Well, my dog has no nose!
2 Likes
(not a reply)
2 Likes
2 Likes
Right?
Seems to me that would be the easiest, most believable way for someone to ‘prove’ that he/she is actually from the future.
Come with the winning Powerball numbers, (or Gray’s Almanac, circa 2000-2050) or don’t come at all.
10 Likes
When does it smell?
5 Likes
Hey! My book was in the same apocalypse. (Incredibly misguided Instagram ad from a while back, below…don’t know what I was thinking…)
2 Likes
Hummm… maybe he knows something we don’t?
Hitler still lives because of all the fascists and antifacists constantly killing each other in a reenactment of Mad Magazine’s Spy vs Spy that nobody actually gets a chance to kill Hitler.
Kennedy still dies, but all the talk of multiple shooters is real, because Dallas November 22 1963 has become an even more twisted version of Black MIrror’s Black Museum.
2 Likes
[quote=“Alvin_Goodman, post:30, topic:116327”]
When did this change happen?
At some point in (known) history, someone claimed to be from the future and I’m wondering where science/fiction/beliefs was at that point.[/quote]
I’ve wondered about that myself - at what point did that idea that someone from the future would travel back in time to the present originate?
Wikipedia’s list of time-travel stories outlines the course of development of the idea of time travel, which seems to start with 18th century prognostication - an angel or good fairy traveling into the future to see what’s there, in the first couple of stories, as a sort of rhetorical device. In the 19th century time machines start to show up. Then there are many stories about people from the present going back in time (such as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court), but it’s unclear what story first shifted that to give the reader the perspective of some future person traveling back to the present. It seems an inevitable development.
It’s interesting that this might actually have been lost in time, as the first known story of a time machine was for a time: “The Clock that Went Backward” featured a clock that let a pair of boys travel back in time. The story, printed in a newspaper, was not anthologized, and there wasn’t any scholarly work referencing it, so (according to its Wikipedia entry) it was essentially lost until 1970s.
While science fiction doesn’t always get the same level of scholarly attention as other genres of fiction, it still surprises me that we might not have a record of the first time-traveler to come back from the future to change the past. Travelers from the present are a more natural form (given fiction tending to anchor the POV to the protagonist, giving the reader someone who is experiencing the same wonder of time travel they are getting from reading the story), but at some point there had to be someone who came up with a modern-day Cassandra (or rather a future one), seeking to tell us in the present of some future calamity. I wonder who first made that shift in perspective.
Likewise, I’ve always wondered if the concept of time travel would have made sense to a person in the ancient world. Obviously, they had the idea of a future and of prophecy, but concepts like someone from the future traveling back in time to change things, let alone timelines and paradoxes seem modern to me. Did they have the concept of the future as a ‘place’ that people could travel from, or was the future only possibility (or inevitability) that hasn’t yet happened?
6 Likes
If time travel was possible, we would be neck deep in time travelers right now, because future populations would be larger than ours, leading to an over supply of people wanting to travel to the past.
2 Likes
Douglas Adams had something to say about time-travel and tense:
"One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can’t cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.
The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be descibed differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is futher complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.
Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later aditions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term “Future Perfect” has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.
To resume:
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is one of the most extraordinary ventures in the history of catering.
It is built on the fragmented remains of an eventually ruined planet which is (wioll haven be) enclosed in a vast time bubble and projected forward in time to the precise moment of the End of the Universe.
This is, many would say, impossible.
In it, guests take (willan on-take) their places at table and eat (willan on-eat) sumptous meals while watching (willing watchen) the whole of creation explode around them.
This, many would say, is equally impossible.
You can arrive (mayan arrivan on-when) for any sitting you like without prior (late fore-when) reservation because you can book retrospectively, as it were, when you return to your own time (you can have on-book haventa forewhen presooning returningwenta retrohome). "
9 Likes
True but only if time travel were also sufficiently cheap. We might talk about post-scarcity futures, but if you had to consume the mass energy of an entire star you’d save it for special occasions.
For example, by some estimates building a stable wormhole (if possible at all) could take mass energy about equal to that of Jupiter. (Note: a stable wormhole with movable ends could serve as a time machine due to time dilation, but not to before it was made).
1 Like
Awful!
. . . wait
1 Like
That’s all fine, but can he tell me when the McRib sandwich is coming back?
In one of these realities, I’m sure this is an amusing gag. Clearly I’m in a different ficton.
1 Like
I think you may have a too romantic view on Gore. It’s not at all certain his reaction would have been any more sensible.
Iraq was Dubya’s personal obsession. Plans were being made for the invasion (and for selling it to the public) as soon as he entered the White House. There’s no reason to suppose Gore would have erred in that particular direction, which would have likely meant less dispersion from the established war goals in Afghanistan (because I think the intervention in Afghanistan was a logical response to 9/11 - maybe not the best, but logical at least).
2 Likes
You are all so linear.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
