Tracking time travellers from the future

[b00tleg]

A half baked idea I had for a story. In the story, it occurs in the present day. Time travel is theroretically possible but of course, sending someone into the future or past is unprovable and may not be possible. Over the course of this story, a government project is revealed to be experimenting in time travel and has been for a long time. However, the experiments are not being carried out here in the present, but in the future. The government in the future is sending people back to our present, the past for them in attempts to gain test data on their time travel technology.

In anticipation of such events, one scientist started the program by developing a means by which time travellers could log thier trip to the past before returning to their present. To help maintain time-line continuity, nobody knows how far ahead these time travellers are being sent back, it could be thirty years or a thousand. A network has been installed so that time travellers can inconspicously arrive at nearly any point in the past, "check in" so that their arrival and departure plus other information are stored. It might as simple as swiping an identification card before they leave.

Anyhow, this information is then stored in ultra-secure databases-whatever-techno-babble, and the project has been designed to allow "future" scientists access to this data to analyze and incorporate into thier experiments. My question would be this, I think the future would be able to reliably perform these experiments and not adversely affect the timeline b/c they can keep a baseline of information to go off of. Addtionally they can verify this baseline based on reports from subjects that are being sent into the past, b/c they will actually have people there to verify past events.

However, even if this is the case, the timeline would be in a constant state of flux as time travellers are sent back and are tracked and recorded, with the info then stored to sent to the future. Say they were planning on sending subject "Joe" back to the past, and as they prep to do so, they run a search for this subjects trip in the "past-future" database and they already have the results of the trip even though they haven't sent Joe back yet.

If anyone finds this interesting, please discuss. Where can it be improved, what might the implications be? or is it just a bulloxed idea that never see the light of day again.

[Pu-239]

Butterfly effect?

[Patrick Degan]

In David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself, protagonist Danny Eakins ends up briefly in a timeline in which the discovery of a fossilised coke bottle in the ruins of Pompeii led President Robert Kennedy to initiate a study project into time travel. My guess would be you'd look for anachronisms; objects which can't be fit into anything produced by present-day technology as signs of time incursion from the future. Devices with no comprehensible circuitry, or materials which seem too sheer to withstand wear and tear yet do so somehow. Things like that.

[Winston Blake]

If the future scientists don't foresee the true significance of the Time Travel database, you could get a nice paradox:

"So we want info on time travel. Let's send people back in time and collect data."
"Hey look at this, all the information we could ever want, with a convenient carrying handle."
"Oh well, don't worry about sending those people then, we're all done."

So nobody goes back in time and the database never gets made, so the people in the future send people back to obtain time travel info, making the database, etc.

Also it'd be really hard to have plot developments when everything that's going to happen is already recorded.

[Patrick Degan]

If the future scientists don't foresee the true significance of the Time Travel database, you could get a nice paradox:

"So we want info on time travel. Let's send people back in time and collect data."
"Hey look at this, all the information we could ever want, with a convenient carrying handle."
"Oh well, don't worry about sending those people then, we're all done."

So nobody goes back in time and the database never gets made, so the people in the future send people back to obtain time travel info, making the database, etc.

This doesn't guarantee the future scientists not proceeding with the experiments to test the validity of the alleged data. In fact, its very existence is likely to trigger off the experimental investigation.

As David Xanatos once said, "time travel's funny that way".

[Cao Cao]

I believe if time travel were possible, anything that has happened in the past thanks to time travellers simply must happen.
If such data would prevent time travel in the first place, then the data would be lost, for example.

[Stile]

One of the theories of time travel has postulated using a type of tunnel with twin wormholes. The problem with the theory is that if the wormholes would be the two end points, thus you couldnt travel into the past farther than when the wormhole was made.
We havent seem any evidence of time-travellers because a time machine hasnt been invented yet.

[Zero]

This doesn't guarantee the future scientists not proceeding with the experiments to test the validity of the alleged data. In fact, its very existence is likely to trigger off the experimental investigation.

If the data's existance triggers the events that cause the collection of said data, then isn't information coming from nowhere?

[Patrick Degan]

This doesn't guarantee the future scientists not proceeding with the experiments to test the validity of the alleged data. In fact, its very existence is likely to trigger off the experimental investigation.

If the data's existance triggers the events that cause the collection of said data, then isn't information coming from nowhere?

No. The experimental data and the generation of that data still exist in two distinct points in space/time. Effect precedes Cause only from a certain perspective.

[brianeyci]

Or is it just a bulloxed idea that never see the light of day again.

Depends on what your goals are. If you're writing for yourself or fanfiction, anything's good. If you're writing to sell the best thing is start figuring out what's old and what's not and according to Stanley Schmidt it's too old. That's not to say it couldn't work but Gary Provost wrote the more stale your idea the better your writing has to be, or something along those lines. Time travel could work but it'll be a hard sell since it's one of the oldest SF novums around.

A word of warning all my advice is that of an amateur, but I just want to save you time. I wasted half a year writing bullshit SF stories before I started research and figured out what I was writing wasn't well thought out and old as a banana on aging pills.

Brian

[Lord Poe]

I can't recall where I read it, but one time travelling author said that if TT were possible, wouldn't the amount of spectators during historical events keep increasing?

But then, I guess we wouldn't notice here. Unless someone was holding up a camera phone as Jesus is being crucified...

[Patrick Degan]

I can't recall where I read it, but one time travelling author said that if TT were possible, wouldn't the amount of spectators during historical events keep increasing?

But then, I guess we wouldn't notice here. Unless someone was holding up a camera phone as Jesus is being crucified...

That was Stephen Hawking.

[Stuart Mackey]

I can't recall where I read it, but one time travelling author said that if TT were possible, wouldn't the amount of spectators during historical events keep increasing?

But then, I guess we wouldn't notice here. Unless someone was holding up a camera phone as Jesus is being crucified...

That was Stephen Hawking.

I have this image of of the crowd/soldiers/crusifiyree's on calvalry all looking at the camera saying 'cheese' in a Monty Pythonesque way.
I think I prefer Diana Gabaldon's premise that one cannot change the future because you are already part of the past.

[Ar-Adunakhor]

There is also the possibility that time travel is eventually developed, but it happens so far in the future that our historical events are like the major historical events of the Uquabatan Empire in darkest Africa. We might get one or two popping in somewhere for the sake of completeness, but they really could not care less.

[Patrick Degan]

Three possibilities:

1) Time travel is possible, but only to the future and back —i.e. travel to the past beyond the point of the machine's invention is not possible.

2) Time travel to the past is possible, but only at a considerable energy penalty since the "past" is fixed whereas the "future" is fluid; hence not many voyages to the past are made.

3) Time travel to the past is possible, but only to those points in the past where the traveler was and will always be part of the flow of events; anywhenelse the past is a solid wall of spatio-temporal concrete.