Defeating Time Travel

[brianeyci]

How about forcing a paradox?

A stupid time travel user could get delusions of grandeur and want to bite off more than he could chew. I'm not creative enough this morning to think of a trap, but I'm sure this afternoon I'll come up with one. Like forcing him to come back in time and kill his grandfather, or more devious.

If paradoxes are disallowed, who knows what might happen. The machine might just not work, or it might break, or such a thing might frustrate the time travel opponent entirely. More likely the machine just wouldn't time travel, but it always depends on the time travel physics themselves. In some universes encountering your past self causes both to be destroyed.

I'm assuming you're fighting with the knowledge of time travel mechanics and you can't construct a time travel machine yourself, rather than not knowing a rats ass about time travel. The former it's possible, the latter it's a lot worse than the Fiijans. More like rats and someone from space firing a meteorite. Time Travel is usually considered the ultimate weapon in most non-time travel series, and I believe in Dr. Who as well (although I don't watch most of it.) So time travel is science fiction's WMD.

[Darth Wong]

So you can't defeat Time Lords because their time machines have all kinds of fantastic capabilities and virtually inexhaustible energies from a super-advanced infrastructure ... what the fuck does this tell us about the difficulty of overcoming time travel as a tactic? Absolutely nothing, because such a hyper-advanced civilization would be insanely difficult to defeat even without their time travel.

[General Zod]

How about forcing a paradox?

A stupid time travel user could get delusions of grandeur and want to bite off more than he could chew. I'm not creative enough this morning to think of a trap, but I'm sure this afternoon I'll come up with one. Like forcing him to come back in time and kill his grandfather, or more devious.

If paradoxes are disallowed, who knows what might happen. The machine might just not work, or it might break, or such a thing might frustrate the time travel opponent entirely. More likely the machine just wouldn't time travel, but it always depends on the time travel physics themselves. In some universes encountering your past self causes both to be destroyed.

I'm assuming you're fighting with the knowledge of time travel mechanics and you can't construct a time travel machine yourself, rather than not knowing a rats ass about time travel. The former it's possible, the latter it's a lot worse than the Fiijans. More like rats and someone from space firing a meteorite. Time Travel is usually considered the ultimate weapon in most non-time travel series, and I believe in Dr. Who as well (although I don't watch most of it.) So time travel is science fiction's WMD.

Depending on how time travel rules of the universe in question work, creating a time paradox would be a bad thing. In Whoverse you wind up having that particular area of the universe get eaten by creatures that show up whenever a time paradox happens. So if you don't know the rules you could quite literally make things much much worse. It's why Time Lords won't just go back and try fixing a problem again and again til they get it right.

[brianeyci]

Well it again does depend on the universe.

But in the most logical kind of universe, paradoxes are just not allowed to happen. Let's say you meet an enemy from the future. A potential protection against that enemy is to note something important about that enemy. For example, he's from this or this town, or this or this place. Then place your command bunker or even kidnap his great grandfather, and keep his great grandfather alive by your side all the time. Time travel is defeated, because every time the fuck tries to go back in time to kill you, he's just prevented from going back in time at all. It could even be something simple, like a friend of the friend of the future time traveler. The possibilities to protect yourself are endless, provided you know a bit about the time traveler to start with.

And he doesn't even have to know that. All the defender has to do is create a secret society, which only a handful of people know about, whose sole purpose is to survive as far into the future as possible and kill any time travelers moving backwards. That is possible because the past happens before the future, so you'd be able to know about how the devastating attack or infiltration was carried out and bring that information into the future to stop the backwards movement. It stands to reason that the mathematics and physics behind time travel will be discovered long before an actual time machine is created. The defenders will likely be people without time machines who know about their theory, while the attackers will have time machines.

So viewed this way, time travel is easily defeated, assuming the defender knows the physics behind time travel and knows something about the attacker.

[General Zod]

So viewed this way, time travel is easily defeated, assuming the defender knows the physics behind time travel and knows something about the attacker.

The obvious problem here is, in order to know the physics and laws behind time travel, you have to be technologically on par with the enemy you're attempting to defeat to be aware of said laws. In which case, it's somewhat of a moot point attempting to attack them.

[brianeyci]

Not really. You only have to know how a time machine works, and how to take advantage of its weaknesses, but not have the infrastructure or experience to build one yourself. Maybe physics and science was too much -- all a person would have to know is what time machines did, not the underlying mechanisms behind them. As in, what happens when a paradox is created. Or what happens if I create a secret society whose sole purpose is to go into the future with knowledge of the time traveler's atrocities and destroy him.

History is full of examples of people adapting to tactics and technology while not being able to manufacture such technology themselves. Unless the time traveler can literally bring back whole armies, I don't see what huge advantage he has, again depending on the universe's laws. Simply keep a relative of the time traveler, or relatives, or friends, or friends of friends of the future time traveler nearby. Oops, he's prevented from going back and detonating explosives while you're in the shitter, because it would create a paradox and end his own existence.

[General Zod]

Not really. You only have to know how a time machine works, and how to take advantage of its weaknesses, but not have the infrastructure or experience to build one yourself. Maybe physics and science was too much -- all a person would have to know is what time machines did, not the underlying mechanisms behind them. As in, what happens when a paradox is created. Or what happens if I create a secret society whose sole purpose is to go into the future with knowledge of the time traveler's atrocities and destroy him.

Here's the problem though. Short of gaining access to records by previous time travelers, how are they going to find out precisely what those time machines did? You might be able to understand the basics of it (atom bombs split apart atoms to create a big bang, rail guns use magnets to fire bullets), but without any more significant amount of knowledge you'll have at best a fraction of the understanding you'll need.

History is full of examples of people adapting to tactics and technology while not being able to manufacture such technology themselves. Unless the time traveler can literally bring back whole armies, I don't see what huge advantage he has, again depending on the universe's laws. Simply keep a relative of the time traveler, or relatives, or friends, or friends of friends of the future time traveler nearby. Oops, he's prevented from going back and detonating explosives while you're in the shitter, because it would create a paradox and end his own existence.

Knowing a great deal about a given historical situation and how events fold out can give someone a significant edge if he's seeking to manipulate events within a certain timeframe. It's like going to a poker game and already knowing what hands your opponents are going to deal, letting you know how to bluff, when to bluff and when to fold.

[brianeyci]

All good points, but this is quickly becoming a chicken or the egg question. Let's look at this from a different perspective.

All I have to say is I am traveling through time right now. That's right, I'm in the future, one second from the past.

So the primitive countermeasure of time travel seems to be, as soon as your society discovers the math and science behind time traveling (and why not, theory always predates application sometimes by hundreds of years) you create a secret society whose sole purpose is to survive for all time and prevent backwards movement.

I don't see how time travel is such a devastating tactic, given I'm traveling through time right now.

Historical records can be dated and entirely wrong. If you're traveling close to your own time period, presumably your adversaries know about time travel and have countermeasures (great scientific discoveries are almost always done in parallel by many people at the same time on different continents even). If you're traveling back to ancient history, records can be wrong, the culture may be wrong, and especially the language may be wrong. I'm not at all convinced that it's a huge advantage. If I went back in time, me, just one lone man, to kill Caesar, I wouldn't know where to start.

[General Zod]

All good points, but this is quickly becoming a chicken or the egg question. Let's look at this from a different perspective.

All I have to say is I am traveling through time right now. That's right, I'm in the future, one second from the past.

So the primitive countermeasure of time travel seems to be, as soon as your society discovers the math and science behind time traveling (and why not, theory always predates application sometimes by hundreds of years) you create a secret society whose sole purpose is to survive for all time and prevent backwards movement.

Theory can be vastly different from application and experimental data, however. Scientists were worried that the atom bomb would never stop once detonated until they tested it out (for example).

I don't see how time travel is such a devastating tactic, given I'm traveling through time right now.

Historical records can be dated and entirely wrong. If you're traveling close to your own time period, presumably your adversaries know about time travel and have countermeasures (great scientific discoveries are almost always done in parallel by many people at the same time on different continents even). If you're traveling back to ancient history, records can be wrong, the culture may be wrong, and especially the language may be wrong. I'm not at all convinced that it's a huge advantage. If I went back in time, me, just one lone man, to kill Caesar, I wouldn't know where to start.

If the historical records are wrong, a knowledgeable traveller will be able to pick up on this, and still exploit things to their advantage. Time Travel's best advantage is probably as an observational tool with minimal interaction, however. Need to know where a valuable historical document disappeared? Travel back in time to its last known location and find out what happened. Want to know what someone's deathbed confession was in regards to a valuable location/object/event? Go back in time and learn of it, then travel back forwards and find it in the present. Plenty of possibilities without descending into retarded Star Trek physics.

[SirNitram]

So you can't defeat Time Lords because their time machines have all kinds of fantastic capabilities and virtually inexhaustible energies from a super-advanced infrastructure ... what the fuck does this tell us about the difficulty of overcoming time travel as a tactic? Absolutely nothing, because such a hyper-advanced civilization would be insanely difficult to defeat even without their time travel.

Indeed. Of course, they did get defeated in what appears to be a non-paradox-frenzy war("Ten thousand ships on fire...." to quote the surviving Time Lord), by an opponent of roughly similar, if slightly inferior quality, and vastly superior raw numbers.

The Time Lords were the epitome of Sufficiently Advanced Technology, though it's very interesting to see what happens without their infrastructure(Paradoxs are now dangerous as hell, for example).

[mr friendly guy]

Generally the Time Lords don't like creating paradoxes except in extreme situations. The most obvious ones were in "The Three Doctors" and "Genesis of the Daleks". We see in "Father's Day" there is a price (and in the novels there are other consequences) for creating paradoxes and presumably the Time Lords aren't willing to pay it very frequently.

I can suggest a few anti-time travel scenarios I have seen in sci fi

1) In Legion of Superheroes before the reboot Darkseid would have inadvertantly created a paradox by taking his younger self body. To prevent this he tried to siphon loads of dark matter, to create a giant body of mass. Presumably this is supposedly similar to how a singularity's immense gravity affects time. So presumably powerful gravity wells might be able to prevent paradox. Don't know enough about the physics of this to comment much more though.

2) In the Whoverse novels its mentioned that in the early time wars some races deployed devices which could destroy a TARDIS while it was time travelling "near" such a device. I supposed it could be seen as an equivalent to the IEDs insurgents are using in Iraq. A poor man's weapon to try and counter a more technologically superior foe. Note these races most probably didn't have time travel capability but understood enough about the theory to build some defenses against it.

Any way these devices were littered into the time vortex to try and counter TL power. It didn't do enough. The Time Lords still won and cleared out most of them from the vortex. But presumably if the time travel capable enemy didn't have many time machines it could presumably work.

[Ford Prefect]

You know, I honestly can't think of many actual polities with time travel which aren't ungodly powerful. I mean, I know the Time Lords, the Daleks and ... the Xeelee. And Skynet, actually, but beyond that?

[Ariphaos]

You know, I honestly can't think of many actual polities with time travel which aren't ungodly powerful. I mean, I know the Time Lords, the Daleks and ... the Xeelee. And Skynet, actually, but beyond that?

Most forces in Star Trek short of the Q. The Whoverse has a lot of middling powers capable of using time travel.

There are a lot of limited time travel scenarios, where you can only go back so far, can only effectively observe, are essentially sent to a different universe, can only reverses time in a localized area, or face some other such limitation.

Weren't the Xeelee restricted to their own Universe? That's a limitation on a similar scale that a sufficiently massive entity could exploit.

[Ford Prefect]

Weren't the Xeelee restricted to their own Universe? That's a limitation on a similar scale that a sufficiently massive entity could exploit.

That was why they were building the Ring, in order to go somewhere new and exciting and possibly Photino Bird free.

[OmegaGuy]

Photino Birds never cared about other universes, they only wanted the main one to themselves. In fact IIRC the reason they tried to destroy the ring was because they feared extrauniversal invasion.

[Lord of the Abyss]

You know, I honestly can't think of many actual polities with time travel which aren't ungodly powerful. I mean, I know the Time Lords, the Daleks and ... the Xeelee. And Skynet, actually, but beyond that?

The future UN in Larry Niven's Svetz stories.

The various countries in Simon Hawke's Time Wars series.

The Snake and Spider factions in Fritz Lieber's Changewars stories.

Future Earth in Robert Silverberg's End of the Line.

Poul Anderson's Time Patrol.

The US and Soviet Union in Andre Norton's Time Trader stories.

[Xon]

Weren't the Xeelee restricted to their own Universe? That's a limitation on a similar scale that a sufficiently massive entity could exploit.

The Xeelee wish to travel to a different universe, where there is a hard discontinuity between thier current existance and where they wish to travel too.

We arent talking about a simple dimensional boundary that many settings have, or even other possible alternative timelines, but the 'universe' after all of space/time stops existing when the Monads infuse which potential universe becomes 'real'.

The Ring is quite literially a Clarke-Tech prayer for Divine Intervention and getting it.