See also the Strange Life of Ivan Osokin by P.D. Ouspensky (1915). I vaguely recall that Gurdjieff also had some ideas along these lines.
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Well, I was thinking maybe a little more down to earth. We’re assuming that the time travellers are human. For all we know, the cockroach that you just squished in the bathroom might have come from the 28th century.
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Where are all the aliens? All other answers to the Fermi paradox, plus:
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They’re not visiting your planet.
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They’re hiding in plain sight.
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You think they’re crazy.
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Aliens experience other planets without leaving their own.
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There aren’t any.
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yep - can’t get back to a point before the system that allows spacetime traversibility exists. Apparently the general notion checks out though, (as long as there’s no exotic matter around).
Brilliant series of books. I never fail to refer to them in any scenario.
Especially since we are talking about the virtually infinite future.
There are many other ways to describe this problem. In John Varley’s classic story Air Raid, use of the time machine blocks out expanses of history in four dimensions, so once you go back to the USA on 1 Jan 1980, nobody else can. Or going back always forks history, leaving one time traveler per fork. Or time travelers can only interact with the past in limited ways (they are literally ghosts). Can’t remember what story that was in.
The short story was first, ten about 100 attempts at the movie script, then the novel.
I love how arrogantly everyone believes that they live in a timeframe that’s interesting enough to be worth visiting.
Actually I will go out on a limb here and assert that our time is absolutely unique, in relation to our own history in any event.
In our first million years of history we invented fire, boats and levers. Thats pretty much it. In the last 150 years we have gone from hot air balloons to interstellar space craft. At the start of that period we had basically no idea how our bodies worked. No understanding of our fundamental template (DNA) and no way to understand our design and construction.
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Have you read E for Effort?
I posted a link about it elsewhere here. Very much what you are describing about seeing-only.
But your position has to be relative to something. There is no universal coordinate system, no centre from which absolute position can be measured.
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Maybe we can’t see them because they are just transferring their minds through time. But It could be explained by the hypothesis number 3.
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This one is fun:
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That is my theory on alien abductions and some UFO sightings. Alien (and perhaps some form of mutated/evolved? future human) tourists coming here to screw with us.
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It is the fictional biography of Jack Hawksmoor, a character from the comic book The Authority. Some dudes from the future performed a lot of crazy surgeries in him in order to give him enough powers to stop a terrible threat from the distant future.
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You missed off the antisemites going back to start a massacre, who ignore the fact that Jesus and the disciples were also Jewish.
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So they could prevent the rise of Christianism and thus, averting the fall of Rome.
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It’d be a dogpile of every fanatic with a time machine. (Conspiracy wonks would head to Roswell and the Kennedy assassination. It was Steve Bannon on the Grassy Knoll.)
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Still nobody has asked when are all the Time Travellers…
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Whenever they want to be?
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into the future, one second at a time!
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We made bombs so powerful they could destroy entire cities in one go back in the 40s. I’m sure a lot of people back then thought, “Well, this is it. At some point every yahoo and fanatic is going to get their hands on these and the world will end.” So far it hasn’t happened. The cold war also didn’t result in nuclear annihilation.
Maybe part of the reason these things don’t happen is because the boogeyman of a the “crazy person” is a myth. People who are actually so disconnected from reality via delusion or hallucination that they are totally unaware of what it means to go back in time and alter the past are also too disorganized to actually pull it off. People who are so entitled that they think it is okay for them to travel to the past and mess things up are also too egotistical to do anything that would endanger themselves. Time travel is never going to be a consumer item that anyone can use on a whim or in a moment of weakness any more than nuclear bombs will.
Another thought the past is possible, wouldn’t the first time travellers take steps to ensure they had a sort of ultimate control over time travel? Suppose you are I are in a race to make a working time machine. You win by a day. So you go back in time as many times as it takes to do research into countermeasures that prevent time travel, or to locate all other time travel projects and sabotage them all. Any time your equipment (which is more technologically advanced than the rest of the world by an unlimited amount) detects tell-tale signatures that say that someone else is developing time travel technology you immediately go back in time and make sure they never even get close.
Why continue with the forward flow of time at all? The future is random and dangerous. Set off a doomsday device that will end the planet or the entire universe and go live at some point in the past, secure that no other time travelers will ever come about to mess with you.
Or what if time travel is just really slow. If you realize that time is another dimension, just like space, then, just like space there may be a maximum possible speed to traverse it (if this sounds wrong because that speed would have to be measures in seconds per second, yeah, remember that time travel is nonsense). What if we are barrelling ahead along the time dimension at a very high speed, so in order to go back in time you need to basically decelerate. We don’t know how long that would take - perhaps a trip from the point at which time travel will exist to now takes longer than a human lifetime and no one is interested in that one-way trip until one day in the future when a generation ship of time travelers arrives.
I think I’ve got several science fiction stories to write.
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Please do-- I loved the one you posted! 
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