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...
one thing i've always wondered is that there's always new dirt and rocks creating layers of earth, so if you went far enough into the future wouldn't you appear 100 feet below the ground inside solid rock and die?
ReplyCouldn't you get around the money issue by using gold? It may be expensive but you can sell pure gold at banks for pretty much all of U.S history and prior to that gold was still used as a currency. It is obtainable now, it has been used since the time of the Romans and I see no reason why it wouldn't be used again in the future. Also you should be able to eat the food just not drink the water
ReplyChanging time is a pointless effort. You simply can't, because it already happened and and always will. Time is a eternal and fluid concept.
ReplyOnly if you view time a linear which, according to some theoretical physicists, it isn't.
What in gods name is the picture on #5????
ReplySo... is it possible to go back in time?
ReplySeems like in order to properly time travel, you need a space/time ship that is sentient/AI equipped to help with positioning, and you would need a food/drink purifier and/or food reserves, and valuables that are known to be valuable in the past or predicted to be valuable in the future (possibly including currencies from various times and places).
ReplyOn a separate note, it's fitting I got an ad for Dr. Who
So uh...don't go back to a place where they don't speak your language, don't go back to a place with bad purification of food and water, don't plan on buying anything or getting a job, and don't waste months or years screwing with time. The last one is true but the others are all really obvious (and Doc Brown did in fact warn us about at least the money one...)
ReplySo, um... that leaves... going back to catch my little brother's soccer game I missed last year...? Oh, wait, you said not to go to a place with bad purification on the food and water...
This reminds me SG1 :
ReplyO'Neil to Thor "What is with you people? Time machines are nothing but trouble, even we know that."
Great episode by the by (Unnatural Selection, season 6)
I have never seen a full episode of Dr. Who, but I do remember a scene I came across randomly where the Dr. was asked for ID and he pulled out this blank little booklet and handed it to the guy. It performed a mind trick on the guard and made him think he was seeing the Identification he needed to let the doctor through.
ReplyIt's called a "Psychic paper"
#2. Duh.
ReplyI like how Dr Who actually addresses a few of these. The Doctors regeneration extends his lifespan. The TARDIS is self-aware, thus preventing materializing in the wrong place, though not always sending the Doctor where he wants. Also, the TARDIS translates insise your brain, so you speak the same language as the natives.
ReplyThe thing about a lot of this is that it's totally pulled from somebody's ass. Nobody really knows if we'd age the same way when we travel back in time. It would depend on the process, and the process (and whether there is one) depends on laws of physics we don't know yet.
ReplyFurther, "time travel" into the future is completely possible. Just move really fast; google "time dilation."
But I want to go backwards...
You don't age faster. You age at the regular pace, still getting the same years out of your own life as you otherwise would have. Only you're using them dicking around in the past or future, not in your own timeline. Sure, if you went back to the moment you left, to everyone ELSE you'd look older, but you haven't actually shortened your own life any. On the contrary, if you go 150 years in the future, you can be sure you'd look damn good for your age (birth year).
ReplyThis is true. But imagine you are your mother. You just suddenly aged five years in ten minutes. Assuming you DID come back, instead of sending them into a nightmare about their child being kidnapped.
The obvious solution to #2 is to convert your money to something like gold or diamonds before traveling back. Then sell it for period accurate currency when you arrive.
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesAlso, doc brown did warn us about this. He had a whole suitcase full of money from different periods (which I assume he obtained in this fashion.
And when the diamond industry falls apart because people finally realize that diamonds are easy to make and look just like glass? Or someone invents a replicater that can create gold out of thin air? What then?
@Maeve... Really? Thin air? Hell even NASA needs soy to turn into bacon and alchemy turned into chemistry when they gave up turning metal into gold but hey thin air might work better go back and let them know.
Thin air gold = really rich me in 1900 Nya haha
There is a Twilight Zone episode that proves that is a dumb idea if you're going into the future - bank robbers put themselves in suspended animation and when they come out gold is worthless. Having too much of it in the past might raise suspicion and would probably get you mugged and/or killed. Still a better bet than currency, but just about anything would be problematic. Which begs the question: why even bother to travel to a time that uses the barter system when you have a freaking credit card? :-)
Article Idea: 5 Reasons People Travel Through Time (That Are Completely Retarded). Reasons I would nominate: To Find/"Rescue" Someone, To Change/"Save"/"Fix" History, To Cheat Fate/To Get Rich, To Just f*****g Look Around and To Hunt Dinosaurs. Okay cracked writers go for it!
Actually that is an awesome idea for an article f-that I call dibs fuckers.
I was hoping someone else caught that, don't know how the editors and writers work together but to title an article Time Travel Realities Doc Brown didn't warn us about, and then give a specific example that the movies covered?
Also, unless your time machine were part space ship, you'd risk dying of asphyxiation in deep space upon re-entry into real time. The reason is that when your time machine has entered hypertime, the world it has left continues as it always has. That means it rotates and it revolves around the sun. So there is a very strong chance that when you re-enter real time, the planet is going to be in another location.
ReplyNot to mention that the galaxy is spinning/crashing into another galaxy/god knows what else
Doctor who
Reply5 is why you should always bring a packed lunch.
ReplyDoc Brown did warn about the money situation. He had a little trunk with money from different time periods.
Replyi always thought about something if you traveled 20 years into the future wouldnt you be in a future where you we gone for 20 years and what if you stopped WW3 in the unaltered timeline
ReplySo wouldn't traveling to the future to see what it will be like be impossible
If, after you went on your little trip to the future, you went back to continue your life, it would be okay. Also, you would be able to find out when you died and if you died during your trip and everything because there might be records of your "Disappearance".
That's where parallel universes get involved!
Another problem with time travel in the Past, as the Twilight Zone addressed in "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville." Even if you had the inside track on the "future," you couldn't cash in on it, because people would either (1) not believe you, (2) consider you insane, or (3) (if you were stupid to bring a 'future object' with you into the Past) be a foreign power or alien possessing strange technology.
ReplyOf course, as many stated, apparently a TARDIS would solve most of those problems since it exists within its own dimension than a three-dimensional construct. Just saying.