Comment

Comment on xkcd #2976: Time Traveler Causes of Death

[off topic]

One of my favorite time travel novels is ‘The Big Time’ by Fritz Leiber.

The two big ideas in the book. First, that there’s a Law of Conservation of Reality. Go back in time and shoot Hitler. He dies. Then gets better, really fast. Twenty minutes after you shoot him, he’s fine. Spend your whole life shooting him and the history books will just ignore it. It takes an army of time travelers working night and day to get any changes to stick.

Second idea. There are two armies, both trying to change the past/future. They have been at it since before the Big Bang and will go on until the Heat Death of the Universe. They recruit humans but no human has ever seen the big bosses, just low ranking stooges.

source

Sort:hotnew top

MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
But that neccessitates a predetermined fate.

source
- Dagwood222@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  . It takes an army of time travelers working night and day to get any changes to stick.
  
  Changes do occur in the story. The participants talk about the ‘Change Winds’ and how people can just disappear because thier timeline has been shifted and their parents never met.
  
  source
solstice@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Ctrl+F Hitler, ah, there it is. I feel like the xkcd comic missed an opportunity to have a 1932-1945 segment in there about the biggest cause of death for time travelers being OTHER time travelers killing them before they can successfully go back in time and kill Hitler, lol.

Re: conservation of reality, I feel like if I went back and shot Hitler, I would miss, or be stopped by security, or bad weather, or even if I managed to actually do it, he’d be replaced by a look alike, and then it would turn out the guy we always thought was Hitler was actually just an actor, or something. Whatever happened happened and can’t be undone, not through magic resuscitation of a corpse, but through smooth and natural intervention of reality itself, if that makes sense…

source