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Many a hungry time traveler has Googled ‘trilobites shellfish allergy’ only to find their carrier had no coverage in the Ordovician.
#1, during all eras: they didn’t get the space-travel part in space-time correct.
xkcd #2976: Time Traveler Causes of Death
Submitted 4 months ago by schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de to xkcd@lemmy.world
Comments
apocalypticat@lemmy.world 4 months ago
TheMinions@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Wouldn’t that just be asphyxiation?
MsPenguinette@lemmy.world 4 months ago
But what about time travelers who go forward in time
EmoDuck@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Autoerotic asphyxiation
nightofmichelinstars@sopuli.xyz 4 months ago
Morlocks
OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Lava
jaemo@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Believe it or not, jail
…and asphyxiation.
DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Robot raptors
son_named_bort@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Time machine door gets stuck
lath@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Flu.
dohpaz42@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Mole people.
mrbaby@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Dad comes home with the milk
ThrowawayPermanente@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Cancer
davidgro@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Asphyxiation
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 4 months ago
It’s a spectrum from “low and slow” up to “broiled.”
Dagwood222@lemm.ee 4 months ago
[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.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
But that neccessitates a predetermined fate.
Dagwood222@lemm.ee 4 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.
solstice@lemmy.world 4 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…
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Mammalia are a footnote in earths history.
14th_cylon@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Asphyxiation checks out Image
jol@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
A time machine is a teleportation machine. If we can imagine a time machine existing, a teleportation machine isn’t really far fetched.
TheMinions@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I cannot wait for time travel to exist so all pedantic online can be like “um actually, it’s a space-time machine”
leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 4 months ago
A time machine is a faster than light drive.
Well, the other way 'round, really, but same difference.
And to come back you need a slower than (but very close to) light drive.
Persen@lemmy.world 4 months ago
well, if you rewind time and stay in the box, the box would probably stay on earth, but I have no idea how time travel would work.
JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
There is no cosmic frame of reference. Earth is moving, the sun is moving, the galaxy is moving, but you can choose any frame of reference within that. It’d be really silly to use the suns frame of reference, you’d use Earth’s.
14th_cylon@lemm.ee 4 months ago
There is. Just because we can’t correctly find and use it with our knowledge doesn’t mean there isn’t.
Like why would you use earth’s? There is nothing special about earth.