9.8 KiB
[BST] Long term consequences of one-shot time travel
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Author: u/itaibn0 *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3b2kq8/bst_long_term_consequences_of_oneshot_time_travel/
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Score: 6
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Created: 2015-06-25T13:33:44
Post:
Here is an idea I have for a premise for a story. I'm not currently planning on writing anything based on this, and if anybody else is inspired feel free to use this idea. If there already exists fiction with this premise I would be interested to hear about it.
So, there's a common trope where a person from the present or future accidentally time-travels to the distant past. In this new land she is rootless and unfamiliar with their customs, but her knowledge of history and science also sets her at a great advantage compared to everyone else. One good example of this theme is the 1632 series, albeit that is with an entire town instead of one person.
Whatever adventures this time-traveler has, at some point she will grow and die (or die before growing old) (I'm assuming she doesn't find a way to return to her present). I'm interested at what happens to civilization for centuries onwards. I'm assuming the time-traveler had became a significant figure, and at some point she revealed her story of how she had come here. This story might not be believed by everyone, but it is taken seriously due to all the knowledge she has to back it up. Many of the statements she has made about the future are recorded and meticulously preserved. Thanks to her society advances much more quickly the second time around.
However, her knowledge of her original time's science had been haphazard. She describes many inventions without knowing how they work, others have explanations but can't be made with materials people can procure. Some of the things she says cannot possibly be true but are, whereas others are simply false. That's to say nothing of the fakes attributed to her. An inventor or scientist must rely on her but also know how to think for herself.
People in this society still ask themselves what happens if they mysteriously transported into the past, but to them, it's not an idle curiosity. Even the original time-traveler doesn't know how she got here, but it could happen again to anybody at any time. And this time, they're going to be prepared...
Possible setting: The time-traveler has told people the time and place where she was whisked away into the past. Science has already caught up on everything she has said and then gone further. Now the date approaches. Crowds gather, and perhaps armies. What will happen this time?
Edit: I just realized that this idea fits well with this week's challenge. This is unintentional. I didn't even read the challenge until after I posted this.
Comments:
u/notmy2ndopinion [+5] Concent of Saunt Edhar (21 hours later)
"If alternate universes are like pages in a book, all running in parallel, from top to bottom, then this book was bound with all of the pages folded in half and then a hole was punched through it. The words at the end of page one bleed over and affect the beginning of page two altering its initial trajectory, so on and so forth, ad infinitum.
"We don't know why the book of history was written this way, and we aren't sure how many iterations the Traveler went through before the underlying structure was demonstrated through a forward projection of documentation.
"You will be Traveller #75 since the first document. Your history has been pulled up by the bootstraps of me (#74). Your duty, should you choose to accept it, is to redo our timeline in the adjacent world to make it a better place. We have extensive notes, about what has and hasn't worked. The restart point is always the same, but the resultant end 534 years later always differs and we usually try to build a lasting institution to record the changes for your benefit. Some choose a religion, others a government, or a corporation, but I chose a research facility for iteration #74.
"You might wonder if you are the same Traveller as me, as I wondered about #73. Our familial histories and visual descriptions hardly ever match our past versions, since wars and other major changes to the initial time point affect relationships and offspring in unpredictable ways.
"It is my hope that this document will be read by you, my progeny, and you share my values and utility functions. I also hope that the Tesseract facility will provide you with a detailed summary of the yearly variances between my timeline and yours, so we can better understand the flutterby effects ("if a honey-suckling flutterby flaps its wings in Xiong, a hurricane can happen in Nuevo York") and account for them in version #76.
"Now, if my plans are being set into motion as I requested, you should have a tome in front of you and a week to memorize it before you Slip Back. Here are the key people you will need to make contact with and the ways to ally yourself with them..."
u/Harkins [+4] (5 hours later)
Possible setting: The time-traveler has told people the time and place where she was whisked away into the past.
She can't really know that if she goes back more than ~250 years. The various calendar reforms have been pretty big, and they spread slowly and confusingly.
Even if she knows the exact date of a historic event to count from she's probably wrong. I started to make an example of the Battle of Agincourt and looked it up on Wikipedia to double-check and was delighted to find a nice article on old and new style dates using that exact example that explains very well the problem, so I won't belabor it. :)
It doesn't help her to know the dates of famous future events because they'll be thrown off by any changes she's wrought to history and by her mentioning the event. If she publicizes "Oh, in 300 years on December 7, 1941 Japan pulls America into World War II by bombing Pearl Harbor" I can guarantee that's one thing that's not going to happen on that date. :p
What she really wants is to know the date of a major astrological phoenomena. Maybe her mom died on the day that Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter or something. Then she has a consistent calendar, history isn't thrown off by foreknowledge of a famous event, the butterfly effect won't change it, and as a bonus the new society won't know her date of departure until a few weeks or years before it happens. You could start your whole story on the date of the astrological event when the whole world has to admit this weird historical kook was in fact not a kook.
(And you are obliged to namedrop Democritus somewhere, because if anyone was a time traveller lost in the ancient world...)
u/None [+3] (59 minutes later)
This is the sort of thing that would only instigate war if there were overwhelming causes for it to happen otherwise. With the exact authenticity of her claims faded in the past, there would be skeptics claiming she was just a brilliant, lucky woman. No sane politician would send an army to claim the possible point of time travel without a clear gain.
However, individuals, religious institutions, and scientific institutions might clamour to be there. Myths would have sprung up as to the exact circumstances. There would probably be conflicting accounts of exactly which date was the right one.
And if it sent just one person into the past...
Now the tale of that person would be interesting indeed.
u/itaibn0 [+1] (2 hours later)
Yeah, I guess armies is pushing it. Still, this is an event of global significance, so I expect some political squabbling over the best way to handle it. There might be riots and police, and they'll definitely be hundreds of cameras.
It might send one person, but one scenario that I was imagining is that it is a moderately-sized portal that's open for minutes or hours. The first time only one person was in the right place and the right time, but the second time thousands can go through.
But really, I think the most likely scenario is that no extraordinary physical event will occur there, but that too could make a good story with all the preparation and conflict.
u/thesteamboat [+2] (5 hours later)
This is a large part of Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. Spoilers warning/summary of relevant details follows:
At some point in the future we have the ability to open viewing windows looking back in time. During the course of investigating history it is discovered that Columbus's journey to the new world was engineered by an erased future history (to prevent the Aztecs from overrunning Europe and implementing blood sacrifice on a massive scale.) The current timeline eventually sends agents back in time who strand Columbus in the New World (preventing the slave trade and massive depopulation of the Americas) while also introducing metal working to the Aztecs and reforming the whole ritual sacrifice thing, so that when the old and new worlds meet they're on roughly equal footing.
u/TimTravel [+1] (3 days later)
u/itaibn0 [+1] (11 days later)
I'm assuming a multiple-timeline model of time travel rather than a self-consistency model. I also have thoughts on the self-consistency model which I would like to expand on at some time, though to summarize, I have never seen any author that gets it right, and a story that gets it right would be completely unlike almost every time travel story.
u/TimTravel [+1] (11 days later)
In a multiple timeline model, beware the ethical implications of creating and destroying timelines.