time corps

So in English we were doing anything but English. We were discussing the improbability or probability of time travel being developed.

Now my peers on my table believe that because we haven't had any visits from future people going "HEY I'M FROM THE FUTURE. HERE'S A GADGEMETRON TO PROVE HOW FUTURISTIC I AM!", by logic of deduction, that means there probably will never be time travel.

But I didn't find this solid enough. I proposed that the mechanism of time travel could be strictly controlled.
"Rules are made to be broken"
And I agree with this. Screw rules. I'd just escape to the past to avoid getting caught by authorities eh?
But this is based on the assumption that untrained people can use the time machine. My analogy is that "Why aren't people illegally flying jet planes for fun? It's not like people can successfully apprehend them if they break the sound barrier and land in some boat in the middle of nowhere? The reason why random civilians aren't flying Mach3 jets is not because of laws prohibiting them - it is purely because they don't know how to."

The hole in my argument is that there are people out there who can fly jets and use it for illegal stuff. But we all know a jet costs a metric shittonne, and I'm sure a time machine would too. Also if you're flying a jet illegally, it's very rarely used to go visit other countries and go "Hey! I'm from Australia! Here's a kangaroo head to prove it! Right, that's all I wanted to do when I used this to travel illegally to your country. Just tour a bit. Toodle-doo!"
Similarly, it makes no sense that people would risk going against the law just to tour the past and show off to people that they are from the future.

In addition there may be physical barriers or rules against killing past family members and any of those paradoxes. Personally I think the "solution" to the kill-family-member-time-paradox is that you will fail inevitably, no matter how hard you try. Because it is implied that your family member must survive in order for you to survive to the age to which you can use the time machine, by some chance or another you are physically incapable of finding your family member and then subsequently killing them.

Like you can shoot at them but your gun will jam, or you will miss. You can try stab them but not before another member of the public spots you and apprehends you. etc etc. You can try but you cannot succeed, if you have travelled to the past.

ANYWAYS my proposal is that there is an elite division of the Defence Force, known as the Time Corps. They exclusively travel to the past to rectify military mistakes while leaving no trace of their interference. They need to have both physical ability, a mind for tactics, and also high intelligence. High intelligence because if my idea about the paradox "solution" is the correct one, then they need to overcome the physical barriers that the present is holding on them. This includes being able to persuade the leaders to send them back in time, even if there is seemingly no mistake. Let's give this example

1) Day 1
The politician/officer gives a written command that was badly worded (not known at the time)

2) Day 2
This results in a massive loss in a battle, with civilian casualties everywhere... It is just a mess.

3) Day 3
The Time Corps is given the go-ahead to travel to the past in Operation Pocket Watch, to amend the politician/officer's words of command.

4) [Day 4] Day 1 revisited
The politician/officer notices a mistake in his notes as there was a strange black smudge above it, drawing attention to the mistake.

5) Day 2 revisited
A direct conflict is avoided, and the situation is stable.

6) Day 3 revisited
The Time Corps must be given the go-ahead to travel to the past to add the black smudge above the notes. However, it is imprudent to directly alert the officer/politician of their role in the past, and therefore must subtly gain the approval to launch Operation Pocket Watch, even though the politican/officer has no idea about the crisis that has been just avoided.

7) Day 4 paralleled
At the gaining of approval, the parallel alternatives match up, effectively closing the loop and moving on, and the alternate path involving severe losses has been destroyed as it is recessive to the dominant present reality.

If you followed that properly and it made sense to you, then kudos =D. All this shit makes sense in my head but I probably am not wording every detail =]

And high intelligence is also needed because I bet a time machine is not something stupid like "punch in numbers and you're off". Just like flying a jet is not "punch in numbers and you're off". There still needs to be manual take off and landing, and unless you're trained to do this, you can't use it. It is probably a very technical piece of equipment - the incorrect usage could lead to you surviving in a recessive reality which eventually just ceases to exist, or you could not effectively close the loop and hence live the same loop over and over again, all the while aging until you die within that loop.


Now that I know this, the Time Corps will come and murder me in my sleep yesterday.
=D

4 comments:

tree said...

My thought about time travel is that
Once you make/prove the machine/theorem/whatever that can cause time travel to happen, that will be the furthest one can travel back in time. So only if you madeit in year 3000, if you're in eyar 3056 you can only go back as far as year 3000/ the instant it was made.

No real reason for me to declare that, it just seems the way it'd be.

Now you know the whole concept that every decision creates a parrallel universe where you did something else, creating an infinite number of realities and futures for each choice.

If we were to create a time machine, then in all those possibilties in the future from the point of the time machine's creation would have that time machine. And i'd assume that they'd all use it, most likely visiting the popular dates (or if we go off the previous idea about time travel, they'd probabaly visit the earliest point that the time machine was made.)Then all these possible futures would converge on one time period, all of these alternate realities haven't been destroyed yet, but they all exist. And they would have all stemmed from the one point where you decided to make that time machine. So thus you could say that everything that would ever happen in the future would happen at once, and you can't change it since it's already happened. Scary.

Not sure if that made sense to anyone, but it's pretty scary to me. Hope time travel never comes around tbh

jwhero said...

I like the idea that you can't go back further than when the machine was made. I suppose this kind of limitation would not be based on physics as we know it, by truly and actually reversing time, but instead rely on perhaps some new science of storing moments inside a machine.

If the reality is indeed tied in with the machine, then it is not a true time machine. For any Harry Potter fans out there, one of those machines that can't go back further than its earliest creation date, would be like a Pensieve, except without the biased viewpoint.

Because of the link between the earliest time the machine can travel to and the time at which the time machine was made, it must imply that all possible realities are also linked to that machine.

Hence I find it improbable that the environment within the machine that "stores" these moments is capable of interaction. I believe that it can recreate sights, sounds, smells, touch, tastes, but the user probably cannot actually impact upon the stored environment.

My argument relies heavily on the assumption that a machine that is limited to whenever it was created does not use physics as we know it, but instead uses some method of storing moments to create perfect memories.
If you can suggest of another feasible reason why else a time machine's traveling capability is limited to its date of creation, I'd be interested to hear =D

tree said...

Oh i had no reasoning for my idea, time travel itself is hard to reason anyway within the bounds of physiscs or whatever branches of science

i was just freaked out at the possibilties of time travel if it acted the way we believed it would, travelling freely to whenever we wanted

jwhero said...

Who's "we" in "[in] the way we believed"? xP

I don't find my idea of time travel scary. Risky if you're doing it untrained, but otherwise there's nothing too retarded about it.

You can't fuck up anything that'll prevent you from visiting the past when you reach that moment again, but with a bit of planning it's really not that scary.

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