Topic: Time Travel

[arakish]

Once again, I get a good question my players.  Although this question can also apply to Rolemaster (all versions), it got asked in the Spacemaster campaign.  I searched the forums, but there were no topics devoted to just Time Travel.  Just posts that mention "time travel" in passing.  And all of those are 3+ years old.

Question: Why can't we time travel?

I did not give them an answer right away.  Besides, I just hate always saying, "It's impossible," all the time.  I'd rather give a good reason why it is virtually impossible, instead of just saying it is impossible.  Below is the response I am currently working on.  Please give me some feedback on what y'all think.


Time Travel

Time Travel has become one of the most exploited subjects.  No other subject has elicited as much speculation in all fields of writing: science-fiction, romance, drama, suspense, and even theoretical physics.  In this section, I cover how I handle time travel.  Basically, anyone achieving the capability to telephase through time simply ceases to exist in the current timeline and slips into another, yet different, timelime, regardless.  Even if you try to get back to your original timeline, you will never make it.  Each time you try, you just create another timeline.  The best you can do is to find another timeline very similar to your original timeline.

IMHO, in real life, I do not think time travel is possible.  Even our current understanding of physics does not say that time travel is impossible.  Nor do they say it is possible.  When I say time travel, I do not mean the nice little "tricks" we can use to "appear" to time travel by using relativistic velocities or close approach to an immense gravitational field.  I mean true time travel much like opening a portal and stepping through like walking through a doorway.  Even if it were possible, I believe one would truly cease to exist in their original timeline and slip into another timeline.  And each time they telephase, they simply go into yet another completely different timeline.  And if they keep doing it, they may get so far removed from their original timeline, that the timelines they enter become more and more different than their original timeline.  The timelines may even get to a point where they are completely insane and unrecognizable.  One could even say that this would be similar to the sci-fi TV show Sliders (Wikipedia and IMDB and an Unofficial Site).

Into the Past

Travelling into the past is handled rather simply.  Since you will slip into another completely separate timeline, differences between the timelines can be virtually nil to extremely drastic.  To determine the differences between the two timelines, use the below equation:

Equation 1) oed100 - 200 - Mod; where oed100 = unmodified open-ended d100 roll, and Mod = -1 per 5 days travelled into the past.  NOTE: Travelling one 365-day year into the past would mean a Mod of -65.

Equation 2) oed100 - Mod; where oed100 = unmodified open-ended d100 roll, and Mod = -1 per 5 days travelled into the past.  NOTE: Travelling one 365-day year into the past would mean a Mod of -65.

The greater the negative number, the greater and more drastic the differences.  Basically, time travel into the past is usually not done.

Into the Future

Travelling into the future is handled in the same manner as travelling into the past.  However, the chances of differences are more drastic than travelling into the past.  Reasoning: The future has yet to happen and possesses many more possibilities.  To determine the differences between the two timelines, use the below equation:

Equation 1) oed100 - 500 - Mod; where Roll = unmodified open-ended d100 roll, and Mod = -1 per day travelled into the future.  NOTE: Travelling one 365-day year into the future would mean a Mod of -365.

Equation 2) oed100 - Mod; where Roll = unmodified open-ended d100 roll, and Mod = -1 per day travelled into the future.  NOTE: Travelling one 365-day year into the future would mean a Mod of -365.

The greater the negative number, the greater and more drastic the differences.  Basically, time travel into the future, also, is usually not done.


Another question.  Do you think Equations 1 are too drastic?  Or, not drastic enough?  Or, are Equations 2 good enough?

rmfr

[markc]

 From fiction I tend to think of time travel in two ways. One the portal method and the other the ability to change things as you go until you get to where you want to go (Amber book series). The portal method requires magic, psionics or machinery to operate, IMHO. The Amber Method as I will call it the person changes small things until they get the right image of the place/time they want to go. The Amber Method IMHO would require a lot of Re, Me and SD to get things just right for you to go where you want to go. I would place the stats above 110 or maybe higher to represent the level of dedication it would require to manipulate reality this way. Once you have decided on which method or methods then you can decide on the particulars on how you manipulate reality.


  About Time Travel if you could switch to dimension in which time had no meaning then you could in essence go back or forward in time upon returning to the dimension you wanted you would be when you wanted. 
 


 So you can see, I see Time Travel as a sub set of Dimension Travel.


MDC 

[JimiSue]

I am perhaps fortunate in that I have never had the problem of players wanting (or even asking about) time travel. I am not sure it's possible in the real, so I can't see a tech solution happen. But Psi and Magic do a lot of things that aren't possible according to physics so that seems like the way to go if ever I had a need to have it in a game.

For the future, this would be handled in much the same kind of way as you might handle divinitation magic and prophecies in a fantasy game. You can make a reasonable guess as to how things might turn out, but make it clear to the players that future events are inevitably tied to the past, and that things that happen in the present may still change the future that they visit.

For the past, I don't see a huge problem. I've always thought of the grandfather paradox as sloppy thinking. here's why. Let's say that a set of circumstances have happened that mean you have travelled into the past and shot your grandfather. Those who love this paradox say that when the grandfather is killed by the shot, that you will never have been born and therefore cannot have fired the shot, which means that your grandfather wouldn't have died, so you do exist after all, which means you can have travelled back in time and shot him... and so on. My take on this is that up to and including the moment that the trigger is pulled, you exist and the event then becomes a part of the past. The bullet kills the grandfather, at which point you cease to exist. However, because the trigger pulling is now an event in the past, it isn't changed. In effect, you have just set up a loop in time, and closed off one pathway. You future (and the future of that loop, technically) ends with the closure of that loop. However, in the world where the grandfather died, all that happens there is some guy from the future comes back, shoots the grandfather and then disappears without a trace. Your grandmother may remarry (assuming she has even met the grandfather by that time), and still have children, and the children of her kids may be similar to you... so if you insisted on still playing that character, the GM could have free rein to change your stats and perhaps even race and skills and history, as he wishes (is this the right moment for an evil laugh? Muahaha.  )

I do like time travel fiction though and have a number of short story compilations. Most of them about unforeseen consequences - e.g. a scientist goes back in time to visit the ancient Greeks. His intention is to pose as a traveller from a far off country, and give a push of a few hundred years to the advancement of science, so that when he returned to his own time there would be greater scientific achievement. However, when he returned it was a barely feudal world - what had happened was that the Greeks, while impressed by him, had decided there was no point trying to compete and so had turned away from the science entirely.

However, my favourite story is one where there is a time travel tourism business, and the guy in the story goes back in time to visit the crucifixion of Jesus. So he's given appropriate clothing to blend in, and  there in the square, Pontius Pilate does his thing, and and the guy notices that actually, there aren't that many people around him that look very middle eastern. And he can't hear any language other than his own. The story ends with the realisation that actually, everyone in the square clamoring for Jesus' death is actually a tourist like himself, too caught up in the thing to realise that they are changing (indeed, have already changed) history in a major way just by being there.

[GrumpyOldFart]

The bullet kills the grandfather, at which point you cease to exist. However, because the trigger pulling is now an event in the past, it isn't changed. In effect, you have just set up a loop in time, and closed off one pathway. You future (and the future of that loop, technically) ends with the closure of that loop.

Exactly. Whatever happens stays happened. You may be able to make it happen differently in another dimension, but you can't make it unhappen.

The Amber Method as I will call it the person changes small things until they get the right image of the place/time they want to go.

Which works for various incarnations of "reality" that are in a concurrent place on the timeline. But if you travel "back in time" to "your own past", but before _____ event happened, you actually traveled "sideways" to a nearly congruent reality where _____ event hasn't taken place yet, and may not. Yes, the guy looks and acts just like your grandfather when he was young, and is involved with a girl who looks and acts just like Grandma when she was young. They even have the same names. This reality is, after all, very nearly congruent.

But whatever happens stays happened. Unless the reality you were born into already has in its history (known or not is beside the point) the events you cause by your presence in the past, you can't travel back along this timeline, because those events have already failed to happen.

Travel "along a timeline" into the future is meaningless because the timeline you're in doesn't exist yet in the future. Or rather, it exists as a possibility, but there's no guarantee that the chaotic blend of events and decisions leading from "the present" that you traveled away from will ever result in "the future" you traveled to.

There are no "parallel realities". They aren't parallel for the same reason water molecules in a river aren't parallel, the term makes no sense where it is applied. Realities that appear to be "parallel' are only moving in a common direction at that point in their respective timelines.

Personally, I think the equations should do fine as is.

[JimiSue]

Although I do find that imaginings are generally a lot more interesting and believeable than randomness. I think this is why I enjoyed that Sliders show (mentioned above) so much when it was on - someone had clearly spent some time visiting significant (and sometimes not so significant) junction points in history and asked the question, what would have then happened if Y had happened instead of X? I strongly suspect that a lot of the creative minds behind it were very interested in modern history, because from that point of view it was quite educational. Like, if penicillin had not been discovered, with the population boom, bacterial infection was rampant, and by a country mile the number one killer. And that show  also raised an interesting point about getting back. There was one episode where they had literally a few seconds to decide if they were going to stay there, or miss the jump. They had appeared outside the main guy's house, and he tested the garden gate to see if it still squeaked - it didn't. Then he found a newspaper and quickly read some of the more unlikely things that had actually happened in the real world since they had gone. The consensus was that they were in a close parallel, but not the actual. Only to move on, and seconds later, his mother came out of the house, thanking a guy for finally oiling the gate and stopping it squeak, and the two of them wondering if the main guy whose name escapes me... (my memory is over 40 years old - remembering things isn't what it's good at any more) is ever going to find his way home again. Quite poignant in its own way.

The point (I think) is that when you start travelling in time, it's a one way journey. Because you can never be sure that you're back where you started.

Unless you take the view that in the very far future, someone travels forward in time, does that mean that all events up to then become set in as a timeline? Because that would mean that (Dr Who-like), you could then travel up and down it as your technology allowed.

Or, you can take the view that time heals itself. Sure, you can go back in time and kill Hitler. But that just clears the way for soeone else with strikingly similar views from rising up in his place. Or, to take the penicillin example above - maybe it wasn't discovered at the same time, but with advances in science and the proliferation of micro-biologists it is inconceivable that no one had ever discovered it. One thing I have noticed the more I study science is that quite often, a breakthrough happens in several places at once. For every person famous for whatever discovery, there are half a dozen people in the wings who very nearly got there before him (or in some cases actually did but failed to publish in time or even realise they have d a breakthrough.

The (new and improved) point here is that essentially, you can let your mind go wherever you want once you start in on time travel, because somewhere, there is a theory ready to be made up to explain it It's exactly what science fiction does best.

[Thom @ ICE]

That's funny... Just this past week two gentlemen at one of the airports I was in had a discussion about the exact same example - Penicillin had not been discovered.  They then went on to discuss
* What if Hitler had been killed earlier in his rise
* What if the nuclear bomb had never been dropped
* What if Robert Kennedy had not been assassinated

A very interesting conversation...

[GrumpyOldFart]

That's funny... Just this past week two gentlemen at one of the airports I was in had a discussion about the exact same example - Penicillin had not been discovered.  They then went on to discuss
* What if Hitler had been killed earlier in his rise
* What if the nuclear bomb had never been dropped
* What if Robert Kennedy had not been assassinated

A very interesting conversation...

And my short answer to those questions is that we'd be in that timeline, "what if" ing about if Hitler had lived, if they'd actually dropped that bomb, if they hadn't caught Oswald before he pulled the trigger.

Granted, that's only my answer, not necessarily everyone's. 

[JimiSue]

... at one of the airports I was in ...

So well travelled! And of course, you have travlled faster and further than most of us which means that relativistically you're now in a different time line. Hope the weather's nice over there :p

[GrumpyOldFart]

...which means that relativistically you're now in a different time line. Hope the weather's nice over there :p

Hmmm... I guess that explains the many times I've seen it rain on one person's yard and not his neighbor's.

 

[Cory Magel]

Let me first give my thoughts on traveling back in time.

1) Is it possible? I'm going to say yes, although I don't think in real life it is possible. Even if it were rule two applies...
2) You can't change anything.  Whatever you do is either irrelevant (if you don't have a goal) or is part of what results in what you already know of your life.
3) Moving from one variation of a reality to another has nothing to do with your time travel.

So, Rule #2 is the main sticking point.  If you move backwards in time do you remove yourself from the effects of that timeline?  Meaning if you change something, would you know it?

Let's say you want to stop something from happening.  So you go back in time and you actually stop it from happening.  It now did not happen and there was no reason for the future you to try and stop it from happening - because it didn't happen.  Thus, you could potentially change something... but you wouldn't know it because the new reality is your reality.

Now, this is where you could say that the character has created a new reality and is now stuck with the consequences (their life may now be unrecognizable to them).  Furthermore anything they do to try and 'repair' that could result in further corrupting things from the eyes the person messing with time.  In this theory you are assuming the pre time travel character is immune to the impact of the changes.  That doesn't make sense to me.  So, I don't subscribe to that theory.  I just say you can't change the past and everything you do to try and change something is either ineffective or partially responsible for what you are trying to change.

Why?  Because I don't want spells with the ability to mess with things that have already occurred to throw a campaign into chaos from the GM's perspective.  If it were not for that I might let people actually change the past.

Now, can you travel forward in time?  Sure, why not.

Real world?  In a manner of speaking we already know it's possible simply due to the slowing of time due to speed... you just have to be going really fast for it to have any impact what-so-ever.  Ok, so you really are not 'traveling through time', but you almost accomplish the same thing.  However once you've traveled forward you can't go back so far as we know.

Game world?  I would allow the player to see what has happened in the future and act on that information, possibly changing the future because it has not happened yet.  Now, this is an interesting situation because you could really do whatever you want as a GM.

The character may want to prevent a certain persons death at a specific point in time for example, and accomplish it, but in doing so change the future they saw thereafter... so everything else from that point on out no longer applies.  For example, let's say in the future they saw they were very poor, but also see a fledgling company from their normal timeline that became a mega-corporation in the future, so they invest heavily in it when they go back to their normal timeline.  In the future they saw this did not happen and they have therefore altered that future.  Butterfly effect - they set off a series of seemingly unrelated events that result in the failure of that company.  They know what would have happened if they'd left it alone, but because they didn't it potentially changed.

Hopefully that all made sense.

[Cory Magel]

Oh... and the "Grandfather" paradox.  Simple: Whoever was trying to kill the Grandfather screwed up.

1) You, or whoever's grandfather you thought you were killing, was not the correct person... same name, mistaken identity, identity theft, adoption... etc.
2) One of the women who helps/saves the shot grandfather turns out to be the grandmother.
3) Maybe you got caught trying to shoot him and now spend X number of years in jail in the past... (which could create a wonderful new problem for your character in their normal timeline if they ever get back to it depending on how much of your identification was tracked).

[GrumpyOldFart]

You shot Grandma's boy toy! 

[Cory Magel]

There was a show called "Seven Days" on once where the main character was able to travel back in time up to seven days via a government program created to stop 'bad things' from happening to the US/World.

We always laughed because how did the people who sent him back really know what happened?  He always prevented what they sent him back to prevent.  So you go back seven days, spend a week on the beach in Hawaii, come back and... "Hey guys! I saved the world again! You'll never guess what happened this time..."

[arakish]

Cory,

I remember "Seven Days" and wondered the same things for the same reasons.

I also understand the "Butterfly Effect" you mentioned.  For instance, since I know what has happened in my current timeline, suppose I could send a message back to myself while I was in the US Navy and tell myself to invest heavily in Microsoft, thinking it might make me a millionaire today.

However, step in with the "Butterfly Effect".  I do invest heavily in Microsoft starting in 1981.  But my investments causes Microsoft to completely fold under, still leaving me as I am today.

I completely understand that.  The same goes for seeing the "future" and and making changes "now".  However, no matter what, that "future" still happens, just in a different fashion.  Say it was seeing one's love dying in a car wreck.  You work to ensure that the time of the car wreck your love is not in a car.  However, instead of dying in a car wreck, your love dies in an elevator accident.

I can also see such happening.

All Others,

Thanks for your insights and thoughts.  Even I have to admit, when it comes to time travel (or more accurately, temporal mechanics), I tend to begin to think that it is just easier to say it is impossible.  Yes, I do enjoy a good time travel story.  However, like Corey Magel said...

... I don't want spells with the ability to mess with things that have already occurred to throw a campaign into chaos from the GM's perspective.  If it were not for that I might let people actually change the past.

However, I always state that the future is mutable.  By acting in the present, you can change how the future may occur.  Then comes the sticky part with actually knowing exactly what the future will be like.

Thus, I am with Cory Magel.  Travel into the past is just plain impossible.  They can use spells/psions to "see" the past, but that is all they can do.

As for travel into the future, I'm still going to have think about that.

rmfr

[markc]

  When I played in a game in 84-86 what my PC did was go back in time and bury items that I would dig up when I went into the future. Sometimes the items were there sometimes they were not. At times the items were in good condition and others they were not. So it was not a sure thing which I was ok with.
  I used some of the $ to fund a magic item I was making and the rest I gave away to various charities, the poor, to have parties and other people and events that I deemed of worth (both good and not so good, but not evil). There were also time police so I was careful as I could be to not upset the timeline too much.


MDC

[Cory Magel]

I completely understand that.  The same goes for seeing the "future" and and making changes "now".  However, no matter what, that "future" still happens, just in a different fashion.  Say it was seeing one's love dying in a car wreck.  You work to ensure that the time of the car wreck your love is not in a car.  However, instead of dying in a car wreck, your love dies in an elevator accident.

Just to clarify on what I meant... I would actually let someone save an individual if they saw they were going to die in the future (or alter any event if they managed to do so) and that same relative event (a specific person dying for example) wouldn't then still happen some other way, but what would happen is that everything else they saw from that point forward would no longer be reliable.  Once they changed one thing everything else from there on out was up in the air again.

So you can look into the future, see a whole bunch of stuff, but change one thing and the timeline from there on out is now subject to change.

[GalaionEmpire]

At Q, M, Super String, what ever you call it if particles are interfused in to a system (you travel in to the past) the new particles (you) crated a different reality. This is tacking place a uncountable number of times every skein. The simple explanation for this is in Hawking black holes evaporate I think it is in Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays. Any way travel to the past new past is made with a new future. It may be close to the one your from it may not depending on what you do. This also works if you go to the future because you weren’t in the past so it will be different then if you there. The difference may not be noticeable or it may be that you did not travel into the future in this reality so it is untainted by your lack of being there.


Forgive my bad English. 

[GrumpyOldFart]

Yeah, that. 

[arakish]

Forgive my bad English.

Nothing to forgive.  I understood what you were saying.

It is kind of like in another campaign where I allowed time travel, the characters actually (at the same instant) created and enter a different and completely separate timeline from the original one they left.  Of course, they never could get back to that original timeline due to the fact that they just kept creating and entering new timeline everytime they tried.

It is my humble and honest heartfelt belief that if time travel were possible, you would create and enter a completely different and separate timeline.  And everytime you tried time travelling back to your original timeline, you simply created and entered yet another different and completely separate timeline.  Thus, you would never return to the original timeline you left.

Also as you mentioned, the differences between the timelines could be so alike you could not tell the difference, or so drastically different that you are trapped in a depraved nightmare.

But as I mentioned in a previous post, I side with Cory Magel:

... I don't want spells with the ability to mess with things that have already occurred to throw a campaign into chaos from the GM's perspective.  If it were not for that I might let people actually change the past.

I learned that lesson on the one campaign I did allow time travel.

In fact, I have decided to make time travel COMPLETELY impossible.  You can see into the past and into the future, but you cannot travel there.  Viewing the future can be very chancy.  Since it has not occurred, you cannot be certain that what you see will actually happen.  Since the future has not occurred yet, there are infinite possible futures.  And NO.  The spells that say "... a 95% chance of seeing the correct future ..." et al are hogwash.  The equation I will be using is:

OEd100 - 500 - Mods; where Mods is any modifiers the GM feels are applicable and a -1 per day viewed into the future.  For example, viewing one 365-day year into the future would be:
OEd100 - 865.

In other words, the above OVERRIDES any spell description.  Period.

But that is just my opinion.  I feel since the future has not happened, then there is no way to be certain of what will occur.  A good real life example is how many times have you heard "there will be world peace in the future"?  I have been hearing it endlessly for the last 45 years.  Yet, we are as close to world peace today as we were back in 1966.  My simple reason is: "As long as there are differing human cultures and religions, there will always be war and terrorism.  Until we truly become one human culture with only one religion, we will never have peace."

rmfr

[providence13]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days

Check out the Light of Other Days. Great story about wormhole cameras that can look anywhere and into anywhen in the past.

It's less about time travel and more about how society changes with these new discoveries. Absolutely no privacy in the present or the past doesn't grind society to a halt.

If you allow time travel, it could very well make an entirely new reality that does not effect the original timeline. Consider that all possibilities can happen and your actions are what define the present. Everything you did in another present, would alter that future, but would have nothing to do with the present that you left.