If insurance companies had access to Time Travel

[Rossum]

Just a thought I've had after watching Minority Report and reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

Imagine that humans discovered a method of paradox-free time travel which is relatively inexpensive. The time line is self-contained and self-correcting, time travel never results in alternate time lines, can't be used to retroactively kill someone, and there is absolutely no way that someone could destroy the universe by meeting their past self. At the very worst, an attempt to alter past events or to change the future based on information gathered from the future will just result in events getting very confusing or potentially dangerous for those immediately involved. Time Travelers have more to fear from accidentally tripping and banging their head on the side of their time machine than they have to worry about running over their own grandparents.


Anyway, suppose and insurance company has access to a machine that can get reliable information from the future. More specifically, every time they fill out an insurance claim they also send a report to the Time Agency who then sends that report 48 hours into the past. Then, 48 hours in the past the insurance company can theoretically alert their policy holders about the future accident and either prevent it from happening (somehow) or at least minimize the damage so that said company doesn't have to pay out as much money (while in theory their policy holders are compensated comfortably in the unlikely event that an accident occurs despite the future knowledge).


So, in a universe where past events cannot be altered, how could an insurance company prevent as many accidents as possible assuming they could know 48 hours in advance of any reports they could learn about their customers? Likewise, how could you prevent said companies from just making up random stuff and saying they are preventing events from happening?

[Seggybop]

Imagine that humans discovered a method of paradox-free time travel which is relatively inexpensive. The time line is self-contained and self-correcting

in a universe where past events cannot be altered, how could an insurance company prevent as many accidents as possible assuming they could know 48 hours in advance

Are you sure you know what a paradox is? =/

[Temujin]

Considering the level of ethical behavior we've seen from insurance companies, particularly medical insurance, I certainly wouldn't want them having any more power than they already do. And this counts as a lot of power, which they would abuse.

You prevent them from abusing it by having a time agency deal exclusively with this technology, and locking the fuckers up if they try to get around the regulations.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

So, in a universe where past events cannot be altered, how could an insurance company prevent as many accidents as possible assuming they could know 48 hours in advance of any reports they could learn about their customers? Likewise, how could you prevent said companies from just making up random stuff and saying they are preventing events from happening?

Fail. Those two statements are directly contradictory.

The way you've established time-travel in this scenario suggests a universe run on rails. The insurance company can't do jack shit to prevent anything from happening, since that would create a paradox that your scenario doesn't permit. Yes, they can get a report that Jack Shithead will drive his car into a telephone pole, but since the past cannot be altered, Jack Shithead will drive his car into a telephone pole regardless of what the insurance company chooses to do.

[Rossum]

So, in a universe where past events cannot be altered, how could an insurance company prevent as many accidents as possible assuming they could know 48 hours in advance of any reports they could learn about their customers? Likewise, how could you prevent said companies from just making up random stuff and saying they are preventing events from happening?

Fail. Those two statements are directly contradictory.

The way you've established time-travel in this scenario suggests a universe run on rails. The insurance company can't do jack shit to prevent anything from happening, since that would create a paradox that your scenario doesn't permit. Yes, they can get a report that Jack Shithead will drive his car into a telephone pole, but since the past cannot be altered, Jack Shithead will drive his car into a telephone pole regardless of what the insurance company chooses to do.

Correct, though I suspect they can at least minimize the damage somehow (though probably not by much):


Insurance Company gets a message from 48 hours in the future telling them that Jack will crash his car into a telephone pole at X location at Y time. The message doesn't tell them how much damage was caused or how much he was injured.

Insurance Company then calls up Jack and informs him that we will run into a telephone at X location at Y time and they recommend that he doesn't drink any alchohol before that time and that he drives extra slow in that area.

Insurance Company then informs the police and possibly medics that they think Jack will have an accident at X location and Y time and so they have someone there just to scout out the area and make sure nobody gets hurt.

Jack drives by, sober and driving slowly on the road... until something causes him to crash into the telephone pole. It could be a random squirrel jumping on his windshield, he gets uncharactaristically distracted by a female jogger in a shorts, or maybe he's just contemplating the horrible linear nature of time and how he is destined to crash into the telephone pole.

Then, Jack crashes into the telephone pole but he's going slow enough that it doesn't do much damage to the pole or his car and the police are there to make sure nobody was hurt. They all decide it wasn't so bad after all, tell some jokes, and they all go on their way and whatever minor damage was done will be fixed in no time flat.

Later, the policeman nearby fills out the information about the 'crash' and a copy of the information gets sent to the Insurance Company. Insurance Company notes the time and place of the accident and sends that information back in time.



Basically, nobody can prevent the accident event from happening but hopefully they can minimize the damage caused by it. The problem I'm getting is that by the way my stable timeloop thing goes then:

1. Any accident that causes enough damage to hurt anyone will have information on it which can be sent into the past.

2. Some accidents can be minimized due to precautions made using future information.

3. In the result of minimizing the damage, the end result of the accident will be damage too small to normally bother making a report about. This accident would still be reported because there was someone there who went through the trouble of minimizing the damage.


It could also result in a situation like:

Insurance Company gets a message that Joe will set his house on fire due to faulty electrical work at X time.

Insurance Company calls Joe up and tells him that he will set his house on fire due to faulty electrical work at X time.

Joe freaks out and shuts off the circuit breaker to his house and turns off all the power so there is no electricity to cause problems, he gets a fire extinguisher and keeps watch to make sure nothing happens.

A firefighter arrives, sent by the Insurance Company to prevent the electrical fire from spreading when it occurs.

The firefighter and Joe stand watch as the time for the fire comes and goes without anything happening. Joe is confused but the firefighter checks all the electrical work and declares that its all perfectly fine.

They turn the power back on and Joe gets some sleep, Firefighter fills out a report and sends it to the Insurance Company.

Insurance Company gets the info and scratch their heads, wondering how the heck that happened. Eventually, one of them decides to just screw it all and writes up a fake information about Joe setting his house on fire die to faulty electrical work.

They send the fake report back in time which causes the whole mess. Time Agency shows up and wants information about what happened and guys at the Insurance Company get their scientists on the payroll to say something about how there was an electrical fire in an alternate universe and that their brilliant handling of the situation had prevented it in this time line and they totally didn't just send themselves a bogus report... and if they did then it was to prevent the universe from imploding.



Technically, both scenarios result in stable time loops in which the report of the 'accident' is used to help prevent any damage from resulting from it... but the later one is probably a false alarm for an accident that both caused and resulted in a fake report being sent back in time.

[SilverWingedSeraph]

past events cannot be altered

You said this yourself. If you can make small changes like what you are proposing, then what in the hell is the difference between that and a large change? More often than not a large change is just the result of lots and lots of small changes anyway. This whole scenario makes no sense. If you can change the past at all, then unless there's some mystical force that says "you can change things this much and no further", what in the hell is preventing larger changes from occurring, exactly?

Your hypothetical in the last post you made makes even less sense, and is so convoluted it makes my head hurt.

[AniThyng]

I don't think you've really thought through how this is supposed to work in a universe that isn't protagonist centered. Does not the policeman and the fireman have their own lives? How can you say the timeline doesn't change if in your scenario all sorts of extra hoops are added as precautions?

[Simon_Jester]

Correct, though I suspect they can at least minimize the damage somehow (though probably not by much):

Insurance Company gets a message from 48 hours in the future telling them that Jack will crash his car into a telephone pole at X location at Y time. The message doesn't tell them how much damage was caused or how much he was injured. Insurance Company then calls up Jack and informs him that we will run into a telephone at X location at Y time and they recommend that he doesn't drink any alchohol before that time and that he drives extra slow in that area. Insurance Company then informs the police and possibly medics that they think Jack will have an accident at X location and Y time and so they have someone there just to scout out the area and make sure nobody gets hurt.

Jack drives by, sober and driving slowly on the road... until something causes him to crash into the telephone pole. It could be a random squirrel jumping on his windshield, he gets uncharactaristically distracted by a female jogger in a shorts, or maybe he's just contemplating the horrible linear nature of time and how he is destined to crash into the telephone pole. Then, Jack crashes into the telephone pole but he's going slow enough that it doesn't do much damage to the pole or his car and the police are there to make sure nobody was hurt. They all decide it wasn't so bad after all, tell some jokes, and they all go on their way and whatever minor damage was done will be fixed in no time flat.

Later, the policeman nearby fills out the information about the 'crash' and a copy of the information gets sent to the Insurance Company. Insurance Company notes the time and place of the accident and sends that information back in time.

This makes no sense. Either the accident happens as described or it doesn't; you can't skirt the requirement to avoid creating paradoxes by being deliberately uninformative to your past-self. If you have to, it defeats the whole purpose of "paradox free" time travel; the insurance company can't risk sending a detailed accident report into the past because that guarantees that all the consequences of the accident will happen as described in the report.

Also, the whole idea makes no sense from a causal perspective. Why can't Jack just decide not to go driving on that day, if he knows damn well he'll hit a telephone pole if he does? What stops him? What if he gets out of bed and says "Fuck, I don't want to run into a telephone pole, I'm going to stay home." Does some Magic Fate Ray zap him and drag him out of bed against his will, forcing him to get in his car and ram a telephone pole?

How does this system avoid paradox, while still preserving a guarantee that all information sent from future to past will be accurate?

It's much more reasonable to have a time travel system where paradoxes do not occur, and where, when information goes back in time, it retroactively changes the past without eliminating the existence of the information in the past, as in the following comic strip:

Here

It could also result in a situation like: Insurance Company gets a message that Joe will set his house on fire due to faulty electrical work at X time. Insurance Company calls Joe up and tells him that he will set his house on fire due to faulty electrical work at X time.

Joe freaks out and shuts off the circuit breaker to his house and turns off all the power so there is no electricity to cause problems, he gets a fire extinguisher and keeps watch to make sure nothing happens. A firefighter arrives, sent by the Insurance Company to prevent the electrical fire from spreading when it occurs. The firefighter and Joe stand watch as the time for the fire comes and goes without anything happening. Joe is confused but the firefighter checks all the electrical work and declares that its all perfectly fine. They turn the power back on and Joe gets some sleep, Firefighter fills out a report and sends it to the Insurance Company.

Insurance Company gets the info and scratch their heads, wondering how the heck that happened. Eventually, one of them decides to just screw it all and writes up a fake information about Joe setting his house on fire die to faulty electrical work. They send the fake report back in time which causes the whole mess. Time Agency shows up and wants information about what happened and guys at the Insurance Company get their scientists on the payroll to say something about how there was an electrical fire in an alternate universe and that their brilliant handling of the situation had prevented it in this time line and they totally didn't just send themselves a bogus report... and if they did then it was to prevent the universe from imploding.

This is far more plausible- the idea that fake reports are being sent. The obvious problem, of course, is that no one can ever know which accidents were real if they're all preempted in advance this way...

[PhilosopherOfSorts]

I don't think that the insurance company would try to prevent accidents with time travel, instead they'd just preemptively drop people who were going to get into an accident. "We droped his coverage because he had a preexisting condition, he's going to crash his car next tuesday."

[Simon_Jester]

Of course, if they did that reliably they'd be out of business in weeks; there's no point in paying someone a premium if they unfailingly refuse to pay in the event of an accident.

[Hawkwings]

They can't pre-emptively drop people either, that would be changing the timeline

[Rossum]

I don't think you've really thought through how this is supposed to work in a universe that isn't protagonist centered. Does not the policeman and the fireman have their own lives? How can you say the timeline doesn't change if in your scenario all sorts of extra hoops are added as precautions?

Well, alot of this is me trying to understand time-loop logic (yes, I know that my knowledge of this subject is limited to science fiction stories and Wikipedia articles and well I can't offer any excuse except trying see if someone here understands it better than I do).

Basically, when you send information into the past and act on it then the universe works to form a stable time loop that prevents one from altering any of the events that drove you to travel back in time in the first place.

from the wikipedia article

An example is the Titanic sinking; even if there were time travelers on the Titanic, they obviously failed to stop the ship from sinking. The Novikov Principle does not allow a time traveler to change the past in any way, but it does allow them to affect past events in a way that produces no inconsistencies—for example, a time traveler could rescue people from a disaster, and replace them with realistic corpses seconds before it occurs. Providing that the rescuees do not re-emerge until after the time traveler first journeyed into the past, his/her motivation to create the time machine and travel into the past will be preserved. (See Millennium.) In this example, it must always have been true that the people were rescued by a time traveler and replaced with realistic corpses, there was no "original" history where they were actually killed, since the notion of "changing" the past is deemed impossible by the self-consistency principle.

The Titanic is an accident that happened decades ago and there is alot of information that has been gathered about it. A person can go back in time to before the Titanic sank (in fact, that would just mean that they were always there for that moment) but they can only perform actions that don't change events in a way that would violate the evidence and information that drove them to go back in time.

In a society where people are fully aware of time travel and the use of future information then it would hopefully be easier to change events in a way that is both favorable to those involved and would result in a stable time look (because the laws of physics will always win regardless of what people want). If a ship were to sink in a society with access to time travel and the time cops were fast enough then hopefully they could just grab people out of the sinking ship and drop them off somewhere nearby without having to go through the trouble of making fake corpses.

Its just that... in a universe where authors can't pull the "their time travel resulted in an alternate timeline" handwave and its explicitly known that the universe will always ensure that the time loop will be completed regardless of what anybody wants then how could people use time travel to prevent accidents and just how utterly petty and insignificant can these accidents be while still warranting the trouble it would take to orchestrate a time loop to prevent it? And, I suppose as both my examples before showed, what happens when people become too aware of the temporal roller-coaster they live in and start pulling stuff that requires convoluted stuff to correct?

[AniThyng]

It's pretty easy to contrive of a single self-contained time loop like the titanic analogy, but that rapidly breaks down under repeated loops, intersecting loops and the admission that the world does not revolve around only one event at a time.

Even the titanic analogy goes to show that the timeline has in fact changed - just not in a way that a history book will record. It may work for fake corpses that no one will scrutinise, but it's not really going to work with anything where detailed records will be kept would it...

[PeZook]

They can't pre-emptively drop people either, that would be changing the timeline

Not really. The timeline looks like so: Jack goes into the office, the office checks if he will get himself injured, they refuse to sign an agreement coverage because he will. Nothing is changed, since he will still get hurt and won't have insurance.

Of course, that would defeat the purpose of insurance: people who'd come into the office and hear the insurance agent say "Okay, we checked your future, we can insure you" would just walk out: why get insurance when you know nothing will happen?

While those who will get into an accident won't be leaving their money, either

So it would be in the interest of the insurance company to hide that capability.

[AniThyng]

They can't pre-emptively drop people either, that would be changing the timeline

Not really. The timeline looks like so: Jack goes into the office, the office checks if he will get himself injured, they refuse to sign an agreement coverage because he will. Nothing is changed, since he will still get hurt and won't have insurance.

Of course, that would defeat the purpose of insurance: people who'd come into the office and hear the insurance agent say "Okay, we checked your future, we can insure you" would just walk out: why get insurance when you know nothing will happen?

While those who will get into an accident won't be leaving their money, either

So it would be in the interest of the insurance company to hide that capability.

But doesn't that implicitly assume that the payout of insurance money or not does not change the timeline in any way?

[PeZook]

But doesn't that implicitly assume that the payout of insurance money or not does not change the timeline in any way?

Nothing can be done!

The assumption the timeline can't be changed is a paradox in and of itself...

[Simon_Jester]

Well, alot of this is me trying to understand time-loop logic (yes, I know that my knowledge of this subject is limited to science fiction stories and Wikipedia articles and well I can't offer any excuse except trying see if someone here understands it better than I do).

The first thing to remember is that time travel not being real affects the issue. There aren't any "real" laws governing how time travel works, so you can't say "this is how it works."

The best you can do is construct an internally consistent picture of how a universe with time travel might operate. Let's start by examining your premise:

Basically, when you send information into the past and act on it then the universe works to form a stable time loop that prevents one from altering any of the events that drove you to travel back in time in the first place.

The obvious problem with this is in the phrase "the universe works." The universe is not an agent with a will of its own. "The universe" cannot compel you to do anything against your will.

Therefore, it's ridiculous to imagine a situation where even though time-travelling information tells me that I don't want to leave my house today, I still wind up doing all the same things I'd have done anyway. If I learn that today I will crash into a telephone pole, I simply won't go. And there's no mechanism by which "the universe" can grab me by the ear, drag me into my car, and push the car into position to hit the telephone pole.

That's a huge problem with the way you invoke Niven's Law of Conservation of History*. You think of it as "the universe" forcing events to occur in such a way that the time traveller's causal past is preserved unchanged; that doesn't make sense. The universe can't magically coerce me into doing things I would otherwise not do in order to force me to generate information ("Simon will crash into a tree") that I would otherwise not generate.

*What you think of as the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle, but Niven published over a decade before Novikov...

There are two ways to avoid time travel paradoxes (where X causes X, however indirectly, and therefore X must happen now so that time travellers later will go back in time to set up the conditions before for X to happen now).

---

One option is the Law of Conservation of History. In its formal version, this is Niven's (and later Novikov's) idea; stories invoking it without making it explicit stretch clear back to ancient times.

Under the Law of Conservation of History, there exists one and only one history, and it cannot be changed by time travel. Information about the future does not permit you to avoid the future you've been informed about.

It's not enough, in this kind of universe, to try and "fix" a disaster by sending back minimal information about it and then faking your way through it. That doesn't preserve causality, because it still results in the universe that sent the information back in time NOT looking like the one you really get. For the law to hold, the universe must be trapped on railroad tracks.

The oldest example I know of for this is the legend of Oedipus. Oedipus was a Greek hero who was abandoned at birth by his royal parents, and raised by shepherds. One day, he went to the Oracle at Delphi to ask if the shepherds are his real parents. The Oracle refused to tell him who his biological parents were, but instead told him that he was going to kill his father and marry his mother.

Oedipus was understandably freaked out by this, but he thinks the shepherds are his parents, so this fate was easy to avoid (he thought!). He decided to go off to a different city, far away from the place he was born, so that he can't wind up killing his adopted parents (who he thinks are his biological parents). On the way to this city, he meets an old man and they get into an argument, then a fight. He kills the old man- his biological father, but he doesn't know that. He never finds out the man's name.

When he reaches the city, he fights and kills a monster that had threatened it. In gratitude, the city makes him the new king, to replace their old king who recently disappeared. He marries the widowed queen of that city. At this point, you can probably guess that the city in question is the one he was born in, that he just killed the king of (his father)... and he just married his mother.

Later, Oedipus goes insane and gouges out his eyes when he figures out what happened, but that's just a typical Greek story ending. The really important point for our purposes is that this is what a stable time loop looks like: a magic source (the Oracle) gives you information about the future, and your reaction to that information leads you to create the situation the Oracle warned you about.

But there are two catches. One is that this story only works because there are actual gods meddling with the world and making events come out as "fated" to happen. The Oracle of Delphi is a minion of Apollo, who is powerful enough to make bizarre and random stuff happen in order to fulfill his own prophecies. In real life we don't see that happening. That's a big problem with stable time loops- they often require either very improbable events (to keep the past from being changed), or the active meddling of beings who are deliberately trying to preserve the stability of the time loop (which is unlikely given that these beings would have to be gods).

The other problem is that if we're talking about stable time loops, the stablest loop of all is the simplest one: no time travel occurs. If I have to find a way of keeping information sent into the past from affecting the past, the easy way to do it is to make it impossible to send information into the past... in which case time travel shouldn't work in a stable time loop universe even if that universe DOES have godlike Time Consistency Enforcers.

---

The other option is the parallel universe conjecture. A time traveler arriving in the past creates two parallel universes: one where he arrives, and one where he does not. The universe where he never arrives is his own personal history, and thus nothing he does affects it; the universe where he does arrive is fair game to change, because he can't create a paradox. His actions have no effect on his own future.

This is my favorite, because it's vaguely compatible with the rules of causality as we know them and the nature of the universe as we know it. We don't have to accept that effects can happen for no obvious cause: every effect (even a time traveler) has a cause (though possibly in a different universe from the one the effect occurs in).

From the point of view of most science fiction, this will look exactly like the classic plot of traveling into the past to set right something that went wrong in your own history. Imagine I go back to 1930 and kill Hitler; from the point of view of the universe I arrived in, I am a man from a wacky alternate-future universe where Hitler didn't die and caused World War Two. From their point of view, my past never happens; from my point of view it does happen, but in another universe (a universe where, historically, I the time traveler did not arrive).

In a society where people are fully aware of time travel and the use of future information then it would hopefully be easier to change events in a way that is both favorable to those involved and would result in a stable time look (because the laws of physics will always win regardless of what people want). If a ship were to sink in a society with access to time travel and the time cops were fast enough then hopefully they could just grab people out of the sinking ship and drop them off somewhere nearby without having to go through the trouble of making fake corpses.

But why would this work? What guarantees that the resulting "loop" will in fact be stable? What happens if someone refuses to play along with this game and deliberately creates an unstable time loop, by avoiding a disaster without faking the evidence that a disaster was fated to occur?

What compels obedience to this rule?

[RedImperator]

It's pretty easy to contrive of a single self-contained time loop like the titanic analogy, but that rapidly breaks down under repeated loops, intersecting loops and the admission that the world does not revolve around only one event at a time.

Even the titanic analogy goes to show that the timeline has in fact changed - just not in a way that a history book will record. It may work for fake corpses that no one will scrutinise, but it's not really going to work with anything where detailed records will be kept would it...

No, it hasn't. The corpses were always fake. That's the entire point of the Novikov Principle.

But doesn't that implicitly assume that the payout of insurance money or not does not change the timeline in any way?

Nothing can be done!

The assumption the timeline can't be changed is a paradox in and of itself...

How does this work, exactly?

[Rossum]

The obvious problem with this is in the phrase "the universe works." The universe is not an agent with a will of its own. "The universe" cannot compel you to do anything against your will.

Therefore, it's ridiculous to imagine a situation where even though time-travelling information tells me that I don't want to leave my house today, I still wind up doing all the same things I'd have done anyway. If I learn that today I will crash into a telephone pole, I simply won't go. And there's no mechanism by which "the universe" can grab me by the ear, drag me into my car, and push the car into position to hit the telephone pole.

That's a huge problem with the way you invoke Niven's Law of Conservation of History*. You think of it as "the universe" forcing events to occur in such a way that the time traveller's causal past is preserved unchanged; that doesn't make sense. The universe can't magically coerce me into doing things I would otherwise not do in order to force me to generate information ("Simon will crash into a tree") that I would otherwise not generate.

Well... I suppose the main thing I am trying to understand is this:

If human society had access to easy Time Travel then how could they use it to benefit society.

The problem I'm running into is that in many stories Time Travelers either change history or enter into alternate timelines that are not the timelines that they started out it. This means that if an Insurance Company collects money from its policy holders with the understanding that it will use its time travel tech to prevent them from getting hurt by accidents then alterations in the timeline would screw somebody over somehow.


If Time Travel results in the timelinee being changed:

Insurance Company is founded and has access to a time machine that can send information back in time.

People get insurance there and pay into it on the understanding that the Company will use their tech to either prevent them from getting into accidents, compensate them for damages, or do a combination of the two.

Policy holder is driving along when they get in an accident caused by an uninsured drunk driver. Policy Holders wife is killed in the accident.

Insurance Company gets the report and sends the information back in time 48 hours. There, they inform the policy holder of the upcoming accident.

Policy holder is shocked and decides to stay home with his wife. Meanwhile a policeman tracks down the drunk driver and stops them from either getting drunk or getting in their car. No accident occurs and the timeline is changed.

Since there was no accident, there is no reason to send the information back in time so nobody bothers to send that information back.

The problem I see with this is that this one act has altered the timeline. Granted, the policyholders wife is alive (which is good) but that one act changed 48 hours of the universes history. If the Company does this sort of thing for every one of its policy holders then its changing history probably several hundred times a day. Heck, if there was an Insurance Company which could guarantee absolutely that they could prevent you from ever getting in an accident (or at least warn you or whatever) then I'm pretty sure you would sign up. The Company would also have no real reason to turn down anyone if they were 'high risk' because if that person ever did get into an accident no matter how often then they could just change the past and the accident would never happen.

In essence, if an Insurance Company could use time travel to just erase accidents from history then they are altering history... and probably doing it hundreds or thousands of times as day. Who knows, maybe in the process of preventing one accident then they could cause some other accident and have to erase that from history.

And when you give anyone (no matter how benevolent) the actual power to actually change history then that opens up a whole new can of worms that I don't want to know about. Like what happened to that policy holder who lost his wife in the accident that was subsequently erased? What happened to the policeman or medics that arrived at the scene? If you stop one accident from happening then you are at best erasing the memories of everyone involved with it and snapping everything back to its origional place.


If Time Travel creates Alternate Timelines:

Policy holder gets into an accident involving a drunk driver and his wife is killed.

Insurance Company gets information on the accident and sends it back in time... and the accident isn't erased.

Insurance Company double-checks the information and then pays out the money to the policy holder to compensate for his loss (assuming that his policy covers it or they don't do something to screw him over or whatnot).

In an alternate timeline, 48 hours ago the Insurance Company gets the information and alerts the policy holder and the police about the upcoming accident. Policy holder and wife stay home while the police prevent the drunk driver from causing an accident.

Policy holder keeps paying into the Insurance Company while enjoying his lovely family and the Insurance Company of this timeline doesn't have to pay out anything.


The problem I'm getting with this one is that in the original timeline then there is a guaranteed instance of the time-travel not working to prevent the accident. The original timeline always has an accident and they send the information back to create an alternate timeline in which the accident doesn't happen... but that doesn't really help them any. If the company does that for all the accidents that happen then they could create hundreds or thousands of new timelines in which they prevent accidents but there will always be timelines in which the accident isn't prevented. There could very well be one 'origional' timeline that keeps running into accidents and sending information into the past to create timelines where they don't happen... but they personally aren't getting any benefits from using the technology.

Why the heck would anybody invent a time machine to prevent accidents when all it seems to do is vanish their reports and zip them off to some alternate universe? If they received reports from the future about how to prevent accidents then it would make sense... send stuff to the past to prevent accidents from happening to your past self and you in turn get stuff from the future to prevent accidents from happening to you. But with alternate timelines then there will probably be a few where all their problems can be prevented using info from the future, some timelines where some accidents are prevented with future info but many occur with no warning and result in them sending info back... and a few at the 'front' who aren't getting any info from the future and thus have no real incentive to keep sending info back.

Sending time travelers back into the past is basically the same problem but even moreso. If you are a corporation or government agency with access to time travel and you spend millions of dollars building a time machine and training a time traveler... what could you personally gain from sending your agent back in time to an alternate past from which you have no idea if they can return? They might make their way to an alternate version of your Time Agency but you're still sitting there like a schmuck who vanished millions of dollars of equipment and personnel into nothing.

Your alternate timeline time machine might make a good garbage disposal if it dumps trash into an alternate past that it can never get out of... but then again that would result in an alternate timeline where garbage from the future is popping out of nowhere and stinking up the place. Proposing such an idea would hopefully offend anyone with the money to build it, and you'd better hope that this doesn't result in your future selves dumping toxic waste on you. Having to declare war on your alternate past and future selves with toxic-waste launching time cannons could get very messy and very confusing very quickly.



The only Time Travel method I can imagine being useful to the society of its origin without resulting in whole 48 hour instances of Earth being erased and rewritten would be a machine that could create stable time loops reliably. The problem I'm getting with it is that a stable time loop only really cares about bringing about whatever events started the loop in the first place.

If you read about the people who were killed in the gas chambers in WWII and hate that such a thing could happen then you can save them with a stable time loop.

1). Read about the gas chambers, where they were, and who was killed in them.

2). Travel back in time and gain access to the gas chambers.

3). Wait for the first group of people to be gassed and when the doors close you step in and rescue everyone to send them into the future.

4). If there are Nazis watching what is happening inside the gas chamber who will later report what they see then deal with them... install tiny video screen and sound systems that display a simluated image of the inside of the chamber and fake the people dying inside. Or you could have fellow time travelers disguise themselves as the Nazis, replace them, and then fake the reports of the people inside dying. Do whatever you have to to make sure that the rescue of the people inside is not mentioned in the history books.

5). Bring the people to the future and have scientists take measurments of them and create realistic corpses to replace them in the gas chamber.

6). Send the realistic corpses back in time and dump them on the floor of the gas chamber.

7). Remove or hide whatever equipment you put in there and leave, repeat the process for the next group.


The end result is that the people who were thought to have been gassed in WWII were in fact rescued by time travelers and replaced with realistic corpses. They had always been rescued but the evidence of their rescue had been hidden and never discovered until the point in time where you actually send them into the future.

A person cannot change the past... but by cleverly working behind the scenes and timing things right then one could create a stable time loop in which the past isn't quite as bad as the history books said it was.


The thing with my Insurance Company thought experiment is that hopefully if human society has access to time travel then they can figure out a more efficient way of eliminating accidents.

In the example with the policy holder... the Insurance Company could have learned that the policy holder got into an accident and then quickly built an android duplicate of the policy holders wife... and then went back in time and discretly replaced his wife with the android duplicate... and then after the accident they bring her in to meet him in the hospital where they reveal that they had future information about the accident and prevented her death by replacing her with an android for the duration of the accident...

Well, that would certainly help get around the problem of the accident and ensure that the policy holders wife wasn't killed... but I'm pretty sure it would be pretty dang creepy if it was discovered that your Insurance Company could replace your loved ones with realistic time-traveling androids on demand. Sure, they would hopefully be on your side and could prevent you from injury by cheating death but... sheesh... there has got to be an easier way to save people through time travel than replacing them with androids or erasing huge chunks of earths history or creating entire alternate univereses in the process.

[PeZook]

How does this work, exactly?

The OP said you can send information back in time, but nothing can be changed ; While the very act of sending information back in time changes things, but it really doesn't because the information already got back.

So the insurance company can get information on the accident before they even take up the policy when the future office send the files, because they already sent the files and so it (and the reduced damage) became part of the timeline!

...I guess I'm tripping now, I'll just shut up.

[Jon]

The other option is the parallel universe conjecture. A time traveler arriving in the past creates two parallel universes

This issue I always had with this conjecture (and similar quantum theories involving every 'decision' resulting in a timeline where both outcomes are played out) is how an entire universe is created... how can an entire universe instantly pop into existence, where does all of the matter and energy in it come from, etc- or do the parallel universes already exist, and the time traveller just lands in one of those and never the one he left?

[Simon_Jester]

This issue I always had with this conjecture (and similar quantum theories involving every 'decision' resulting in a timeline where both outcomes are played out) is how an entire universe is created... how can an entire universe instantly pop into existence, where does all of the matter and energy in it come from, etc- or do the parallel universes already exist, and the time traveller just lands in one of those and never the one he left?

The only satisfactory answer I can think of to this would be to study the progress of quantum mechanics up to the 1930s or so, then read the answer given by the gentlemen who came up with the Many Worlds Interpretation.

The only short answer I know of is that if energy is weighted by probability (a 50% chance of one joule existing plus a 50% chance of one joule existing equals one joule), then energy is conserved because when one (100% probable) timeline splits into two (50% probability each, for the sake of argument), nothing new is created; we just see a "dilution" of the original quantity, though not an observable one.

This is not a satisfactory answer by itself.

---

Well... I suppose the main thing I am trying to understand is this:

If human society had access to easy Time Travel then how could they use it to benefit society.

Arguably, they couldn't. In a stable timeline universe dominated by stable time loops, the most stable time loop of all is "no one ever invents time travel." If we're imagining that "the universe" can somehow conspire to preserve stable time loops by making incredibly improbable things happen... surely the universe can conspire to eliminate time travel.

The problem I'm running into is that in many stories Time Travelers either change history or enter into alternate timelines that are not the timelines that they started out it. This means that if an Insurance Company collects money from its policy holders with the understanding that it will use its time travel tech to prevent them from getting hurt by accidents then alterations in the timeline would screw somebody over somehow.

Why?

If Time Travel results in the timelinee being changed: Insurance Company is founded and has access to a time machine that can send information back in time. People get insurance there and pay into it on the understanding that the Company will use their tech to either prevent them from getting into accidents, compensate them for damages, or do a combination of the two.

Policy holder is driving along when they get in an accident caused by an uninsured drunk driver. Policy Holders wife is killed in the accident. Insurance Company gets the report and sends the information back in time 48 hours. There, they inform the policy holder of the upcoming accident.

Policy holder is shocked and decides to stay home with his wife. Meanwhile a policeman tracks down the drunk driver and stops them from either getting drunk or getting in their car. No accident occurs and the timeline is changed. Since there was no accident, there is no reason to send the information back in time so nobody bothers to send that information back.

Why not? If this is a stable time loop universe, just send back a fake report. If this is not a universe where stable time loops are required (as in, a message not sent in my future may still arrive in my past because it was sent by alt-me who DID send the message in alt-future), we can ignore the whole problem, as here:

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20050403.html

In essence, if an Insurance Company could use time travel to just erase accidents from history then they are altering history... and probably doing it hundreds or thousands of times as day. Who knows, maybe in the process of preventing one accident then they could cause some other accident and have to erase that from history.

So what? Also, and I know this may seem like a nitpick, since insurance companies aren't gods, you don't Capitalize their Names. It's "insurance company," not "Insurance Company."

And when you give anyone (no matter how benevolent) the actual power to actually change history then that opens up a whole new can of worms that I don't want to know about. Like what happened to that policy holder who lost his wife in the accident that was subsequently erased? What happened to the policeman or medics that arrived at the scene? If you stop one accident from happening then you are at best erasing the memories of everyone involved with it and snapping everything back to its origional place.

And yet, if that is not possible, what's the point of time travel at all? If you can't avoid horrible alt-futures by creating a stable time loop in which they don't happen then there is NO way to use time travel to avert disasters. At best, you might be able to use it on a very small scale for covert observation.

Why the heck would anybody invent a time machine to prevent accidents when all it seems to do is vanish their reports and zip them off to some alternate universe? If they received reports from the future about how to prevent accidents then it would make sense... send stuff to the past to prevent accidents from happening to your past self and you in turn get stuff from the future to prevent accidents from happening to you. But with alternate timelines then there will probably be a few where all their problems can be prevented using info from the future, some timelines where some accidents are prevented with future info but many occur with no warning and result in them sending info back... and a few at the 'front' who aren't getting any info from the future and thus have no real incentive to keep sending info back.

Now this is a good point. An alternate universe spawning time machine is really only useful as a people mover: you want to find out what happens in an alternate universe if you do X, so you, personally, enter the machine and do whatever you had in mind.

From the point of view of the home universe, the machine is a device for making human beings vanish from history without a trace; the only reason anyone has to keep using them is (in principle) that time travellers arriving from other parallel universes in their future may convince them that the method works.

That is, yes, of very limited practical utility.

The only Time Travel method I can imagine being useful to the society of its origin without resulting in whole 48 hour instances of Earth being erased and rewritten would be a machine that could create stable time loops reliably. The problem I'm getting with it is that a stable time loop only really cares about bringing about whatever events started the loop in the first place.

If you read about the people who were killed in the gas chambers in WWII and hate that such a thing could happen then you can save them with a stable time loop...

4). If there are Nazis watching what is happening inside the gas chamber who will later report what they see then deal with them... install tiny video screen and sound systems that display a simluated image of the inside of the chamber and fake the people dying inside. Or you could have fellow time travelers disguise themselves as the Nazis, replace them, and then fake the reports of the people inside dying. Do whatever you have to to make sure that the rescue of the people inside is not mentioned in the history books.

WAIT!

What if you can't do that? What if someone who knows more about the design of the gas chambers (like, say, me) concludes that there is no way to adequately fake the deaths of millions of people? What happens now? Do you give up? Do you try anyway? What happens if you fail and your attempt to create a stable time loop doesn't work?

Isn't it more logical to create a time loop by sending special information to your future self? Like "Trust me, Hitler may not seem like such a bad guy to you in 1916, but he really has to die, and here's some documentation on why." Or, for that matter, isn't it more logical to not try? Because if you're going to make a big deal about stable time loops, then as I said, the most stable time loop of all is the "no time travel" one.

Well, that would certainly help get around the problem of the accident and ensure that the policy holders wife wasn't killed... but I'm pretty sure it would be pretty dang creepy if it was discovered that your Insurance Company could replace your loved ones with realistic time-traveling androids on demand. Sure, they would hopefully be on your side and could prevent you from injury by cheating death but... sheesh... there has got to be an easier way to save people through time travel than replacing them with androids or erasing huge chunks of earths history or creating entire alternate univereses in the process.

Why?