The Gaming Den

I've had this idea in my head for a while now, and while I don't think I know enough about physics, history, writing, etc. to write it yet, I realized I could probably get some pointers.

Gimmick
There will be two types of time travel three significant technologies.

• 1) The stable time loop time travel ala Harry Potter and Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy, among others where things kinda just wrap around and fit and you don't need to worry about paradoxes.
  2) The create a new timeline every time you use it machine, where everything changes forever from that moment, but a new timeline is created which diverges from the moment travel takes place. This will be a lot harder to use in the story than type 1.
  3) Sort of a combination of 1 & 2. This would allow travelers to go to other realities created via 2, without making new ones.

No Future
If I actually had a time machine, the first thing I'd do is go to the future and fix all my problems with future tech. So I decided to have the earth suddenly completely destroyed by some random asteroid or negative space wedgie or something sometime in the near future, maybe four years from now. This will only be found out by time travelers going to the future and finding the Earth either missing or completely uninhabitable, and no matter how far into the future they go, they don't find any awesome civilization to steal tech from. This is the same in all timelines, as it's not affected by anything changed on Earth. Near the end of the story, the heroes will get many many timelines to cooperate and pool their resources via inter timeline portals in order to find a way to leave Earth and colonize other planets as the whatever destroys the earth is still beyond their ability to counter as it's just way too massive or radioactive or swirly or something (this is so using Method 3 to save the earlier Earths is not an option, though they could still be evacuated). Either the fate of humanity will be left vague, or a new scarcity free utopia will occur (especially if Method 2 solves the whole Entropy and Heat Death issue with, "Running low on energy? Just create a new timeline"), I haven't decided yet.

Initial Setup
Initially set in the early two thousand tens in either Earth, or something that's pretty much Earth. Two groups will discover Time Travel methods 1 and 2. A research institute (sponsored by people who want to use time travel for their own benefit) with tons of funding will discover method 2, which is far more complicated and requires more resources, but somehow it's kept hush hush and the general public doesn't know about it. A small group of very few physicists (some of whom are former employees of the institute) discover Method 1, but don't publicize it yet. They catch wind of the institute's progress, and discover that their time machine was used, but seemed to just disappear forever, whereas their stable time loop machine worked with observable results. At some point, they go back in time to just before the point where the institute's machine was supposed to travel to, and versions of them appear in the new timeline created, but with memories of the old timeline. They won't realize they're in a different timeline until they fast forward to what they think is the present, but things will be very different. They will have to keep travelling to different time periods, occasionally ending up in other newer timelines and things will escalate till they figure out what's going on and discover travel method 3. Also, they will occasionally team up with 'other selves' with memories from the original timeline as whenever Method 2 travel occurs, a different version of everyone around at the time is created.

Issues Tackled
I also want to handle the ramifications of this sort of thing on a more personal level. In newer timelines people will find that friends, family and their timeline counterpart are different. Their counterparts might have never been born, might be completely different from them in personality, might be in relationships with entirely different people, etc and the characters will have to come to terms with this. Some will find their counterparts more successful than them, or to have different sexual orientations, or to be the kind of people they despise. Some will be missing younger siblings, or will have gotten new or different younger siblings. Also, they would have no history in the new timeline except for looking like their counterparts, if they have one that is (some people wouldn't be born at all depending on when the split occurred). Some angst over what could have beens will occur, but will lead to positive reflection and reevaluation instead of prolonged angst as eventually they will find out that their old timelines still exist and can be reached.

Media and culture will be different, sometimes slight sometimes huge depending on how recently timeline splits have occurred. Different movies, different movie casts, different song lyrics and rhythms, different memes, different games, etc. Also, some shows that were cancelled in other timelines, will be ongoing. In some timelines, Nintendo would not cheat on Sony with Phillips and so the Playstation wouldn't be born. I don't know if I can do these parts convincingly even with a ton of research, but I'll give it my best shot. The characters will contemplate making deliberate changes to the timelines and may or may not perform them.

Possible Conflicts
The objective of the heroes will be to get back to their own timeline, but I'll make it so their machine has a cool down timer, or is difficult to procure resources for (requires a jigawatt to run perhaps) so they will be stuck in some timelines for longer than they like. Also, perhaps enforcers from the institution who discover their method of travel and use it as often as they do might be after them, requiring them to hide or something. They'll also discover the Earth is doomed at some point when they go to the future.

Major Inspirations
DragonballZ: Android Saga. Trunk's time machine was basically Method 2 and 3 as far as I could tell, and trying to figure out how it worked created the spark that would eventually be this idea.

Futurama: In the episode, "The Farnsworth Parabox":

The professor makes a box that functions as a portal to an alternate universe where from some point onwards all coin toss results were flipped. At the end of the episode, they closed the portal forever though. At that point I thought, why? Why not open it up further and allow the dimensions to cooperate? Sure, it's because of the status quo, but I felt that the concept could use some exploring. It would be awkward at first but would be awesome later on, as you have a whole other universe to interact with. This made me consider the ending to my story where all the timelines cooperate. Also I loved how their counterparts weren't evil (or good in Bender's case) and that the other universe refused to be called Universe 2 (as they felt they were equally important) and eventually they all settled on calling the universes Universe 1 and Universe A

Ideas?
What kind of issues would you like guys like to see handled in a story like this? What type of thing would be interesting to explore? While I'm leaning in the direction of handwaving how it works, are there any actual physics which might be handy to know?

What else should I look up?
I don't think I've checked as many time travel related books, tv shows, anime, cartoons, etc. as I should have. Recommendations would be appreciated.

Criticisms
What flaws or problems with this have you found?

The propper grammar in terms of tenses will have been a bitch and a half to have been worrying about when you will have finished writing it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8w95xIdH4o

Whether your time travel runs on Cherenkov radiation or child labor, you basically have two questions to answer with it:

• When the past is changed, does it affect the remembered history of the time travelers?
  
  and
• When the past is changed, does returning to the present reflect the changes made in the past?

Most time travel fiction gives completely incoherent answers to those questions. And of course, when answers are provided, they are often completely 'magical' answers like "you have 24 hours to fix the past before you start forgetting the old version of history" or whatever.

Multiple universes basically isn't even time travel. It's just a version of sliders where you get to visit alternate Earths that happen to have different dates.

-Username17

I believe that the answer is that in case 1, the answers are "Yes and Yes", and that in case 2 the answers are "No and No".

Case 3 looks like it might be "No and Yes"

With my system the past is never changed. Time travellers only remember the history of their original timeline. I'll try to provide some examples that will hopefully clear things up.

Bob discovers Method 1:
Bob has just invented a Time Machine. He decides to kill Hitler. He succeeds. Content, he returns to the present and finds things exactly the same. He wonders what happened and returns to the past. Turns out, that someone else had found out that the name Adolf Hitler was available, and stole his identity. This is the actual guy who would go on to cause the holocaust. Bob's determined to kill this guy. However, he gets caught and sentenced to prison. He realizes, that he doesn't have the power to change history with his device. He manages to escape somehow, and returns to his timeline, feeling extremely guilty about this whole thing.

Bob discovers Method 2:
Feeling guilty about it, Bob has just invented a Method 2 Time Machine. He decides to kill the new Hitler that he created. He succeeds. Content, he returns to the present and finds things completely different. His hometown doesn't look anything like he remembers. It's called something else. The language feels similar, but barely recognizable. He doesn't recognize anyone. He has no idea what happened in the meantime. He realizes that he's created a new timeline that split the moment he went back earlier, and by using the machine again he had created another one. There are now 3 timelines.

Timeline 1: Original. Bob uses machine and disappears from Timeline 1 forever.
Timeline 2: Bob kills Hitler and then disappears from Timeline 2 forever.
Timeline 3: Identical to Timeline 2, upto the point where Bob appeared. Bob decides not to use the machine again and settles in Timeline 3, somewhat content that there are two timelines where the Holocause didn't happen. Sure, he didn't save his original timeline, but that's got to be worth something. No further timelines are created as long as the machine is never used again.

Assuming Bob then invents Method 3 (which now that I think about it is a superset of Method 1):
Events play out the same as above

Bob is in Timeline 3 and homesick. He wants to get back to Timeline 1. He invents another time machine that uses Method 3 and returns to Timeline 1. No further timelines are created as long as the machine is never used again.

Timeline 1: Original. Bob uses method 2 machine. He reappears later, having used Method 3.
Timeline 2: Bob kills Hitler and then disappears from Timeline 2 forever using method 2 machine.
Timeline 3: Identical to Timeline 2, upto the point where Bob appeared. Bob decides to use the Method 3 machine to return to Timeline 1.

Stahlseele wrote:The propper grammar in terms of tenses will have been a bitch and a half to have been worrying about when you will have finished writing it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8w95xIdH4o

Not looking forward to the grammar. Still, I've come up with a decent labeling system for characters originating in different timelines, and will try to use absolute time and date whenever possible.

radthemad wrote:So I decided to have the earth suddenly completely destroyed by some random asteroid or negative space wedgie or something sometime in the near future, maybe four years from now.

radthemad wrote:With my system the past is never changed.

So you actually don't want to make a time travel story. At best you want to tell a dimension sliders story where some of the alternate Earths happen to have dinosaurs on it. Why the fuck do you have "time travel" as a conceit if you refuse to interact with the past or the future?

Why are you spouting all these words about temporal mechanics if you are wholly uninterested in actually having anything happen with time?

-Username17

Question: What's the difference between going back through your wormhole to the future and sitting in some kind of stasis (cryogenic is the usual buzzword, I think) for that time?

I think you're going to discover pretty quickly that stable time loops are way, way harder to write for than alternate universe time travel. Especially if it gets used for Preston-Logan attacks or anything really cool.

Grek wrote:Preston-Logan attacks

What does this mean? Google didn't help.

Frank: Yes, time is immutable in my setting. Once something's happened, there's nothing you can do about it. That said, you definitely can interact with the past and the future (it's just that there won't be anything to interact with in a few years). What's written in the history books isn't necessarily what actually happened. According to Wikipedia, Alan Turing committed suicide in 1954, but perhaps what actually happened is that he was hired by time travellers to work on something else and they faked his death for him. But the fact is at the moment I post this, Wikipedia says he died in 1954, so whatever actually happened, events still conspired to make Wikipedia think this. You can't change what Wikipedia has posted at this time (Okay you totally can, but you know what I mean). Time travel is still great for information gathering, hiding from authorities, or even just tourism. You could participate in major events, and you could even save people's lives and stuff. It's just that whatever you do, has already happened. You can however, create new timelines that split from whenever you want using Method 2, and you can totally change everything in the new Timeline.

RadiantPhoenix: Method 1: None whatsover (except whatever effects maintaining cryostasis have on the timeline). Method 2: You'd be splitting the timeline so that there's one in which you appeared, and one in which you didn't, whereas in Cryo, you wouldn't be splitting the timeline.

Grek: Yes, that's the kind of crazyness I want to explore. Except it's worse, in that I'll be using BOTH Stable Time Loops and Alternate Timelines. Method 3 is basically entering an alternate universe and then optionally travelling forward or back in time in a stable time loop. However, in order to do use Method 3, you'll need to roughly narrow down the point in time where a new timeline was created using Method 2.

RadiantPhoenix wrote:

Grek wrote:Preston-Logan attacks

What does this mean? Google didn't help.

It's a reference to Bill S Preston and Theodore Logan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Ted

and Retroactive Preparation

Challenge: Can you do Groundhog's Day, except Bill Murray builds a time machine?

Groundhog's Day is a different beast altogether from what I'm doing. It uses Mental Time Travel, which is sort of like save scumming in a video game, i.e. it's only time travel from your perspective and you'll never run into past and future selves. That said, it could work in my setting if you frequently use Method 2 to create a new timeline at the start of the day, knock out the 'you' in the new timeline, take over his life for the day, and repeat, creating new timelines every time. You could leave the versions of you originating in each timeline to deal with the consequences, or I guess you could kill them. While they're identical to you at that point in your life, they're still not you, so if you're okay with murder, you might be okay with this sort of thing. If you leave them alive though, they might not like what you did to them, and you'd better hope they don't invent Method 3. However, you'd still age with this mechanism, you wouldn't be able to try anything too risky as dying would be permanent, indulging in fast food would still make you fat, and getting arrested would be problematic unless the machine is small enough that you can keep it on you while arrested. So, that takes out a lot of the fun from it But, on the plus side, you can use the machine any time and don't have to wait a full day, if a particular venture isn't going well.

You should probably also read A Dark Travelling.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dark_Traveling

(apparently this week is Zelazny week)

Yeah, it does look like the sort of thing my setting will eventually become (from the reader's perspective anyway, as it already has become like that). Thanks

a preston-logan attack in terms of time travel basically boils down to this:"i win because i have won and i will have made it so that i will have won this."

Nothing turns me off from a riveting story more than time travel and parallel clone dimensions.

Are you sure you want to pursue imaginary science like this?

Yes, but it's not necessarily an 'I win' button. In the process of making it so that you win, you could still be vulnerable, especially if your opponents have time travel as well, or are at least aware that you do. e.g. there's a locked door you need to get through. You note to yourself to have the key drop on you from a vent above you. You use the key and go through the door. Later on, when you go about trying to give yourself the key, you get ambushed when you're about to get back to your machine and captured. The bad guys saw you getting the key on CCTV though, and guessed that you'd planned something like this. So it turns out that one of them went into the vent and dropped it using their time machine, so that you'd go on to get captured anyway.

You can trick other people into 'thinking' they're using Preston-Logan attacks, as Bill and Ted did in their second movie.

sigma999: Sorry, but yes. It's a major part of the story. But I'm curious as to what you have against them, so that I could try to avoid the usual pitfalls these kinds of stories have.

This might fall into the realm of "belief" more than scientific veracity, but I don't personally believe in alternate dimensions and time travel. It has as much plausibility as believing in a judgemental, monotheistic, white male deity that impregnates Jewish twelve year olds only to kill the child thirty years later.

Time travel is implausible because in the entire spectrum of temporal events you could assume that at some point in time someone would invent the time machine. They would travel back in time, alter events, and create ripples throughout the chain of events again and again until you form "stable loops" as you say. This seems unnatural and against the fundamental structure of how time works, which seems more like a Buddhist notion to paraphrase essentially "time is an illusion" and "the only moment is the present".
How can you travel to "the past" when it doesn't exist other than in memory?

As for alternate dimensions, I would say that if given the probability that there are infinite dimensions in a "multiverse" you would have the odds that at least one of them has the technology to bleed over into others, unleashing a tidal wave of disruptive contact. In our Earth world and reality this has not happened, and never will, so that probability is nil.

Sorry I'm not using scientific terms. I'm no scientist. My college degree was in graphic design and writing.
However I have read plenty of Marvel comics and seen movies in which they have time travel creating feedback loops, characters swapping dimensions, and general nonsense that creates this susurrus of worthless lives that don't mean jack shit in the grand theme of things. This is the kind of shit that Alan Moore despises, the degradation of a story into a multiverse with infinite possibilities rather than focus on the here and now.

So in summary go write your story, I'll read it and not blast it, but I'm just saying.... It's a tough pill to swallow.

Most real science isn't especially plausible. It simply is.

sigma999 wrote:This might fall into the realm of "belief" more than scientific veracity, but I don't personally believe in alternate dimensions and time travel. It has as much plausibility as believing in a judgemental, monotheistic, white male deity that impregnates Jewish twelve year olds only to kill the child thirty years later.

You don't watch any movies or tvshows about magic, dragons, aliens, superpowers allegedly via 'evolution' or 'natural mutation' and stuff like that?

sigma999 wrote:This seems unnatural and against the fundamental structure of how time works, which seems more like a Buddhist notion to paraphrase essentially "time is an illusion" and "the only moment is the present".

Well, if it helps any, in my setting things still happen only once, from a certain point of view. While you could buy all the tickets to a concert and occupy the hall by yourself and watch it from every seat, the concert has still only happened once, and each time you watch it, you're getting a different view so "the only moment is the present" still applies from the perspective of events, and also from the people experiencing the events, as each moment is still different to them.

sigma999 wrote:As for alternate dimensions, I would say that if given the probability that there are infinite dimensions in a "multiverse" you would have the odds that at least one of them has the technology to bleed over into others, unleashing a tidal wave of disruptive contact. In our Earth world and reality this has not happened, and never will, so that probability is nil.

Whether or not the many worlds theory is true is irrelevant to my setting, as 'those' alternate worlds aren't interacted with. Method 2 Time Machines explicitly create a new timeline everytime they're used, and upto the point they were used in, the new timeline is completely identical to the old one, the difference being, that in that moment, a time machine appeared in the new timeline whereas it didn't in the old one, and that there definitely will be inter timeline travel between these via Method 3.

sigma999 wrote:Sorry I'm not using scientific terms. I'm no scientist. My college degree was in graphic design and writing.
However I have read plenty of Marvel comics and seen movies in which they have time travel creating feedback loops, characters swapping dimensions, and general nonsense that creates this susurrus of worthless lives that don't mean jack shit in the grand theme of things. This is the kind of shit that Alan Moore despises, the degradation of a story into a multiverse with infinite possibilities rather than focus on the here and now.

I don't know if there are any scientific terms for these, what with Time Travel being completely theoretical. 'Preston-Logan attack' is a term (probably) invented by Grek a few posts ago, based on the surnames of the protagonists of the Bill and Ted movies, and I think I threw in a few trope names from tvtropes, so I'm not using scientific terms either. I'll try to be wary about losing focus on the characters themselves, especially as I'll probably have loads of significant characters.

sigma999 wrote:So in summary go write your story, I'll read it and not blast it, but I'm just saying.... It's a tough pill to swallow.

I hope you enjoy it. I'm cool with blasting as long as you detail your reasons

sigma, that's inane. Time is a spatial dimension, nothing more, nothing less. That is the thing that time is, it is an axis of motion like up and down or east and west. Now, time is a special axis of motion. It's special because every single thing we are aware of happens to be traveling through time in the same direction. But there are good solid math reasons to believe that not everything does, and in any case we already know for any reasonable definition of certainty that not all things are traveling through time at the same rate. If you travel left or right at any speed, you simultaneously travel through time slower than had you been standing still.

Now there's a couple interesting things about that. The first is that the amount slower that you go through time when you move forwards is so neatly described by the Pythagorean Theorem that what's "really going on" appears to be that all things are moving through 4 dimensional space at exactly the same speed all the time and that speed happens to be the rate at which time passes for an object at rest. Which is fascinating. But the other really interesting thing about that is that you are therefore interacting with things from "the past" and "the future" all the time in your everyday life. If you sit on the couch all day while your girlfriend drives around town at high speed, literally more time has passed for you than has passed for her - when she comes back home you will be a visitor from the future and she will be an echo from the past.

Using very accurate clocks we have in fact confirmed beyond reasonable doubt that the things around us are not in chronological sync with one another. And you know what happens when an object from the past meets an object from the future? Absolutely nothing. Despite being on different positions of the time line, two objects meeting in the here and now treat each other precisely and exactly as if neither one was time traveling at all.

So if you're going to rant about "realism" the question you have to ask is not how time travel could possibly happen. We know that time travel happens. It happens all the time. The question is why anything funky would happen with extra universes or time paradox closure or whatever the fuck. That is all a bunch of magic-think that people layer onto the narrative to tell stories. In the "real world" when you bump into a door from 10 seconds in the future, you just hurt your nose.

-Username17

I'll believe alternate dimensions when someone invents a device that can pull an alternate version of myself into this world so that they can punch me in the jaw.

I'll believe time travel when a 100-year old version of myself travels back in time to kick me in the nuts.

All I'm saying as far as how it pertains to a fiction story is that it makes for continuity problems, because you are leaving a finite setting and approaching infinite.
It can be done tactfully like with DC comics "52 Earths" or whatever it's called, but even then I'm just shaking my head.