one thing: the right answer was really 42.

The answer of 42 = a wildcard (i.e. *)
in ASCII…

😉

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There are more things in heaven and earth, Kirsty, than are dreamt of by those that believe the meaning of “42” is merely the ASCII code for the humble asterisk. We are talking here about the ultimate answer to Life, the Universe and Everything and not some obscure text coding fact!

So it follows that your favorite one is not the only possible interpretation, not by a long chalk:

https://www.quora.com/On-what-basis-does-Douglas-Adams-say-that-42-is-the-answer-to-life-supercomputers-and-everything

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/03/douglas-adams-42-hitchhiker

Of course, we at the 24th Century know perfectly well what is the real meaning of ’42’. But I’m not about to divulge it here, because there is a most strict ban on sending such information to inhabitants of a different epoch. This is liable to cause the most extraordinary chronological snafus and the penalty for the violation of this rule is the direst imaginable: to be put in an eternal temporal loop inside a very small room, where everything that happens over half an hour recurs endlessly, and where there is an unreachable boombox that plays loudly and forever the same song by  Barry Manilow.

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Whatever works for you, is fine by me @oscarcp. I still like the theory of the wildcard!

The meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything.

In the ASCII Language (computer language), 42 is an * or “Wildcard”

The greatest computer ever built was asked what the meaning of life is and it literally told everyone in ITS language that “Life is what you make it”

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[wavy]

See
https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/one-of-the-main-problems/#post-1958839

🍻

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by wavy.
• This reply was modified 4 years ago by wavy.

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Well, English has been one of the more rapidly changing languages… some of us have access to rather more stable alternatives.

Icelandic is at least a close relative of English that hasn’t changed much in the last 1000 years.

… and then there’s people like me, at school I really did get told to not use so archaic forms… in Latin. (Apparently I default to Tarquinian-era Latin if I don’t remember to pay attention.)

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Well, mn-, you could do everyone a really big favor and, in your next trip to First-Century BC Rome, give some hints to Virgil for editing out the bits that drag in the Aeneid (*) and give more salience to the really good ones (e.g. Dido and Aeneas, the boxing match, Turnus last big battle). Then people shall be grateful for such a terrific read, even if they’ll never really know why, because you, under Time-Travel Rules, could never tell them, instead they’ll be grateful to Virgil, but really to you, per omnia saecula seculorum.

(*) Of course, it is a pretty good and often exciting read, even with the slow parts still in, but it can be improved. Make it more of a page-turner, you know.

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I had to laugh when I searched YouTube for time travelers and they had videos of “people from the future” walking around in the 1940’s talking on cell phones.  Without the towers and communication infrastructure, cell phones would be worthless.

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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Not a problem with 23rd Century models: those don’t need something as passé and crude as towers sending radio transmissions to them! They use Dilithium crystals that resonate with the quintessence pervading space-time and is responsible for its accelerating expansion!

I don’t know, Charlie. Maybe it would be best if you’d just forgot all about this complicated business of time traveling and, instead, stayed home, in a comfortable chair, with a good book about time traveling adventures and a nice cup of tea. I would do that, if I were you. But I am not you, so I am going back to the 24th Century, where am sure that my Five-Star Wife No. 1 has by now a nice cup of Arthurian tea ready for me and is impatiently awaiting my return.

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I know I should be satisfied and accept what’s going on in the present. But I’m still too young at heart and brain to sit quietly by and watch the world stagnate while possible imminent doom lurks right around the corner.  The old “fight or flight” hits and therefore the desire to go back to a known safer, happier time such as the 50’s or 60’s.

I’m also impatient.  We’re still lumbering around our solar system in rocket powered craft.  We should be directing our scientific minds to the development of faster than light speed spacecraft instead of constantly making newer, prettier smartphones.  I should stop here because this is starting to sound like a rant, and I didn’t mean for it to be that.

Thanks OscarCP, the book sounds good since I’ve watched all the Star Trek, Stargate, and other good SciFi shows I have on DVD’s many times.  It looks like you and the others who responded are really into Science Fiction!  Thanks.

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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OscarCP

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Charlie, One more question for you: Have you ever seen the sadly unappreciated “Babylon V”? Maybe you are just too young of soul and body for that. To me, it is one of the Really Good Ones, the great TV science-fiction shows of all times. Along with a few others that include “ST The Next Generation”, “Firefly” and “Farscape”.

Of course the real future is even more interesting, but I imagine you already knew that.

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I’m a big Star Trek fan and then became a big Stargate fan. I was thrilled when ST TNG came out, didn’t care as much for DS9, really liked ST Voyager, and ST Enterprise.  I have the DVD’s for Firefly which I enjoyed very much but never got into Babylon V or Farscape.  Babylon V seemed to me to be too weird, and I never got to see Farscape because I think it was only on cable.  If they come to OTA TV I’ll give them a try.

Other Shows I enjoyed (for the short while they lasted) were Prey, Warehouse 13, Primeval, Eureka, Dark Angel, and Tera Nova.  Tera Nova was pretty much what I envision is going to happen to this world unless things change drastically from what they are now.  At this time, I feel the future is very uncertain, therefore my hypothetical fear of going too far ahead in one jump.  I’ve been around for a long time and I don’t like what I’ve seen going on in this present time line.

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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Note: the Prey TV show I’m referring to is the 1998 one with Debra Messing.  I didn’t know there was a newer “Prey” out.

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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Hmmmm. Babylon 5. First use of CGI instead of models. A real milesotone.

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wavy, OscarCP

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Charlie, One more question for you: Have you ever seen the sadly unappreciated “Babylon V”? Maybe you are just too young of soul and body for that. To me, it is one of the Really Good Ones, the great TV science-fiction shows of all times. Along with a few others that include “ST The Next Generation”, “Firefly” and “Farscape”.

Of course the real future is even more interesting, but I imagine you already knew that.

Babylon V WAS one of the greats! I really thought the last episode was kinda poor, I was on the Babylon V BBS on Fidonet at the time which I am sure J. Michael Straczynski read and got some of his ideas.

Firefly was my favorite, a pity it could not have lasted a few more seasons. 🙁

🍻

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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Wavy: “Firefly was my favorite, a pity it could not have lasted a few more seasons.”

The cutting short the show might be explained, in a way and after the fact, because it was just too expensive to produce. But what was never really explained is why it was presented with the order of the episodes shuffled like a pack or cards, turning the continuity of the story arcs and sub-arcs into a messy muddle. Someone in Fox TV with the power to do it seemed to be sabotaging this very amusing and intelligent show from the creator of such milestones of TV entertainment as “Buffy”, “Angel” and “Dollhouse”. The story behind the story? Perhaps here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80YXpLdiNhE

And Fox did it again by discontinuing “Futurama”, scheduling it just after pro-football programming that often went overtime. Then the sweeps did not give the show a high score, for not attracting much of an audience — maybe because people could not see the show in the first place? Next thing you know, the people running the network decided it had not a big enough crowd following and terminated it. That was Fox TV for you.

Fortunately, in the case of “Firefly”, here in the 24th Century, we have accessed the cryogenically preserved head of Joss Wheedon and this was kind enough to dictate to us the script of the episodes of the two more seasons he had in mind for the complete story to play out. The episodes were then produced with the recreated personae of  the main characters evoked into virtual existence by a group of seven sentient AIs, so now we have all 45 episodes Wheedon had in mind for the complete show! And what episodes they are! When you come by the 24th, you can go and see it at the Vulcan Metroplex, where it is available for on-demand viewing from its collection of holographic memory cubes, the largest such collection in the 786+/- 32 Free Associated Worlds of the Federation.

By the way: Book and Wash are still very much alive in these two new seasons. Joss’ head explained that he had to kill them in the movie “Serenity”, because the actors had taken other work after the show was cancelled and were no longer going to be available for a possible new season of “Firefly” — if the movie succeeded in reigniting it, as it was then hoped, but that he always, or at least from the start, had the idea of the whole crew to be on board of the TV show, end-to-end, for the whole three seasons.

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Charlie, wavy

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Regrettably far from the main problem of time travel, but FOX TV is doing it again. The Orville has not rated well enough to justify the expense to broadcast for free on the network of over the air affiliates. But it will be produced and streamed on subscription services. Hard to tell if this is an adaptation to market reality, or the plan to raise interest in subscriber services over broadcast all along. It does bring it in line with the CBS model for ST Discovery.

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Anonymous, It looks like “The Orville” 3rd season is going to come out in Hulu, next year. Hulu has two pay channels, one more expensive than the other, but also a free channel with ads. Watching a show in the free channel is not that different from watching the show on commercial TV.

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You have better information than I had gleaned. I only knew it would not air on FOX and that it would be streamed. I must have assumed that FOX may imitate CBS by launching their own service with a flagship property. Hulu is a good service, and I do not regret advertisements. My comment is that it would not air in the same fashion as the last two years, with commercials, on commercial broadcast television, available without internet service.

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Disney is taking full control of HULU.

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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[wavy]

Fortunately, in the case of “Firefly”, here in the 24th Century, we have accessed the cryogenically preserved head of Joss Wheedon and this was kind enough to dictate to us the script of the episodes of the two more seasons he had in mind for the complete story to play out. The episodes were then produced with the recreated personae of the main characters evoked into virtual existence by a group of seven sentient AIs, so now we have all 45 episodes Wheedon had in mind for the complete show! And what episodes they are!

send me a link 😁 😂

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• This reply was modified 4 years ago by wavy.

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Charlie, I have not seen some of those shows you mention at the end, so I am going to research them. Maybe they are available somewhere for streaming. So: thanks for those hints for further viewing.

Now, as a time-traveler to another, let me ask you if you have read the late Robert L. Forward’s “Timemaster”, where he gave a pretty neat solution to the “grandfather” paradox (travel back in time, kill your grandfather — and then, what?)

I loved dearly Bob’s stories, because he was a writer of amusing and intriguing stories, the kind that make you think, as well as a “practical” physicist that also worked in a field closely related to one where I have also been occupied doing things, on and off: the measurement and mapping of the gravity fields of the Earth, Moon and planets with sensors carried on various types of spacecraft. His contribution was developing a completely new type of the instrument for measuring gravity, including from space, known as the gravity gradiometer. He had some intriguingly advanced ideas and several of these were a big hit with many of us in the field of space geodesy. One of the most interesting, to me, of his scientific publications was about how to make “a hatbox of flat-space time”, meaning how to arrange masses around a given volume of space to perfectly compensate and, so, exactly nullify a planet’s gravity field effect at all the points inside it (and not just at the center of mass, as in free-fall). He also did pioneer work on gravity waves detection, propulsion of spacecraft using solar sails, antimatter and lasers (a concept now being developed for use in the proposed  “Breakthrough Starshot” interstellar mission to Alpha Centauri) and the use of space tethers, plus many other advanced concepts, and included some of these ideas in his science fiction novels, including the classic “Dragon’s Egg”. For hard science fiction, they were also surprisingly funny, both as in “funny ha, ha” and as in “funny really weird”).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_L._Forward

 

 

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Sorry to say, no, I haven’t read Timemaster but from the description you give it sounds like the first book I’ll start with!  Thanks for the info.

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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I would recommend reading “Dragon’s Egg” first (that was also the vehicle of  his breakthrough into science fiction’s fame and shows very well what a very inventive and ingenious physicist he was) “Timemaster” is not exactly immortal prose. It is the ideas in it that are really interesting.

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Charlie

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Fascinating … 🙂

I wonder which will happen first: time travel; sentient AI; or faster than light travel?

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JohnW: Thanks for the question. From my own 24th Century perspective, I can tell you that the three are a single package: If you have, not FTL travel — but just as fast as light travel (AFLT) , then you also have a (limited) form of time travel (a one-way trip to the future of wherever you are coming from) and to be able to manage all that, the help of a sentient AI is absolutely essential. (With FTL travel, you might end up going to the past, in case you did not know that.)

An alternative that makes FTL not essential (at least for traveling to the future)l, is to grab or make a transitable wormhole and move one head very fast (but not necessarily at light speed) a long way away and then bring it back and leave it next to the other head that you have placed earlier in, let’s say, your attic or the tools’ shed (for privacy). Then, to travel to the future you go in through the returned head and come out the one that stayed in the shed all the time, just seconds later by your own wrist-watch time, but at a distant future date by the calendar when you step out — and vice versa coming back. Both the trips to the future and back are all of the same duration, one that depends on for how long and how fast the head that was taken away was traveling during its round trip. For this, once more, the help of a sentient AI is most necessary. One is just not fast enough to be able to think and do everything on one’s own. Also there is some need for considerable amounts of energy: about equivalent to that radiated by a few supernovas all going off at the same time.

 

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I think AI will be the first thing to come along since current science & technology is already working toward it.  As Oscar said, the other two will depend on AI and hopefully Light Speed and Faster than Light Speed will come next thus taking us into the realm of time travel as he explained.

As you go faster, time slows down.  As you approach and hit light speed, time slows down and stops.  So on a four year trip to Alpha Proxima, four light-years away, at light speed, hardly any time will have passed for you in your space craft but four years will have passed back on Earth.  You do some exploring and then head back to Earth at light speed, and another four years will go by on Earth.  When you arrive back home eight years will have passed and since hardly any time has passed for you, you will be eight years into Earth’s future.

As you go faster than the speed of light, time starts to reverse and you will go backward in time.  This is where it gets weird.  The same trip to Alpha Proxima and back at twice the speed of light may bring you back eight years in Earth’s past.  So you might returne eight years before you even left!  So traveling at light speed or faster than light speed has its drawbacks.

Wormholes are much better for getting around if you can figure out how to create them like The Ancients did on Stargate.  Please correct me if I’ve got any of this wrong Oscar.

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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JohnW

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Charlie,

I think you are completely right in all the points you have made. There are, however, a few additional details I would like to point out:

At the speed of light, the mass of a spaceship and everything on it, including the people traveling inside, will have an infinite mass. The result of that, as the mass increases with speed, is that it will take infinite energy to get to that speed, because it has to be the same as the final kinetic energy, or energy of movement, that is proportional to the mass and the square of the velocity multiplied by a factor that is usually very close to one, but goes to infinity as one approaches light speed.

Not only that, but having an infinite mass at light speed, or a enormously large one when still traveling close but not quite at light speed, will create a correspondingly enormously large, or even infinite gravity field of its own that will be, well… very attractive to anything in the original frame of reference of the vehicle and everything else on Earth at the start of the trip. More attractive, in fact, than the biggest black hole that has ever been, that is now, or that shall ever be anywhere in the Universe.

Now, once one goes past the speed of light, one’s mass becomes imaginary (same as the square root of minus one is imaginary). I never had myself, or met anyone that had, an imaginary body mass, so I can’t really tell you what that is like. Probably interesting, but not great.

But even at a fraction of the speed of light there is another detail worth mentioning: outer space, although quite empty by comparison to where we live and carry out our daily businesses here on Earth, is not quite empty: there are always a least a few thousands of atoms per cubic mile, a well as grains of dust and occasionally small and not so small bits of rock. If incoming directly in the opposite direction to the spaceship, so their relative velocity will be practically equal in magnitude and opposite to that of the spaceship, those things will have a very high kinetic energy and, at let’s say 70% of light speed and however small they may be, these things will have each the energy of a very serious bomb. So running into even one of these won’t be all that good for the health of those on board. Besides those atoms, etc. there is also cosmic radiation, that comes from all directions when in interstellar space. That coming towards the spacecraft and against its direction of movement shall also have a lot of kinetic energy that will make living in the ship for the crew the equivalent of being inside a cage of Uranium or Radium. All the time. Again, not great for the crew’s health. Of course the subjective time the crew will be exposed to this ultra hard radiation will be quite short, as you have pointed out, but the great energy of those particles will make up for this.

But there is a pretty obvious solution that actually works and everyone going in near-light speed trip uses here, in the 24th Century, and I know very well from practical experience: force field shields. There will not be invented and perfected until the late 22nd Century. But just wait, I say, and it ill be no problem at all to travel at near light-speed. Beyond that, well… We time-travelers use a completely different way of going back in time, of course, thanks to what is called the Kerr’s Metric Method, that involve immensely massive rotating black holes of zero total electric charge. But I can’t discuss this here, because MS may be listening. And if no them, there is always Google to keep in mind.

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JohnW

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Thanks for going into the mass and energy requirements, and other obstacles to trying to achieve near light speed.  I was thinking about including them but didn’t want to go into those major hindrances.

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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Yep, I was wondering about force fields/shields during transit to avoid catastrophic hull failure in a spacecraft at near light speed.

Not to mention the effects of radiation during long distance space flight. As we will need to solve that even before sending a human crew to Mars aboard conventional 21st century spacecraft.

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JohnW: About the need for shielding space travelers against the hard cosmic (and solar) highly energetic radioation ever present in outer space: “As we will need to solve that even before sending a human crew to Mars aboard conventional 21st century spacecraft.”

Or before sending people to work and live in permanent stations not just on Mars, but even on the Moon. Once one leaves behind near-Earth space and our planet’s protective magnetic shield goes down with distance, so it is any longer an effectively shield that traps or deflects those energetic particles…

There has been some interest on using as refuges huge lava tubes that might exist in both the Moon and Mars (*), made possible by the low gravity there and perhaps capable, it is speculated, of containing whole cities and protecting under their roofs those living there from most of the lethal radiation. But to make any meaningful use of those tubes would require large earth-moving and construction equipment especially designed for its use on the Moon’s surface and that is unlikely to be sent there any time soon, even if the machines were broken into small enough pieces to be delivered, in many trips, with our biggest rockets. Plus several other practical difficulties, such as figuring out how to operate these large machines wearing space suits, and so on.

(*) I recently made a small study on how to find such tubes (and any other mass anomalies  of interest) under the surface of, for example, the Moon (and also of Mars), if using ultra-precise measurements made with a new kind of instrument designed to exploit a certain aspect of quantum weirdness. The measurements would be taken at quite a low altitude, made possible by the lack of atmosphere to drag a spacecraft down, in this case a future lunar orbiter, and good enough to detect the small irregularities in the lunar gravity field those hidden features must produce. It was mostly fun to do the study, even got paid for doing it, but my hopes were not really high that this work would do much more than to keep me happily busy, typing new code away on my PC to do the necessary calculations, for a couple of months during the darkest and coldest months of winter. Now we shall see what happens…

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Oh, I almost forgot to mention one more detail: just as it is hard to go up to FTL starting at a speed lower than light, or STL, it is equally difficult to go down from FTL to STL.

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Darn, I didn’t think about that.  Looks like warp drive is the answer.

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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When you look in a mirror, the person you see doesn’t weigh anything – otherwise the mirror would fall off the wall. That is what you call ‘imaginary weight’. The mirror-reflection still obeys gravity though. It’s the Law.

Time travel is basically a form of optical rotation. You don’t actually do much travelling. You just get reflected backwards or forwards. You need to keep track of your reflections though if you are planning to stop for a while. It’s not about the money, it’s the food. You have to check your chiral glycine. Molecules can be either left-handed or right-handed. They are mirrored versions. If you reflect an odd number of times, you can’t digest the ‘destination food’ – it looks the same but your biological setup only processes the same-handedness molecules. Great for dieting though – you can chomp as much as like but it has no nutritional value whatsoever.

zeddy

Excel Spiral Polarized Travel Coordinator

Win 19 Home Premium, x512, 16TB Intel i9-9120 14.7GHz, Groups Q & Z

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Charlie, access-mdb

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When Einstein’s first great work, about the Special Theory of Relativity came out in late 1905, a convenient representation of Special Relativity’s flat space-time was Minkowski’s, with time as an imaginary variable. That way, the distance between two events (things that happen at a given time and a given place) could be negative, if they were close to each other in space but far apart enough in time. But that was more a convenient math trick than a deep statement about the nature of reality.

However, the imaginary mass is not quite the same as a mass’ reflection in a mirror: it will have a gravitational field of its own, only this will also be imaginary. The whole thing is one of the weirdest aspects of Special Relativity. Nobody much cares about it, because it means having to travel faster than the unattainable speed of light to check it out; this can never happen and, therefore, what the theory says happens then cannot be proven or disproven with any conceivable experiment — unless it is an experiment that falsifies the whole Theory of Relativity, something that so far has not happened. Relativity has successfully been validated by all experiments meant to either confirm it or prove it wrong, so far. The only reason we have left to doubt it is that, maybe hidden in the uncertainty inevitable in all experimental measurements, there might be tiny clues that it is not quite correct, but such clues are so tiny as to have been invisible to us, so far. The one thing most people agree on is that Relativity (General Relativity, that is) probably fails to explain what happens at the center of a black hole, where the solutions of its differential equations become singular and, therefore, probably also meaningless. There is also the fact that Relativity does not fit in the fundamental framework of quantum physics. But nobody really knows what this means.

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wavy

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Please ignore my System Specs in my previous post.

I forgot when I was.

zeddy

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Charlie

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I just remembered something that would help the food situation immensely in the 1950’s and 60’s – MacDonald’s.  Cheeseburger – 35¢, fries – 15¢, small coke – 15¢.  I could take along enough old coins for a 65¢ meal or two.

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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Charlie: Not a bad idea, although old junk food still is junk food, even for us travelers.  But, if you carried out your plan in the USA, don’t take any quarters issued earlier than 1999. They did not have those “50 State” quarters celebrating each of the 50 states back then. Also: no Susan B. Anthony one-dollar coins either. Unless you plan to pay a visit of indefinite length, as a guest, to a 50s or 60s County Jail. Interesting experience but, as I still remember mine, not one to be strongly recommended.

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Notice that I said I would take along enough old coins.  By that I meant coins pre-dating the time I was going to visit.  Visiting 1963, I’d take 1962 or earlier coins.  Please give me some credit, I’ve given this thing some thought for quite a while.

Also, I could get a better meal for only a little more at White Coffee Pot and hear good music from the juke box too.

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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Charlie: Great idea! Really sorry for having  given such unnecessary coinage advice to a well-seasoned time-traveler such as yourself!

But, please, take your time to make quite sure that you go to the White Coffee Pot and not to the White Castle. Just saying.

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I’ve never been in a White Castle.  When I was a kid of 18 to 21 and after a Friday or Saturday night out with my friends cruising all around town, we would many times end up at the White Coffee Pot for a piece of pie and a cup of coffee.  Great times!

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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You don’t know what you haven’t missed!

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OscarCP wrote:

free channel with ads.

did they start that up again , i missed it. Used it for a couple of years until they did away w/the free. I will check again.

🍻

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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I see now that Hulu has The Handmaid’s Tale of which only 2 seasons are available from Netflix.
Mark me very interested. I believe it has been renewed for a forth as well

🍻

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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[Charlie]

I’m not real big fan of Steven King but he’s done a few cool books, many turning into movies.  One that really was different for King was his book “11-22-63”.  It deals with time travel and puts a very good story with it too IMO.  I really got into this one!

One small tidbit of a spoiler:  If what you are doing in the past will disrupt the present timeline in a major way, things go against you in a big way!

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by Charlie.

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Charlie: “if you are attempting to disrupt the present timeline in a major way in the past, things go against you in a big way!”

That is a premise in Bob Forward’s “Timemaster” that was mentioned earlier. Although the consequences were not really that dire, but more as if the hidden hand of some fundamental principle protecting against causality violations (something like Steve Hawkin’s “cosmic censor”) popped up and gently changed the course of events in a way that looked perfectly natural, so it was always as if some a great coincidence had prevented the possible violation.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

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Yep, like a small bridge closed or even a flat tire at the worse possible time to keep you from doing what you’re trying to do.

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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OscarCP

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OscarCP wrote:

PK: I did not read the book, but saw the movie (“The Golden Compass”)

Don’t feel that you have come anywhere close to this particular book if all you have done is see the movie.

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Thanks to all of you for recommending, directly or indirectly, “His Dark Materials”. So I have read, here and there, about them and decided to order the books, as doing so promises to be a good investment of my time and money. I’ll get them in a few days, then I’ll see if I was right.

Now, any more comments on time travel, maybe also including some on it’s possible physical relationship to parallel universes? I’d love to see some of those.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

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A slightly irreverent thought on time travel, to liven up our locked-down lives.

In the UK, and probably elsewhere, the docs have been very concerned about the consumption of booze.  Writing to “The Times”, this gentleman said that he had been limiting himself to one drink per day, and it’s already 20 July 2033.

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4 users thanked author for this post.

OscarCP, wavy, Cybertooth, Myst

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With a good time-travel machine at one’s disposal, a person may repair to an early day and place known to be free of COVID-19 and (at least for sufficiently a long while) of other such plagues, there to have a merry old time in the company of good hearty fellows and even pay for a round or two, so all those present and willing can toast the traveler’s good health.  Just a thought.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
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As I said before, 1957 would be my favorite year.  I’d have to get tested for the Covid 19 right before traveling back.  Contaminating the past would be really bad.

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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