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Ship of Fools: A Taylor Varga Omake (Complete)

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Ship of Fools: A Taylor Varga Omake (Complete) Demons and Angels Seven Days to Skitter
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Jacen1 said:
Perhaps, but at that point in her own timeline, she was still Taylor. The Universe likely treats her as Taylor+Varga, not some new entity that is a combination of Taylor and Varga or as a replacement for Taylor.

Screwing with one's own history, even in a way you would not know about before doing so, rarely ends well.
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The highest(in every sense of the word) authorities on time travel Misters Bill S. Preston Esq. and Ted Theodore Logan would beg to differ with you.

I'm sorry but any attempt at time travel shenanigans that tries to be more serious than Bill & Ted is both vacuous nonsense and little more than authorial fiat designed to let them not handle difficult to fit into the story aspects. Don't try to dress it up, there is nothing wrong with limiting a story to only what you want to deal with, but own that shit and don't try to make excuses.

That last bit wasn't directed at you in particular Jacen but authors in general
 
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Ash19256 said:
Except that event was being observed at the time by those present, and thus the quantum waveforms involved had already collapsed - so this would likely be more akin to going back over previous observations.

Unless, of course, lab results and printouts change whenever someone new observes them.
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To my knowledge, this doesn't happen. If you take a reading and print out the results, the results don't change just because someone else decides to read the printout. Also, I suspect that quantum uncertainty is wrong about the location of something only being decided when it's under direct observation. It's more likely that the location would have been exactly where it is observed in that precise moment even if nobody was looking.

zhuull said:
The highest(in every sense of the word) authorities on time travel Misters Bill S. Preston Esq. and Ted Theodore Logan would beg to differ with you.

I'm sorry but any attempt at time travel shenanigans that tries to be more serious than Bill & Ted is both vacuous nonsense and little more than authorial fiat designed to let them not handle difficult to fit into the story aspects. Don't try to dress it up, there is nothing wrong with limiting a story to only what you want to deal with, but own that shit and don't try to make excuses.

That last bit wasn't directed at you in particular Jacen but authors in general
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Those movies are amusing, even if they are bad. What they aren't is a serious look at time travel. They handwave and flat out ignore all the problems associated with time travel. Instead they use the Rule Of Funny for the internal logic. For the universe those two movies establish, time travel exists only because it exists. After all, time travel was invented by a society built on the foundation of Wild Stallion, a band which is created by the titular Bill and Ted only because someone from the future goes back, gives them a time machine so they can do a history report (which history says they did), then later use time travel to teach the duo how to actually play the guitar (and assemble a band) in time to win a Battle of the Bands. Even the final climactic showdown in Bogus Journey with the badguy is played for laughs. The whole "Oh yeah, well I won because I went back in time and did this" verbal spar (complete with each statement altering the present) is silly in the extreme. After all, why would whoever wins the battle have allowed the other side's time manipulation traps to have happened in the first place?

For all the flaws in the trilogy, Back to the Future does try to take a serious look at the ramifications of time travel. But those movies use the idea that time is not only alterable, but that outside of personal consequences there is no real danger. In the first movie Marty McFly could have stayed in the past, had that (squicky) relationship with his mother, and things would have worked out just fine. One of two things would have happened: The future changes (as indicated by the photo) but Marty is unaffected and continues the relationship, or Marty fades out of existence because he was never born. In which case his trip to the past never happens, and his parents meet exactly like they were suppose to so nothing changes. Well, other then Doc Brown maybe deciding not to build a time machine after watching Marty McFly butterfly himself into non-existence.
 
Watching the past means intercepting photons (at least). Whether or not that is significant, depends.
 
Wonder what would happen if Varga met The Doctor. That would be amusing. Varga's adamant "Nope. No time travel. Nope." Compared to someone whose whole shtick is time travel - of course The Doctor lives in a universe very friendly to the idea. It let him get away with stealing someone from a fixed-point death... as long as they eventually get back to it, anyway.
 
Problem with time viewers:

1) You need to be able to view a different location than the one where the viewer is currently placed, because the Earth is constantly in motion.
2) If you can view different locations, then you can set the time to one microsecond in the past.

Net result: privacy as a concept is no longer valid. Depending upon how expensive and ubiquitous the technology is, it could range from the government being able to retroactively fine you for crimes committed in the past to your creepy stalker being able to watch you take a shower this morning.
 
MTB said:
Watching the past means intercepting photons (at least). Whether or not that is significant, depends.
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Not always. I've ran a character in a super hero game who built a hand held scanner that could show you what happened in a location up to 24 hours in the past. This was done by analyzing the quantum decay of an area to reconstruct what happened. It was 100% accurate within twelve hours, and accurate enough within 24 hours to point you towards where to find evidence. Beyond that though it would rapidly become unreliable. No intercepting photons in the past involved.

Granted, in-game because I flubbed (barely) my "turn it on to see if it actually works" check while passing the design and construction checks easily there was a glitch in the scanner. Sometimes instead of showing the past, it would construct a simulation of what may happen in the future. With no way of knowing when it does this instead of showing the past. The GM used that glitch on occasion as a launching point for an adventure. For example one adventure got kicked off because the police called in my character to analyze a crime scene which had been professionally Cleaned. The results weren't admissible, but it would at least point them towards where to start the investigation. Instead the scanner showed a scene of utter ruin. Which lead to the party investigating, and thwarting villain who's Doomsday device (the plan was to hold the city hostage by threatening to encase it in ice if not paid) had a critical flaw in the power plant. A flaw which had a 50/50 chance of leveling the city via atomic explosion.
 
When there's no time travel involved with your past scanner you won't have causality issues, sure. That just leaves Derek M's points ...
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
Would a device that could show exactly what happened say, twelve hours in the past, but not change those events be useless? Hell no. If it was provably accurate then law enforcement agencies would pay a lot of money for such a device. And even if it wasn't admissible in court it would still let investigators where to look for evidence. If it could be used to view the past of a remote location then intelligence agencies would consider it invaluable. If the device can show you what happened thousands or millions of years then the scientific community would praise the invention. No longer would they have to guess and try piecing history together. They could just watch what happened and study ancient civilizations or long extinct animals.

Physically traveling through time is a horribly dangerous thing to do. But just observation? That is safe, and could provide valuable services.
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As @Derek M pointed out, any time viewer that can view the past has an issue in that there's no easy way to block said viewer from being set to view a time only nanoseconds past the current time, making your machine the most efficient spying device possible. I don't recall the author, but this was the subject of a very early SF short story that's gotten innumerable reprints and been used several times as the basis for other stories.
 
Trufla said:
As @Derek M pointed out, any time viewer that can view the past has an issue in that there's no easy way to block said viewer from being set to view a time only nanoseconds past the current time, making your machine the most efficient spying device possible. I don't recall the author, but this was the subject of a very early SF short story that's gotten innumerable reprints and been used several times as the basis for other stories.
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And I agree, that's pretty true. The only way around that is for there to only be one of the device, and for it to be controlled by someone with uncompromising morals. I'd even admitted that intelligence agencies around the world would love to get their hand on such a device if it could view remote locations.
 
Nano Soldier said:
Whoever invented the idea of time travel has caused a lot of arguments.
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And headaches. But the concept has been around for a long time. H.G. Wells's The Time Machine was not the first such story by any stretch of the imagination. It even crops up occasionally in myth and legend. But as science advances we realize more and more just how bad of an idea time travel really is.
 
CmptrWz said:
Except that in quantum mechanics, observing something can change it...so even viewing the past may change the past.
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.....You do know the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle explicitly deals with discrete subatomic particles only, not macroscopic objects, right? Very little in Quantum Physics applies in any meaningful way on a scale that we humans generally care about, and if the setting involves "Temporal Inertia" then the minor effects caused by viewing the past will quickly be smoothed out.

As to the issues with privacy, the same can be said of binoculars, wire taps, directional microphones and every other device that enables users to spy on people. This is a question on the morality of using the device, not the safety of doing so. Will such a device be the ultimate surveillance device? Of course. Will every organization in every government that is concerned with security lobby to have the use of said device be heavily regulated, complete with hardwired lockouts on research models to keep them from looking into the recent past? You better believe it.
 
Derek M said:
Problem with time viewers:

1) You need to be able to view a different location than the one where the viewer is currently placed, because the Earth is constantly in motion.
2) If you can view different locations, then you can set the time to one microsecond in the past.

Net result: privacy as a concept is no longer valid. Depending upon how expensive and ubiquitous the technology is, it could range from the government being able to retroactively fine you for crimes committed in the past to your creepy stalker being able to watch you take a shower this morning.
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There's a book by Stephen Baxter, based on a synopsis from Arthur C Clarke that is exactly like that premise.
The Wikipedia synopsis is slightly different from my memory of it, but overall society goes weird..
The Light of Other Days - Wikipedia
 
I wanted to do a whole rant about how the "observer effect" has nothing at all to do with your mark 1 eyeball looking at something and everything to do with using enough energy on a quantum system to disrupt it enough for the waveform to collapse as you measure stuff about the system.

But then I managed to write my entire argument in a single sentence and decided not to.:rolleyes:
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
Time tourism could be one reason. Although why anyone would want to travel to the middle ages or earlier is beyond me. Then there's the academic aspect. Imagine the joygasm that historians and archiologists would have if they could actually travel back in time to witness first hand things rather then try to piece them together with fragments.
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In Robert Asprin's Time Scout series one of the reasons people travel back to places like Ancient Rome is sex tourism, for obvious - if very unpleasant - reasons.

The only amusing part about the practice is that in order not to be mistaken for Jews in times when that was a lot more dangerous the guys who want to time travel have to have their circumcisions reversed. Something the time travel organization's doctor does through gritted teeth and with the minimum amount of painkillers she can get away with.

Then there's the movie where rubberneckers go back in time to watch disasters from a safe distance. [edit] The movie is called either Timescape or Grand Tour: Disaster in Time depending on if you see it on TV or on video.
 
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Derek M said:
Problem with time viewers:

1) You need to be able to view a different location than the one where the viewer is currently placed, because the Earth is constantly in motion.
2) If you can view different locations, then you can set the time to one microsecond in the past.

Net result: privacy as a concept is no longer valid. Depending upon how expensive and ubiquitous the technology is, it could range from the government being able to retroactively fine you for crimes committed in the past to your creepy stalker being able to watch you take a shower this morning.
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My own thinking exactly. There was a short story (one of Isaac Asimov's maybe?) where some scientists (scientists and historians) did an end run around government opposition to develop a time viewer they hoped would be able to look back further than a few years, not having considered that possibility.

The government agent who finally explained the reason for not releasing it actually got their agreement it was better not to release the technology... but by then it was too late because one of them had already sent the plans out to everyone he could think of. This was pre-internet as far as I can recall.

I believe the final line may have been something about "the men who murdered privacy."
 
Trufla said:
As @Derek M pointed out, any time viewer that can view the past has an issue in that there's no easy way to block said viewer from being set to view a time only nanoseconds past the current time, making your machine the most efficient spying device possible. I don't recall the author, but this was the subject of a very early SF short story that's gotten innumerable reprints and been used several times as the basis for other stories.
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Issac Asimov, The Dead Past
 
Troy Guffey said:
Issac Asimov, The Dead Past
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I did not recall that it was by Asimov, but I definitely read it many years ago. It's interesting that the Wikipedia page points out that, while the destruction of the concept of privacy is laid at the foot of the protagonists, in reality, privacy died years ago, but the ability to violate it at will was restricted to the government. All the protagonists really did was break the government's monopoly on it.

It's actually quite a prescient piece of work when you think about the attempt by governments to mandate access to encryption keys and such. There are many, many governments that try to regulate public and private behavior with sometimes draconian penalties, so I find the idea of a chronoviewer an unappealing one.
 
I was just reading some Xander Harris stuff - I forget the details of the Buffy-verse you said you were following, but...

Offering Fred Burkle a chance to go live somewhere else (like the Stargate-universe) sounds like a good idea... Might involve a trip to Pylea... And, finding Illyria's sarcophagus so as to give it a nice, friendly, EDM coating would be a good follow-up... Not to mention finding Darla's remains and making sure no one gets to call her back...

Then there's grabbing Angel, restoring him to life (pretty sure they've got all the bits needed), put the Orbs of Nezzla-Khan back into play, in a protective cover, so Angel can still be tough guy...

Slap a one-shot healer on Cordelia Chase, and make her the guardian of a one-shot bush (and give Oz one to look after).

Xander should enjoy the opportunity to trash so many prophecies! :)
 
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Honestly, someone really needs to hit both Angel and Wes with a Clue-by-four or three. I mean, Angel's brilliant plan of "let's infiltrate the Evil Law Firm, let them mess with our brains, then take them down from the inside" was pure idiocy and actually allowed Wolfram & Hart to get away with even more stuff since he thought he was getting reports on everything they are doing. As for the 'Rogue Demon Hunter', sure that was an attempt to revamp him from a spineless wimp into a badass. But he frequently stopped using what brains he displayed in season 3 of BTVS before getting fired. Between him and Angel's arrogance they allowed so much bad stuff to go down that they could have prevented.
 
Ace Dreamer said:
I was just reading some Xander Harris stuff - I forget the details of the Buffy-verse you said you were following, but...

Offering Fred Burkle a chance to go live somewhere else (like the Stargate-universe) sounds like a good idea... Might involve a trip to Pylea... And, finding Illyria's sarcophagus so as to give it a nice, friendly, EDM coating would be a good follow-up... Not to mention finding Darla's remains and making sure no one gets to call her back...
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Eh, the problem there is that as much as l'd like to have Fred survive it would be a shame to miss out on the Varga/Illyria interactions. :D
 
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