Her best, imo, although Blackout/All Clear are good too.
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There was a cheesy but quite good movie in the '80s about time travelers who came back to “present-day” disasters in order to save people just before they died and transport them to the future, where humanity was dying out.
You don’t see time travelers because they only show up at catastrophic events where everyone dies in order to kidnap people for the future.
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I remember in the movie the future the time travelers come from has a heavily polluted atmosphere. So when they come back to the 80’s they have to chain smoke to survive in our current atmosphere.
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I remember that bit. Funny that it stands out so much that we both remember that odd detail.
They’d have to get creative in 2019. Good luck trying to smoke on a plane, even if you were a flight attendant.
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In a modern remake they would have some sort of pollution gum they could chew. Which is not as cinematic as the original’s mysterious smoking body snatchers.
Yes, I am not sure why that is so clear for me when I can barely recall the rest of the film after the initial mid-flight-snatch. I guess maybe it was intriguing to see humans that looked like us but could no longer breath the same air as us due to continued long term pollution and evolution.
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That is true but the Tardis knew where it was going.
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That’s based on a John Varley novel, which was an expansion of his short story “Air Raid.” I still remember reading the short story-- it was pretty bleak.
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Thanks for that. I had a vague feeling that I had read it as a book first (oddly enough, on a plane flight) then saw the movie afterwards. Though I think the movie came out first and the novel was written after?
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Another one: if time travel is possible then the only time traveler would be Roko’s Basilisk.
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I believe the short story came first, but I’m not sure which came next. And I wasn’t trying to correct you or say anything bad. I just saw the movie mentioned and it sparked my memory of reading the story. 
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My thanks are heartfelt; I had the feeling but couldn’t find a reference to the novel. You confirmed it for me.
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Thanks for sharing it. Obrigado!
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A map is an essential thing for time travellers.
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And where the tourists go…
Matthew: “Jesus, some kind merchant gave us these clean robes to wear.”
Jesus: “Very nice, but what are these Roman letters on them, ‘GoldenPalace.com’?”
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As usual, Randall Munroe has us covered…
Charlie Stross got two pretty good novels out of the idea, though he abandoned the universe. He said something to the effect that it was too broken to fix…
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There are no time travelers because we as a species don’t last long enough to invent it.
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That’s true. And it’s only our arrogance that we assume the time travelers are human.
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If time-travel worked, there’d be these 2000-year-old craters in the middle east, where every single fundy throughout all time jumped in:
- To be there at Jesus’ nativity.
- To shoot all the Romans at the crucifixion.
- Some might start shooting at the nativity because it wasn’t Nordic Jesus.
Unless there was some kind of temporal lockout, they’d all arrive at the same times and places. Boom!
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