Lore on Theories of Time Travel

[Ocicat]

Fun little video from Lore of Wired, rating the various forms of literary time travel.  His rating series is always funny, and this one seemed appropriate to post here.  It also manages to do a pretty good job of spelling out why time travel stories almost never work for me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pH_p9HUAvik

[Heradel]

Fun little video from Lore of Wired, rating the various forms of literary time travel.  His rating series is always funny, and this one seemed appropriate to post here.  It also manages to do a pretty good job of spelling out why time travel stories almost never work for me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pH_p9HUAvik

Note: As opposed to Lore of Star Trek. Video is not of an evil android.

[Ocicat]

Video is not of an evil android.

Not as far as I know.  And I used to live with him...
He almost changed his name when that character was introduced to ST:TNG.  I told him that it was a minor character, and that in 10 years, people would stop getting confused about it.

Oh well.  You can't win 'em all.

[H. Bergeron]

I posted a comment, but I'll cross-post it to here, since I'll get more actual discussion out of this board than the Youtube comments:

I don't see why the Time Police idea gets a D+. It was pretty cool in Asimov's "The End Of Eternity," I thought.

[Windup]

I had never thought about it before, but Time Police may be the ultimate expression of an organization's tendency to place its own survival ahead of all other considerations, including the purpose for which it was originally formed.

[eytanz]

Does anyone here read the webcomic Starslip Crisis (http://www.starslip.com/)? The timewar arc, which has the future time police/army going to war (actual war, not metaphorically) against its own past - is an interesting twist on the notion, even though the actual execution in the comic tended to be a bit inconsistent and broad. The (temporary) ending of the arc, reached last week, is especially intriguing as an idea.

[Planish]

I don't see why the Time Police idea gets a D+.

Because it's a ... cop-out?

Robert L. Forward had something going in "Time Master", where the hero deals with time travel paradoxes the way you would employ negative feedback in electronics.

Unfortunately, he still had to resort to the "I obviously did then, so now I gotta..." notion to keep the plot going.

[Zathras]

I don't know who the author was or what the series was titled, but I read a book about time cops.  They had a Time and Place that they had their headquarters in because of timeline changes.  They used some sort of hover bikes.  Sorry, that's all I remember.

[slic]

hey Zathras - I remember something similar and their HQs were at a) the very beginning of time and b) the very end - so a)they wouldn't get affect by any changes and b) so they could monitor changes against a baseline (pun intendend)

hey Ignoranus - because any time cop version would have to employ one of the ridiculous plot devices of "any change doesn't take affect for 24 hours" or "time cops are affected by changes because..."  and finally because who decides what the "real" timeline is?

To add:
When he mentioned the closed loop object (gold potato ricer) he forgot the problem of not being able to create mass only convert it.  Where did the mass come from before the closed loop and where did it go after? D-

[deflective]

ah, sweet! a Lore ranking, thanks for linking this. i haven't seen one since 2003.

as always, the more complicated an idea is the better it's gonna be represented by a comic.

When he mentioned the closed loop object (gold potato ricer) he forgot the problem of not being able to create mass only convert it.

both create & convert are causal concepts and kinda go out the window once time travel is introduced.

[slic]

both create & convert are causal concepts and kinda go out the window once time travel is introduced.

Now that I think about it, if you combine the many fractured time line idea with this idea it could be explained.  At the moment the time traveller "arrived" with the golden potato ricer it would have come from matter not in this universe - but it would come from the matter of another universe I suppose.

[Darwinist]

Cool video.  I'm in the minority here as time travel stories almost always work for me.  Yeah, I suppose it can be nitpicked to death, but so can most of the sci-fi sub-genres.  I guess I just look past the implausibilities like I would when I'm reading or listening to fantasy. 

[Russell Nash]

Cool video.  I'm in the minority here as time travel stories almost always work for me.  Yeah, I suppose it can be nitpicked to death, but so can most of the sci-fi sub-genres.  I guess I just look past the implausibilities like I would when I'm reading or listening to fantasy. 

If the stories good, I'll let a lot of stuff side, but as soon as it gets bad, I attack.