I have a better one: Why are all the time travelers? 
Using a time machine to change the past seems like using cheat codes rather than doing the hard work of changing the world in the present time.
There must be some kind of time law enforcement agency to deal with these chronocrimes. I just hope this kind of agency doesn’t cause any more confusion yet.
Tricky.
You are an Evil Genius!!
This show is amazing. There are amazing mustaches, amazing costumes, amusing plot lines. Including any number of self-effacing jokes about the Spanish’ reputation for being scoundrels.
I will say, though. It’s not a brainy show, particularly. Just stylish.
Posted here 8 years before trump and the new nazi’s.
My favorite time travel story:
I thought about using that as a plot for a short story. What if all you could do as a time traveler was view the past, but only from a finite number of times and locations? And a small bit of radiation leaks from that spot for each viewer. Billions of viewers becomes a small star above a little town in the Middle East.
Sometimes, when I read the news, I think someone stepped off that floating track, smashed a beautiful butterfly, leaving us in this crazy timeline.
Shamelessly ripped off in “The Biggest Game of All!”, an edition of Tharg’s Future Shocks in the 1979 annual for 2000AD. How they got away with it, I don’t know: the only significant difference is the way the future has changed on the time travelllers’ return (it’s much, much darker in the kids’ comic).
There weren’t many Future Shocks that weren’t rip offs to be honest.
Butterfly? They’d be trying to figure out how to manipulate the past in a big way to increase the present day supply of coal, oil and gas.
Or … did they already do that?
Where are all the time travelers?
Does that really matter now? It’s all in the past.
I’m pretty sure some of the earliest depictions of “time travel” in sci-fi were the “look at the past live from a screen” type or “kinda possess the body of some person and shadow-live their lives” (I’m looking at you, Quantum Leap)
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Dead from contacting strains of viruses and bacteria that they didn’t have immunity built against.
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Dead from going back into space instead of Earth because it keeps moving.
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Dead from going back in time right in front of a moving vehicle, or a stray bullet in a cross shooting or any kind of local incident that did not make the news that day.
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Maybe they are like in Ted Chiang’s History of Your Life/movie Arrival: you experience your entire existence simultaneously, so you are constantly experiencing multiple points in time. Our minds can barely understand the notion of non-linear time.
I wonder how many writers since then have been influenced by shows like Quantum Leap…
I think one of the earliest is Wells, which is time travel from a machine, but only into a future.
This is a pretty good overview of time travel as a literary concept:
He argues the idea of the “future” as we think about it is a very recent invention, historically speaking.
Either TT doesn’t get invented or it did and immediately got banned; not to protect timelines but to stop spying and other dubious activities. Forget time travelling back to distant past for tourism or research or anything like that, as soon as TT is possible people will travel back a few minutes or seconds to make bets or buy stocks or spy on other governments to see what they just did a few minutes ago (or a few minutes in the future) and the react to their own advantage. TT is a dangerous thing and whoever controls it will take over.
