• Welcome to the new Internet Infidels Discussion Board, formerly Talk Freethought.

You find yourself in the cretaceous

Unless you travel to an alternate universe the time and place of departure must have already been shaped by your trip to the past, your trip to the past happened long before you departed. Whatever changes were caused by your travel to the past were in place before you left.
 
A paradox is not real, it s jyst the limitaion of our nrain.

I am sure oter ETs travel throug time all tye time.

In fact, I expect Earth and humans are a kind of an amusement park for their entertainment.

All those unidentified aerial vehicles are really part of an ET reality show light years away. Watch the goofy humans.
 
Angra Mainyu said:
Politesse said:
A time traveler who doesn't want their own species to suddenly blip out of existence should be trying to minimize, not maximize, their impact on the target landscape.
Click to expand...
So, do you think that that is possible? How do you get out of the grandfather paradox?
One possibility is that the time traveller actually got to a parallel universe. Humans do not exist, and I do not see why he would have an obligation to try to bring about that tens of millions of years later they come into existence. I see no good reason to suspect he has a good chance of precisely influencing the future in that manner.

Another possibility is that it's some kind of close curve. But whatever it is, if it's our universe, humans do exist in the present.

If you are not convinced and think there is an alternative, I would ask what you mean that humans "suddenly blip out of existence". Does it happen to present-day humans, as if Thanos snapped his fingers? When? In 2021? Maybe 1934? 1492? 2223?
Click to expand...

Obviously, there is no way of answering such a hypothetical with any more assurance than the thousands of scifi stories that have explored these many variants on the theme. I would see the destruction of an ecosystem as an evil regardless of whether there were direct human costs to doing so. But massively disrupting an ecosystem whose outcomes have/had a significant bearing on your own seems especially risky in any universe where time travel was a linear, closed loop affair. I see no reason to assume that meddling with the past is a safe thing to do; we know full well that time is not an absolute property of the universe, but a relative one.
 
Politesse said:
Angra Mainyu said:
Politesse said:
A time traveler who doesn't want their own species to suddenly blip out of existence should be trying to minimize, not maximize, their impact on the target landscape.
Click to expand...
So, do you think that that is possible? How do you get out of the grandfather paradox?
One possibility is that the time traveller actually got to a parallel universe. Humans do not exist, and I do not see why he would have an obligation to try to bring about that tens of millions of years later they come into existence. I see no good reason to suspect he has a good chance of precisely influencing the future in that manner.

Another possibility is that it's some kind of close curve. But whatever it is, if it's our universe, humans do exist in the present.

If you are not convinced and think there is an alternative, I would ask what you mean that humans "suddenly blip out of existence". Does it happen to present-day humans, as if Thanos snapped his fingers? When? In 2021? Maybe 1934? 1492? 2223?
Click to expand...

Obviously, there is no way of answering such a hypothetical with any more assurance than the thousands of scifi stories that have explored these many variants on the theme. I would see the destruction of an ecosystem as an evil regardless of whether there were direct human costs to doing so. But massively disrupting an ecosystem whose outcomes have/had a significant bearing on your own seems especially risky in any universe where time travel was a linear, closed loop affair. I see no reason to assume that meddling with the past is a safe thing to do; we know full well that time is not an absolute property of the universe, but a relative one.
Click to expand...

We can't change the past. It's quite likely that we also can't change the future.

If time travel to the past will happen, then it has happened, and the consequences were and are exactly what we see. How could it be otherwise?

If you attempt to travel back in time with the intent to kill your grandfather, or to assassinate Hitler before WWII, or to do anything else that results in a different present from that which we observe, you will fail. If you didn't fail, then the present would be, and would always have been, different. And it's not different; it's how it is.

Whether that implies that any attempt to travel back in time will fail; Or merely that any such travel can only result in the present as we see it, is unknown. I suspect that both past and present are fixed. Our awareness falls through four (or greater) dimensional spacetime, able only to influence our velocity along three of those dimensions. If we ever worked out a way to vary that velocity, it wouldn't imply a way to change the events of the time into which we move, regardless of the direction of our motion along the t axis.

A time traveler arriving in the Cretaceous might not have the option to bring anything but his conscious awareness along - and might well find that he is a T Rex, rather than needing to shoot one. The difficulty of transferring awareness from oneself to another individual, particularly an individual of a different species, at a different time, may well be less difficult than the task of moving ones material body (or any other object) into the past.

Both seem to me to be sufficiently technologically difficult as to qualify as "impossible", but then, forty years ago I would have considered the latest smartphone to be impossible too, so what do I know?
 
Politesse said:
...
I would see the destruction of an ecosystem as an evil regardless of whether there were direct human costs to doing so. ...
Click to expand...

Would you sacrifice the human race in order to preserve another species?
 
Politesse said:
Obviously, there is no way of answering such a hypothetical with any more assurance than the thousands of scifi stories that have explored these many variants on the theme.
Click to expand...
I disagree. One can do much better, by showing that those stories are in general contradictory if interpreted as the characters do. In other words, the characters are vastly mistaken about the nature of their reality. Sure, one can ignore that in the story, but you were making point.

Politesse said:
I would see the destruction of an ecosystem as an evil regardless of whether there were direct human costs to doing so.
Click to expand...
Even if that were true, a single human would not destroy the cretaceous ecosystem even if he has one of these, a big pistol, plenty of ammo for both, and a machete for good measure.

Politesse said:
But massively disrupting an ecosystem whose outcomes have/had a significant bearing on your own seems especially risky in any universe where time travel was a linear, closed loop affair.
Click to expand...

If time travel is a closed loop affair, your influence in the past is already imbued in the present as DBT pointed out. There is nothing you can do in the past to change the present.

Furthermore, the ecosystems of the Cretaceous will be far more massively disrupted in the future regardless of what the human does, when the asteroid hits. And if the asteroid does not hit, forget about humans in that parallel universe anyway.


Politesse said:
I see no reason to assume that meddling with the past is a safe thing to do; we know full well that time is not an absolute property of the universe, but a relative one.
Click to expand...
Safe for whom? For the past: sure, it's not possible to change it. For the person in the Cretaceous? Well, they will eventually get killed, so it's not safe anyway. But whose safety are you talking about?
 
Treedbear said:
Politesse said:
...
I would see the destruction of an ecosystem as an evil regardless of whether there were direct human costs to doing so. ...
Click to expand...

Would you sacrifice the human race in order to preserve another species?
Click to expand...

No, of course not. How on earth would not murdering a tyrannosaur endanger the human species?
 
Politesse said:
Angra Mainyu said:
Politesse said:
A time traveler who doesn't want their own species to suddenly blip out of existence should be trying to minimize, not maximize, their impact on the target landscape.
Click to expand...
So, do you think that that is possible? How do you get out of the grandfather paradox?
One possibility is that the time traveller actually got to a parallel universe. Humans do not exist, and I do not see why he would have an obligation to try to bring about that tens of millions of years later they come into existence. I see no good reason to suspect he has a good chance of precisely influencing the future in that manner.

Another possibility is that it's some kind of close curve. But whatever it is, if it's our universe, humans do exist in the present.

If you are not convinced and think there is an alternative, I would ask what you mean that humans "suddenly blip out of existence". Does it happen to present-day humans, as if Thanos snapped his fingers? When? In 2021? Maybe 1934? 1492? 2223?
Click to expand...

Obviously, there is no way of answering such a hypothetical with any more assurance than the thousands of scifi stories that have explored these many variants on the theme. I would see the destruction of an ecosystem as an evil regardless of whether there were direct human costs to doing so. But massively disrupting an ecosystem whose outcomes have/had a significant bearing on your own seems especially risky in any universe where time travel was a linear, closed loop affair. I see no reason to assume that meddling with the past is a safe thing to do; we know full well that time is not an absolute property of the universe, but a relative one.
Click to expand...

That assumes that time travel here is vulnerable to paradox.

Take for example time travel in the universes we create: if I create a universe of Dwarf Fortress a d decide to go back in time, it's really not something that can be done from inside, but I can load into an earlier save file. If I change something there, it's not even the same string of execution anymore. It's a divergent file instead.

The assumptions AM makes on time travel paradox rely on tacit assumptions AM makes about the cosmology of whatever system this time travel is happening in, assumptions that are quite probably very bad.

In such a cosmology, there would be no paradox.
 
I don't see why it is logically impossible to displace yourself in time any more so than it is to displace yourself geographically. My position and its effects on the world are fairly consistent whether I'm performing them at t1 or t2. If I can manage to transport myself to t2 from t1, it doesn't create a "paradox", I'm just now affecting things from that standpoint. Are you guys appealing to some sense of "fate" or "destiny"? I don't see why the future couldn't be altered. We know that the future can be altered. We do this all the time. We just usually can't see the effects of our actions until they transpire.
 
Jarhyn said:
The assumptions AM makes on time travel paradox rely on tacit assumptions AM makes about the cosmology of whatever system this time travel is happening in, assumptions that are quite probably very bad.
In such a cosmology, there would be no paradox.
Click to expand...

Serious ? Exterminating the cretaceous fauna wouldn't change the present ? Great.
So we can discuss hunting safaris and what expensive death toys we should bring along.

Maybe attracting TReX by blasting a few rounds with our AR15. Since that would make them believe there are fresh kills nearby they would flock for the free lunch.
Once within reach, our 900 Nitro Express can swiftly deal with the bastards. That ‘ll teach them.

No point in waiting for that asteroid anyway.
 
Politesse said:
I don't see why it is logically impossible to displace yourself in time any more so than it is to displace yourself geographically. My position and its effects on the world are fairly consistent whether I'm performing them at t1 or t2. If I can manage to transport myself to t2 from t1, it doesn't create a "paradox", I'm just now affecting things from that standpoint. Are you guys appealing to some sense of "fate" or "destiny"? I don't see why the future couldn't be altered. We know that the future can be altered. We do this all the time. We just usually can't see the effects of our actions until they transpire.
Click to expand...

We don't alter the future. We alter our expectations in the present. We only experience each moment once, so how could we possibly have a comparison against which to claim things are different?

The future can be unpredictable without being in any way alterable.
 
Treedbear said:
Politesse said:
Your plan is to just kill one tyrannosaur and leave?
Click to expand...

I would try to plan to have the means to kill as many tyrannosaurs as I needed to in order to survive, whether I get to leave or not. Would that destroy an ecosystem?
Click to expand...

Depends how often you decided you "needed" to kill a tyrannosaur, and whether you had other people with you doing likewise. If you're talking about apex predators, seemingly small impacts can have big effects, their numbers are often small to begin with and their links to other species significant. Moreover, in the years following the K-T event, therapod genes in particular came to play a significant role in the overall eocsystemic balance of the planet.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom