6 Time Travel Realities Doc Brown Didn't Warn Us About
No one can deny that having your own time machine would be pretty awesome. Who wouldn't jump at the opportunity to go back in time and hang out with some of the most important figures in history, like Abraham Lincoln or Tyrannosaurus Rex?
Unfortunately, even if you survive the accidental rewriting of history and/or destroying the space-time continuum, time travel will also make your own life pretty shitty as well.
#6.
You Die Faster
To borrow from Professor Rufus of Bill and Ted University, "No matter what you do, no matter where you go, that clock, the clock in San Dimas is always running."
"However, time will never run out on these sunglasses."
So you get in your DeLorean and you leave 1985 to go on an adventure in the past. Say it takes you six months to accomplish your goal (ie, nearly making out with your mom) and when you're done, you go back to your own time. Maybe you go back to the very moment you left.
But you are six months older. There's no way around it. The time machine can't adjust your age backward--if it did, it would be altering your brain at the same time, wiping out the memories of what you experienced. No matter how many rejuvenation clinics from the future you visit, you will always age along your own timeline just as certainly as Marty did throughout Back to the Future.
Poor kid aged five years in one damn weekend.
When you get to the core of it, traveling through time is pretty much a deal with the Devil. Yes, it will enable you to save John Connor and get to Muggle Studies on time, but it will shave several months to several years off your life depending on how much you abuse it. These are precious moments from your twilight years that you will never get back: one last weekend with your wife, your granddaughter's graduation and the inevitable cloning of John Candy.
In short, when you've managed to hit age 89 in seven years and you're lying on your deathbed, will it really have been worth seeing everything time had to offer just to miss out on your own life? Sure, things may suck now, but you have no idea what it's going to be like in the future. By rewriting it all, you may just end up missing out on your own God-authored happy ending.
#5.
You Couldn't Eat Anything
So let's say that somehow you've come into possession of Bill and Ted's time-traveling phone booth. Awesome, now you have the opportunity to find out for yourself what it was like when the Mongols ruled China, among other things.
Travel back to a time when Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves were the exact same level of famous.
After a run-in with Napoleon at Austerlitz, you decide to tackle the Western Movement in America in 19th century New Mexico. After some Reconstruction Era sightseeing, a saloon catches your eye. You are totally thirsty, and they are totally not carding!
Unfortunately by beer #2 and plate of wings #6, your insides are starting to feel like a sitcom on TBS. Why? It's kind of the same reason you don't want to drink the water if you take a vacation in India. There is, uh, stuff in it that the locals have gotten used to but you haven't.
Likewise, mankind's history of purifying food and water for the past thousand years or so has significantly weakened your modern stomach's ability to tolerate impurities, such as all the microbes, piss and yes, even shit you'll find in most foods and beverages from the past.
"Well you're just shittin' up a storm over there, aren't you?"
As a result, should you eat or drink anything prior to the publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, your less-than-ironclad digestive system will start tearing itself apart like the flight crew in Event Horizon. So, unless you are willing to prep yourself in advance by consuming a well-regulated diet of historically-accurate shit sandwiches, we are sorry to report that you must abstain from all the delicious meals time travel has to offer you.
Oh darn.
#4.
Nobody Would be Able to Understand You
So you've got an HG Wells-esque time machine, which, if two separate movies are any indication, means you'll be able to fling yourself 800,000 years into the future. Think of all you'll have to learn by talking to the locals! Don't worry, they all speak perfect English, with only a slight accent. Language is pretty much the same, everywhere, forever, right?
Hmm.... let's try it the other way. Let's go backward in time, not 800,000 years, but just 1,000. You step out, grab some English reading material and find that it looks like this:
Well, this isn't right! After all, even the freaking monkeys in Planet of the Apes (SPOILER: It's future Earth) spoke plain English. What the hell?
Hollywood has mislead us, friends. Even though English is one of the most common languages on Earth, it gives you a splash-range of only a few centuries when it comes to linguistically "safe" places to travel. This is because the phonology of most languages is ever-changing, and it goes way beyond throwing in some "thee's" and "thou's" and referring to women as "my lady."
They aren't a "lady" if they wear pants.
No matter where you go, you'll have to speak both period and possibly even regional dialect to avoid coming off as a spy, a rival neighbor, a hillbilly or a crazy person who may or may not be possessed by the devil.
So unless you remembered to download a protocol droid app for your iPhone, your best bet is to pass as a mute no matter where you go, lest you open your mouth and risk getting into a situation that could potentially cost you your life. Even something as innocent as asking a peasant for directions could come off as unfathomably bizarre to your new peers. And in a great many places in a great many time periods, "unfathomably bizarre" gets your ass burned at the stake.
Not like you'd have anything to say to people anyway. After all...
ok so about the aging when you time travel and being older when you go back to your normal time, if you just remember how long youve been gone in the future or past then you can just add that time to the time of when you left normal time and then youll live the same amount of time that you wouldve normally if you never time traveled at all. . .
ReplyThis was one thought-provoking list.
ReplyAnd a TARDIS would solve all of these problems.
ReplyIf I could choose the form of time-travel, it would be Mental Timetravel where your present-day mind goes back to when you were a lot younger and re-do your past.
ReplyThis article totally ruined my fantasy about going back in time and having sex with as many women as possible from as many different time periods. Then again, if you can get STDs now you'll probably have three-hundred times the chance of getting some kind of disease from whoever you're having sex with back then. You'd have to test everyone you meet for ailments under the guise of magic spells or something, which would really kill the mood by the way.
ReplyObviously you need to be a Timelord and have a TARDIS.
ReplyWith Temporal Theory you can never return to your point of origin if you were to travel in the past. The short and simple answer is because you create an alternate reality the moment you go to the past. Moving a penny or brushing a leaf causes a displacement. Think of "Sliders", but on different scale. Each decision we make little or big creates a parallel earth, doing so in relation to time travel is the same dilemma. You will never be able to see some of the variations in the travel that you do, but it will never be the original Earth you have left.
ReplyUnless the reality you're in now already has the changes in place that you don't even know you're going to go back and make
One thing that kills me, that is never brought up in movies going to the past, is the bacterial/virus situation. He kinda addressed it (drinking the water) but think if you decided you wanted to go meet Jesus or something, you go back to 30 ad. Well smallpox hasn't been erradicated yet, and guess what, you don't have a vaccine because they stopped giving those out nearly 40 years ago. So even if you're old enough to remember getting vaccinated, it's worn off by now. Not accounting all the other just random bacteria floating through the air, or viruses, or whatever, that would probably have you miserable in a matter of minutes, wishing you were dead, or stayed your ass firmly in the present. Thank you D.A. Henderson for making smallpox a thing of history!
ReplyVaccines don't wear off, its been permanently embedded into your immune memory.
"will it really have been worth seeing everything time had to offer just to miss out on your own life?"
ReplyYes, because those experiences would still be part of your life. What else would you be doing? Sitting in your room playing World of Warcraft?
One thing you forgot to mention: The earth is constantly moving... If you were to time-travel to the exact same location, you would be in space.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesThey did mention it.
Did you read the article at all?
"One thing time travel movies never address is the fact that the Earth moves. Your time travel machine can't just move forward in time, it has to be able to travel through space. With perfect precision....Oh, also, the planet is spinning really fast."
-The first paragraph of #1
Learning Latin would give you 2000 years... if you confined yourself to Western Europe. If you stuck to the cities (which even in Medieval times, were surprisingly cosmopolitan), you could probably pass yourself off as "foreign" (because chances are, your accent is terrible) long enough to do whatever it was you came for.
ReplyIn a lot of times and places, they didn't/don't look too kindly on foreigners
Okay so...cut ties with your friends and family beforehand, travel to the same month and day in whatever year you're going to in order to avoid missing Earth's rotation. Activate the machine offshore to avoid changes in landforms. Bring gold to avoid having the wrong currency, and tools, a tent and expertise to be able to provide for yourself without ID papers or language if a translation guide isn't an option. And remember to boil your food and water.
ReplySounds simple enough. Let's go.
It's not just that the earth is both rotating and orbiting the sun, but also the galaxy is both rotating and moving at a really, really incredible speed... so the place you're sitting right now will in a year be somewhere outside the solar system...
I love that the Doctor takes into account almost all of these. The Tardis, psychic paper, sonic screwdriver, being a Time Lord. Yeah, basically set.
ReplyYES! I was coming here to say exactly this. Just travel with The Doctor, and you're set.
yup, I was gonna say the same thing. TARDIS for the win.
That's something I liked about Wells' The Time Machine. It took into account #1: it was a major plot point. Not the Earth-moves-in-space thing (which is my biggest problem with all non-Doctor Who time travel), the stuff-isn't-in-the-same-place-in-the-future thing.
ReplyA) YOu woudln't die young. You still lived those years, jsut in a different time.
ReplyIn fact, you have far more interesting life then almost every other 89 year old.
Back to the future took things being in different places int account. They flew, used a train track that had existed, and a street. Still Risky, but not completely unknown
Of, and if I was a dumb s**t and went back in time without something I could use for currency, I could steal the Action Comic and time travel away. And then find a way to store it so it ages. Cause that's the real problem, if it looks brand new, no one will believe you.
oh gosh, penniless and IDless in a strange city? no one could ever make a living starting from their. jeez, are you really that stupid? do you really believe the only option is low end jobs?
And time traveling in smaller steps would solve most your problems.
Food - Add strong alcohol to the water, cook your meat well done. Most problems solved.
For the recotrd, if you want back in time you would be more risk to the locals then they to you. You germs, virus, and bacteria have an evolutionary advantage of the one at the time.
It's than, not then. When will you retards learn that?
All of this article is assuming that the individual going through time and space knows NOTHING about what he's doing and has 0 foresight. Hell, everything that happened in Back to the Future was due to unforeseen circumstances, but they were even able to accost for issues between eras in time, like style of clothing. If someone is genius enough to build a way to travel through time, chances are they're going to have the genius to foresee the issues with it, like language and food. Just look at the military, they have extensive preparation for things like traveling to a different city. Most civilians would just hop in the car and go and make it just fine, but the military will make it into an extensive operation. If they were to do ANYTHING with time travel, chances are there's going to be preparations UP the ASS. It would probably take MONTHS of preparation with things like identification paperwork, culture adjustment, economic issues, and language all taken care of. The government may be "inept", but they're not completely retarded.
ReplyIt also happened with Bill and Ted... and probably the Terminator too. I mean the one with the guy who went back in time. I doubt that the future rebellion had time to do do much preparation... it was probably more like, they fought their way to Skynet's time machine and whoever was still alive was going back... Hell, even in Star Trek IV they didn't have time to plan ahead (Whale loving aliens were f*****g the earth with a giant black dong), they just had to go. And Kirk is a dude who easily spent 1/3 of his adult life time travelling.
#1 is misleading. Technically, you aren't dying faster, you are only perceived that way given whatever time period you are in. You're just spending your time elsewhere.
ReplyIn fact if someone was standing in front of you when you stared time travelling, they wouldn't even know you left and came back since you returned to the exact same time. If you left and 5:05pm, you'd return at 5:05pm. However, your body still aged for as along as you were time travelling. So while no time has passed in real time, physically you're body was still aging. You can't spend 10 years time travelling and expect to be the same physically when you get back.
Some of this is nonsense; 5 you could eat things sure you might be sick for a few weeks but you would adjust. 4 if you're going back in time you could prepare, going Roman times to the middle ages learn Latin and a romance language, in few week you would be able to talk to people. Going to a Germanic speaking area learn old English or Old High German or whatever language of the area you're traveling to. 3 steal someone else social sectary number, or find the number of some baby who died shortly after birth 20-30 years before and use that info as your own. 2 bring gold with you! Most places in history you could use the gold to local money!
ReplyWhere the hell will you get the gold? How easy do you think it is to just assume some else's identity? Especially someone who died as a baby? Then you say "5 you could eat things sure you might be sick for a few weeks but you would adjust." Would you eat the modern day equivalent of shit? You'd likely be dead before your body even had a chance to fight back. And how easy do you think it is to learn a language?
Learning a langugage is not that hard. I learned German in 3 months. Sure, some need more time than others, but some like me, have a talent for languages. Yes, your stomach would adjust. You would have to eat small portions and you might be sick for a while. Soooooo...take some darn penicillin and a few other wonder drugs with you to offset those things.
Ok. I'm really sorry, but this was a snooze-fest article. Bogus, cracked.
ReplyOne question..... WTF are you talking about?
Ok. I'm really sorry, but this was a snooze-fest comment. Bogus, Abarton1.
You know what solves all of these problems?
ReplyBeing a Time Lord.
The Doctor is already over 1100 years old.
Not sure about #5
TARDIS translation software
Everyone, from every time period ever, knows the Doctor. And even if that's not the case, Psychic Paper.
The Doctor doesn't need money to do things. And even if he did, Sonic Screwdrivers can do pretty much anything.
The Doctor's been to every time between the Big Bang and the End of the Universe. He knows what's waiting for him.
Are you the Doctor? No? Then shut up.