First I would meet Einstein and talk and debate some theories dealing with quantum physics. Second I would offer him a chance to come to the future to see what he had achieved.

Sort of. If she remembered the babysitter as a kid then she would be changing her memory anyway. If she was especially good at behaving exactly the way she remembered herself behaving then you would have to have time rewriting itself over and over but would instead get something more like Back to the Future's end
-spoiler n_n -
where Doc looked like he got gunned down but was wearing a bullet proof vest.
-spoiler-


I wouldn't mind grabbing a bit of modern or near future study about commercials and handing it out a decade ago.

Right now we obviously see so many that we just learn to ignore them. The big plan for dealing with that has been to show us more advertisements (and often make them nearly pornographic,) but that obviously feeds back on itself and we ignore them that much harder.

You've probably asked yourself "who the hell buys this crap?" at least a few times when you were bored enough to actually look at what was being advertised, or worse, had your attention forcibly grabbed by the ad with something like siren noises. Well, back when people had maybe five options total ads were a great way to swing their favor towards one but now we've got about a million options so there's no use competing with so many other commercials and we couldn't even keep track of them anyway.

The solution is obviously a healthy helping of shut the hell up but they know that zero advertising is a company disaster. The actual solution is just lighter ads directed at niche groups. Viral marketing campaigns are some of the forerunners for this concept but it can be taken a lot further. If they'd stopped trying to get an ad seen by everyone back then just so that the 5% that were actually ever likely to buy it would definitely see it...



Though here's an interesting use for time travel: go back and show the terrorists in Afghanistan how the US was going to respond to the 9/11 attack. "Use it as an excuse to invade countries without full international backlash" doesn't even need to be something you agree with, it really ought to give them second thoughts if they had to think about if they were going to make US citizens easier to manipulate thus unshackling the people most willing to do the things they hate most about America.

Plus I'd bet about half of the people here (maybe more because it's an internet forum?) doubt we learned anything from the whole ordeal.

Well you could go grab some fruit from the tree of life and hand it to them right after they ate from the tree of knowledge if you really wanted to give god the finger~

Well, considering that I'm even concerned about it and God obviously wasn't that implies that I'm the compassionate superior to God which is an oxymoron anyway and flies in the very face of what the Biblical God is supposed to be.

Of course, if this had been the mythology of Zeus it might make more sense since no one ever claimed that Zeus was a necessarily a nice guy (er, I mean, a nice God).

Anyway, I don't think I'd truly be interested in doing this. I was really just joking. I think when I got to the days of Jesus I'd discover that Jesus was indeed a pantheistic monk just like I have suspected. Then my next stop would be to go back and see what Siddhartha was up to. Then finally I'd grab a hot chick and take her with me to travel all the way back to just after the dinosaurs left and before humans came onto the scene. We'd have to whole planet to ourselves then.

Butterfly effect refers to the idea that a butterfly flapping it's wings could cause a hurricane halfway around the world.

A lot of people get mixed up in the meaning though. Chaos and order are not opposite things for this explanation- rather chaos refers to a situation where a very small difference in starting conditions leads to extremely different results. For this reason it becomes easier to say that chaos is basically something that's really freaking hard to predict.

For example asteroids striking Earth are a chaotic system. You may know where all the big ones are but if you don't know the small ones the little tugs they give could move the big ones towards different groups of small rocks and those could lead in various directs and so on. After a couple of steps of this you can see how one tiny difference quickly multiplies up to a huge difference.

More down to Earth you could imagine a grassy park with trees. If you move one tree where people walk a lot they might prefer a different path entirely and then the people walking through a different spot because of the tree will make that other spot more crowded which will make other people prefer to sit down somewhere else and so on.


Anyway, in regards to time travel the idea is that if were to do something like delay someone for three seconds that might add up to the difference between them being in a car accident or not and a world with a particular person alive instead of dead is going to echo forward as that person keeps interacting with people and changing what they would have done if he wasn't there. If you know about stuff like six degrees of separation it's easy to see how trivial changes could make huge differences all around the world as time marches forward.

*Due to the multiplication thing butterfly effect would make a rather small difference if you went back five minutes. If you went back a year there would be a bigger effect and if you went back centuries there would be a huge effect. Of course the five minute trip can add up to a big effect a century later but because you could only know what was going to happen for five minutes nobody would know.

-Another spoiler-
They talk a bit about an election where it would have been crazy if one guy was elected. Then they go T-rex hunting being careful to shoot one that was about to be crushed anyway. The client goes off the trail and steps on a butterfly and then they return to the present and find out the really bad guy got elected and also that evureewun spehls tings liek dis.

Well what needs to be understood is that it's not the butterfly being so powerful as to cause a storm. The air has to already be very close to causing a storm and the butterfly would have to be in the right place at the right time to give just enough of a push to make everything fall in the way that eventually comes together to make the storm. Obviously very few butterflies will give the perfect contribution that has such a huge impact on the weather but they are definitely able to change air flows because air flows are such a chaotic thing.

But again, it's not the butterfly making the hurricane from nothing. It's all butterflies, birds, animals exhaling, rocks moving down hills, trees and things being in the way of wind, etc. It's all of these things adding up and the idea is that if you change one very small input that has a little bit of an effect on a lot of things around it and the change in those things has a little more impact on everything around them.

It's easier to understand if you look at things you understand better than air currents: imagine if you were to travel back in time and destroy a single sperm as the cell was first forming. Most likely a randomly chosen sperm is not going to be one that fertilizes an egg but assuming you got one that would have been ejaculated during coitus the chances are still slim. However the enzymes sperm release when they get to the egg to eat their way up to the actual cell surface might have made the difference another sperm needed to be the one to fertilize the egg. Now there's no way you'd know which sperm was going to fertilize the egg.

Because we're talking about time travel I've got to mention Hitler. What if the sperm you killed had been involved in his conception, as the one to fertilize the egg or just a contributor in some way? Switching the genes he got from his father could have resulted in a stillbirth or he could have been born anyway. Maybe the sperm he actually got had basically the same set of genes and differences so small they couldn't even take effect until generations later or maybe they'd alter his childhood so much he'd become a pastry chef.

But think about a world with a Hitler pasty chef. Could you believe that the change of a single cell before he was ever born could lead to the hurricane of a person that rocked the foundations of the modern world and lead to the deaths of so many?

Might as well go to the future and get a starship to cruise over to some paradise planet.

Go back and date helen of troy and whisper there in the horse you know...have a bath with cleopatra and introduce her to bubble bath and make sure Henry the 8th knew i was gay so i didnt become his 7th wife Anna x

A paradox? Come on people this is not star trek. The only way you would not be able to exist in a parallel or divergent plane I would believe would be a result of your matter or energy or parts of it being of the same essence which would mean there are two identical atoms or water at play this should break the law of science. Regardless time travel is over zealously seen as possible when in reality it is highlu unplausible.

i'd sell tickets and profit like those brilliant folks who sold property on the moon all the while keeping in mind the words of p.t. barnum. "nobody ever lost money understimating the intelligence of the american public".

This is acting like atoms are permanent units with particular assigned positions in time- but position need not be a function of time, and there's not any good reason to even think that it is based on any of the physical laws of the universe we understand.

With this in mind we have a few options for time travel. The first is that the timeline is constant, unchanging, and already laid out in it's entirety. We can, under this model, recognize that all time travel events are already recorded and that, like that radio broadcast, we should have several time travelers among us right now. Otherwise it is safe to say that there can be no time travel.

People frequently sidestep this by suggesting that there might be many identical universes to our and that we could step between them but land in that universe's version of the past or future but this and other such models should not really count as time travel so much as travel to a place that happens to be near or totally identical to different times in our own history.


Yet there are much more compelling models available to us. The random decay of particles and various quantum phenomena at least remove the deterministic nature of the universe in terms of Newtonian action and reaction. This doesn't fully remove the option of a deterministic universe but it does strongly suggest that it's being written as it goes along.

In this view we can see that travel to the future should just eliminate you from history until you showed up once again and thus you should never be able to travel to your future self. In traveling back to the present you would now once again be there to have various impacts and so the future you had traveled to could no longer exist. If we assume that time sloughs off that period of time and writes itself anew starting from your trip back we start to see potential problems.

To maintain causality the trip to the future and back does not really create any issues. Time begins to process itself again with your trip back so the trip to the future changes you accordingly and then your return carries back information from a place that no longer exists but you have obeyed causality the entire way through and your trip to the future would still make sense if we were to rewind the universe and then have it carry out on it's own, which we will presume gives the same result if nothing is changed, in accordance with causality.

Trips back to before your initial trip, however, have some actual problems. You are now altering the history that led to your trip. Time can write itself forward with you having showed up from nowhere but if it gets up to the point where you made your trip but instead you do not make the trip then there is no explanation for where the you that showed up in the past came from. In writing itself forward you would have now not made the trip and on a single time line this must mean that you never showed up in the past.

The real problem is that in removing you from the past time should now play out in a way that you DO make your trip back and as we try to lay down history piece by piece we get stuck without it ever able to continue beyond when you made your trip back.

Unless you want to think that time is like video cassette tape and decreases in quality as you record over it again and again there would be no way to ever recognize that someone had done this and instead of time continuing on in a line it would just get up to a point and then circle back on itself infinitely.

There is a relative fail safe however: you need only not do anything that will prevent your trip from happening. This makes killing Hitler and that sort of thing mostly impossible as with a dead Hitler there is no Hitler's Nazi party and thus nobody would know why you would want to kill some random German guy named Adolf Hitler.

If, however, you go back in time and set up a group to both kill Hitler and make sure you travel back in time to set up their group we have averted the problem. Killing Hitler will have many implications though and there is no guarantee that you would be born in the new version of the world so you would instead have to set up the group to make sure that a particular person according to some set of rules be chosen to perform the task, or if available have a robot built for the task.

To avert the paradox whatever messenger must make their trip back in time before your trip would have occurred (and thus erase the troublesome section of history.)

Once we have established a stretch of time that leads to a trip back in time that establishes that stretch of time we can now continue fluidly into the future and though the present of such a movie-style loop would baffle anyone trying to figure out how it began causality will nonetheless be preserved.

Of course this relation could be worked out if we were to travel to the future and confirm that by having taken that trip we were absent from it and that sort of thing. We would still not know who had set up any self preserving travel events but we could recognize the method.

However this cannot be attempted prior to the initial invention of a time machine on the unaltered time line and thus we will have no such loops to observe until them (presuming that we are on the very first construction of time right now.)

With the advent of space travel it will be much easier to determine the nature of time as we would be able to just choose a place to change something that could have no impact on our creation of time travel or our interest in using it and then leave the information about what we did and what it was like without the change (and then take action to make sure the change happened so we could keep that information.)

i'd kill of all my enemies n go back in time to prevent myself from being concieved

Well, like I say, I'd need to get a travel guide with the time machine. Otherwise I have no way of knowing that there will ever be any such thing as a starship in the future.

For all I know the human race might become extinct in a mere few centuries from now and maybe the giant lizards will return again.

Maybe the future is just going to be another 300 million years of dinosaurs and plants preparing to make new oil reserves for the next uprising of the monkeys that only occurs every 300 million years for a little tiny spurt.

You'd have to catch the monkey spurting.

lol obviously you know lil of the subject

yes i would the ultimate way to get back at everyone

I think I'd go into the future, get a bunch of facts about sporting events and stocks and such, come back, and then just start betting on sure things.

That is what I was thinking about