Tuesday Open Thread ~ A Big Ball of Wibbly-Wobbly


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The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
~ L.P. Hartley
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There’s a scene in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off where Ben Stein plays a burnt out history teacher droning on about the particulars of the 1930 Smoot-Hayley Tariff Act to a classroom of students whose eyes have glazed over in a collective stupor of boredom. For many this was how they experienced learning history. For me, the experience was very different. When I was in college I had a history professor whose enthusiasm for the subject was apparent the first day he showed up for class wearing his full academic regalia. Standing in front of us, his arms stretched akimbo, he asked us if we could guess why.

“You’re an ego maniac,” shouted one student from the back.

We all laughed.

Instead of the usual introduction to the lesson, Professor McKendry decided to appeal to our imaginations and present the Protestant Reformation in a uniquely engaging way. Not only was his attire relevant to the question of why Pastors began wearing academic robes after the Reformation, he sparked our curiosity about history as though we were time travelers observing current events as they happened. Which I suppose was the part about history I liked the most. The traveling back in time.

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“Have you ever wondered how nostalgia isn’t what it used to be?”
~ Jasper Fforde, First Among Sequels
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As much as I enjoy reading about traveling back in time, I’m not so sure how eager I would be to actually jump down the time warp rabbit hole. My trepidation notwithstanding, the challenges and dangers time traveling presents often gets lost in the excitement of the adventure. This became very clear to me when I posed the possibility of time travel to some of my young co-workers who seemed to liken the experience more to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventures then I did. For people who complain when someone in the break room heats up fish in the microwave, I was tempted to advise them to limit their travels to the future because any time traveling before the turn of the twentieth century and they’d better have a pretty strong gag reflex.

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London in 1900 had 11,000 cabs, all horse-powered. There were also several thousand buses, each of which required 12 horses per day, a total of more than 50,000 horses. In addition, there were countless carts, drays, and wains, all working constantly to deliver the goods needed by the rapidly growing population of what was then the largest city in the world. Similar figures could be produced for any great city of the time.*

The problem of course was that all these horses produced huge amounts of manure. A horse will on average produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day. Consequently, the streets of nineteenth-century cities were covered by horse manure. This in turn attracted huge numbers of flies, and the dried and ground-up manure was blown everywhere. In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced 2.5 million pounds of horse manure per day, which all had to be swept up and disposed of.

In 1898 the first international urban-planning conference convened in New York. It was abandoned after three days, instead of the scheduled ten, because none of the delegates could see any solution to the growing crisis posed by urban horses and their output.

The problem did indeed seem intractable. The larger and richer that cities became, the more horses they needed to function. The more horses, the more manure. Writing in the Times of London in 1894, one writer estimated that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure. Moreover, all these horses had to be stabled, which used up ever-larger areas of increasingly valuable land. And as the number of horses grew, ever-more land had to be devoted to producing hay to feed them (rather than producing food for people), and this had to be brought into cities and distributed—by horse-drawn vehicles. It seemed that urban civilization was doomed.

Source: The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894

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Doesn’t sound like you’d be keeping your windows open at night, does it? But let’s say for arguments sake one could get used to copious amounts of foul-smelling horse dung littering your neighborhood. Care to guess what odors were emanating from the over-crowded cemetery across the street from where you lived?

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Burial was the norm; cremation a peculiar foreign custom. The difficulty lay in finding room for an ever-increasing number of corpses. The capital’s burgeoning population, upon their decease, were filling up its small churchyards, burial grounds and vaults.

The consequences, wherever demand exceeded supply, were decidedly unpleasant. Coffins were stacked one atop the other in 20-foot-deep shafts, the topmost mere inches from the surface. Putrefying bodies were frequently disturbed, dismembered or destroyed to make room for newcomers. Disinterred bones, dropped by neglectful gravediggers, lay scattered amidst the tombstones; smashed coffins were sold to the poor for firewood. Clergymen and sextons turned a blind eye to the worst practices because burial fees formed a large proportion of their income. Macabre scenes awaited those who pried too closely into the gravedigger’s work.

The key to the problem was gas emanating from rotting corpses. The existence of such gases was undisputed – sextons and undertakers were often called up to “tap” coffins in church vaults, drilling a hole to prevent them breaking open with explosive force. Walker dutifully recorded the effects of leaking miasma on the constitution of gravediggers, ranging from general ill health (“pain in the head, heaviness, extreme debility, lachrymation, violent palpitation of the heart, universal trembling, with vomiting”) to sudden death. Gas could, indeed, prove fatal: graveyard workers who broke into bloated coffins were occasionally suffocated by the release of “cadaverous vapours”.

Source: Death in the city: the grisly details of dealing with Victorian London's dead

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Unappealing as those details are, I haven’t even started with the raw sewage in the streets, the constant cholera outbreaks as a result, or the fact that penicillin wouldn’t be invented for another 100 years. Indeed, time traveling does have its conundrums. On the one hand, who wouldn’t want to walk the streets of Florence while Michelangelo was alive, or watch Brunelleschi’s Duomo being built? On the other, there’s no denying that there would be lot of gruesome health and safety concerns to overcome.

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“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.“ ~ Steven Moffat

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Judging by the amount of books and screen time devoted to the subject one might come away thinking there is little new to write about. But time travel is one of those genres that re-invents itself with each new story. Among the guilty pleasures I indulged in last fall, binge watching Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series was one of them. A time travel saga that incorporates a great love story with Scottish history (not to mention a hunky guy wearing a kilt who is sensitive and romantic). But as a time travel model, I found the method Gabaldon chose to send her main character back in time troubling. One minute Claire is picking herbs on a hillside and the next she accidentally transports herself to 18th century Scotland. Don’t get me wrong, narratively it’s a brilliant dramatic device, but if we were to consider time travel in real life terms, then the consequences of accidentally finding oneself transported back to, oh, I dunno, Italy in 1348 would be catastrophic.

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One would imagine that being accidentally dropped in the middle of Europe just before the first wave of The Black Plague would be bad enough, but how would you also like to be the only one who knew it was coming? Talk about facing some hard choices. Between rational thinking and the impulse to completely freak out, your survival would largely depend on how well you know your history. Armed with the knowledge that Iceland escaped the first wave of the plague, you could haul your ass over there as quickly as possible and figure out a way to explain how bacteria and antibiotics work to an intrepid scientist free-thinking enough to believe you. Which means everyone else’s survival would depend on you knowing history and chemistry. Failing that, I suppose the best you could hope for is to quarantine yourself somewhere with a roaring fire to keep the infected rats away and maybe write a book about your time travel predicament. While it might not be Boccaccio’s The Decameron, it would definitely offer a unique perspective on living in Europe during The Great Mortality.

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Admittedly, saving the world from the Bubonic Plague is a fairly grandiose idea as time travel stories go, but it also brings up the question of how much we are allowed to interfere with the trajectory of history. The answer to that depends on which model the time travel story is using. Typically you’ll see one of four different timelines, or models, writers will employ in their time traveling stories. Each of them with their own rules.

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1. Single Timeline (Everything Predestined)

The most elegant model is the single timeline, or time stream, or universe, which amounts to a closed loop. In its simplest terms: the future time traveler was always in the past. Any “changes” made to the past are not changes at all, because they already occurred. It’s impossible to change the past, since the past has already happened. Which came first, chicken or egg?

When I say “predestined”, I don’t mean that in a philosophical or religious sense. Single timelines have nothing to do with the issue of free will. I mean simply that everything has already happened: the future self was always in the past to begin with. The future self is not changing anything or creating new events by traveling to the past; it’s impossible to change the past.

2. Multiple Timelines (Changing History)

Changing history is fun and offers high-stakes drama, but it’s hard to do right by. Most filmmakers blunder at some point. The idea is simple enough: the act of time travel automatically changes the past and forces the universe on to a different trajectory. It creates a new timeline, or an alternate history, a new causal chain, or a parallel universe — whatever you want to call it (see right diagram). Because it is a new timeline, it operates independently of the original one. That last part is what often gets muddled.

The most celebrated example of this model is Back to the Future (1985). Marty McFly goes back in time, and when he returns to the present, he finds that his parents are much more enjoyable people. For the most part the logistics are handled well, but there are some silly elements, as when for example Marty’s body starts to fade as he intervenes in the past, and starts to prevent his parents from falling in love. This misses the whole point of new time streams. Marty can’t possibly erase himself, because he comes from a time stream in which those threats to his existence never happened. If his parents don’t hook up, all that means is that there won’t be a version of himself born in the new timeline; it has no bearing on any versions of himself in or from other timelines.

3. The Repeated Loop (The Do-Over)

In the do-over, scenarios are repeated until the protagonist triggers a reset, usually by dying, going to sleep, or getting knocked unconscious. The protagonist then wakes up and repeats the scenario again, making different choices, until he or she can finally escape the loop.

For whatever reason, do-overs are often saturated with comedy. Perhaps it’s because repeating yourself over and over again is something you have to roll with and play for laughs in order to keep your wits. In Groundhog Day (1993), the Bill Murray character relives the same day over again, until he finally obtains love and happiness.

Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol is a variation of the do-over. Scrooge gets to visit the future of his current timeline, and even though he can’t affect the timeline directly, he observes things which allow him to change his actions in the present. So instead of the timeline he’s on which results in Tiny Tim’s death, he’s able to make a different choice, and create a new timeline in which Tiny Tim lives. A Christmas Carol is probably the best do-over ever written, though few people think of it as a time-travel story.

4. The Universe Fights Back

This is technically a multiple timelines model, because it is possible to change the past. But doing so results in cosmic disaster. The universe resists any attempts to reorder it, and nasty shit happens when those attempts succeed. That implicitly appeals to the single timeline model: the timeline “must be protected from change” at all costs — or else.

A famous example is Stephen King’s 11/22/63, in which Jake Epping goes back to prevent JFK from being assassinated. He finds it extremely hard to do; the closer he draws to saving Kennedy, things work strangely against him. He manages to save Kennedy, but the world eventually goes to hell as it’s torn apart by world wars. It’s a fatalist view, and a lot like the single time stream model: the past is destined to stay the past; if it doesn’t, then calamity rains down. So Jake undoes his mistake and allows JFK to die after all; this gets the universe back on track.

Source: Four Models of Time Travel

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Stephen Hawking once asked: If time travel is possible, why are we not inundated with tourists from the future? It’s a fair point and yet our fascination with time travel persists. Whether reading about it in a fictional novel or imagining it in real life, the idea of mixing fantasy with science is a powerful alchemy of possibilities. I mean what if someone went back in time and killed Hitler? Or prevented JFK from getting shot? The opportunities are endless. Some might even say our desire to travel back in time, at its most basic level, is a way for us to defeat our own death. Which is definitely an appealing idea these days. So, as I conclude my thoughts on time travel, I’ll punt the ball to members here and ask what time in history would you like to go back to and why?

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Well, that about wraps things up for this week's edition.
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What’s on your mind today?
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lotlizard's picture

Dutch author Thea Beckman’s Crusade in Jeans and its film adaptation.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=crusade+in+jeans

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Anja Geitz's picture

@lotlizard

Thanks for the link. I missed that book when I was young enough to read it. But it sounds like something I would’ve loved reading. Loved the title *grins*

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

that is hard to imagine today. Even visiting farms today, the time spent controlling waste is as much a priority as the farming. Still, even in the 1950's, the people that owned my house managed to pollute their well by locating the septic system too close by. They didn't get electricity until then, and that brought indoor plumbing, then the need for a cesspool, leach field.

Time travel is a fascinating concept. The one I'm still trying to wrap my head around is the film "Arrival".

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Anja Geitz's picture

@Snode

A linguist trying to communicate with extra-terrestrial aliens before tensions break out. Well, we certainly know it’s fiction because in real life I doubt very little attempt would be made in diplomacy before the fighting began. Hahaha!

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

Lookout's picture

I would like to travel in this time. I'm glad we got in our trip in late Jan/early Feb because it isn't sensible to travel yet.

I too love time travel stories. Back in the 80's got on to Dr. Who, the time lord. His tartus machine is a fun vehicle for his adventures. I think he morphed into a woman this last regeneration, but I've not watched in years.

Azimov had a unique time travel story where the main character encounters himself in different times, but I can't remember the name of it. Maybe one of these...
https://www.storypilot.com/tt.php?&keywords=people:%20Isaac%20Asimov&key...

The End of Eternity is a 1955 science fiction novel by American writer Isaac Asimov with mystery and thriller elements on the subjects of time travel and social engineering. Its premise is that of a causal loop – a type of temporal paradox in which events and their causes form a loop.

from wiki

In The End of Eternity, members of the time-changing organization Eternity seek to ensure that the conditions which led to the founding of Eternity occur as history says they occurred. The protagonist, Andrew Harlan, is placed in a situation where he must decide whether to allow the "circle" to close and Eternity be founded, or to allow the opposite to happen and Eternity never to have existed.

Many years later, Asimov tied this novel into his broader Foundation Series by hinting in Foundation's Edge that it is set in a universe where Eternity had existed but was destroyed by Eternals, leading to an all-human galaxy later.

The novel was shortlisted to the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Well, hope your time is well spent today. Have a good one!

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Anja Geitz's picture

@Lookout

I hear ya on the wanting to travel now. Next month I was suppose to visit some friends in Lake Tahoe, but it’s been cancelled now. My Sister was going to come and rent a place with my brother-in-law and we were all going to celebrate her birthday. I was very much looking forward to it for quite sone time. Sigh.

Thanks for the heads up on the great time travel story. I’m getting some great recommendations this morning from members here!

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

Before our ancestors showed up in California and started killing everything to death. Regrets. But then I would have never heard Robert Redford's voice, and that thing would make me feel fine even if he was narrating the current end of everything, I wonder if he's busy? LOL

Saving the Bay - Cultivating an Abundant San Francisco Bay
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3FnKeDdjS8 width:500]

"... You had here an amazing wildlife presence. If you were a person during those times, you would have been a person living in a world that was dominated by animal presence all around you."

right on
peace and love

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Anja Geitz's picture

@eyo

It’s amazing to me to think of the contrasting ways Native Americans viewed the world they lived in, and the way newly transplanted Europeans viewed the world they lived in. One was natural and holistic, and the other was Ego-centric and profitable. People who argue for the side of progress always bring the idea of the comforts we enjoy in life as a result of that progress but rarely talk about the sacrifices and all we lost along the way. I’m not so sure that living like the Native Americans would have been the “hardship” people like to claim it would’ve been. For me, it would have fit my spiritual nature to be in sync with the land, even if I had to work “harder” to survive. I would’ve slept better knowing I contributed to the natural ecology of life.

Thank you for the video. It got me thinking about our world and nature in a way that is making me feel both wistful and appreciative.

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

Lookout's picture

@eyo

along the Gulf of Mexico is near Cedar Key...

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Looking at the ground...
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Looking from the top of the ancient shell mound...
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the oldest human village I've been to is in Orkney...built into a shell midden over 5000 years ago.
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I think it speaks to the idea we ate lots of shellfish in our development and it might not be a bad strategy today.

Take care!

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

@Lookout thanks, but my grandparents already polluted The Bay for at least the rest of my human lifetime. Regrets.

https://www.kqed.org/quest/17506/mercury-in-san-francisco-bay

“Mercury is invisible and prevalent throughout the bay system,” said Sejal Choksi, executive director of San Francisco Baykeeper, an environmental group that works to reduce pollution in the bay.

Once known as “mad hatter disease” after the afflicted Victorian hatmakers who used mercury to produce the felt in their wares, the creeping symptoms of mercury include tremors, problems with vision, hearing, nausea and vomiting, as well as stranger effects like pathological shyness and irritability. The toxin can cause permanent damage to the central nervous system.

Anyone with an immune-compromised system is at greater risk for deleterious effects of mercury, which is also neurotoxic to developing brains, making it especially dangerous for pregnant and nursing women, babies, and small children.

I did write a post a long time ago, to riverlover I think, about my memories of the Russian River watershed feeding our whole big family on weekends when I was a kid. The crawdad traps were filled, fish caught and cleaned, abalone pried off the rocks near Jenner, blackberries picked along the highway. Paradise, if you ask me. But I am a primitive chick, yesterday's OT helped me realize how different we all are. Living in shell mound days sounds easier to me, not harder at all. In fact, what could be better then caring for paradise? Not this, not now. oh well

May all your grades slope perfectly, good luck with the road maintenance. cheers

peace and love

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lotlizard's picture

@Lookout  

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=heinlein+all+you+zombies

Could that be what you’re thinking of (thus not Asimov after all)?

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@lotlizard IIRC, the final line: "I know where I come from, but what about all you zombies!"

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

earthling1's picture

I would want to go back to the late 1950s and go into plastics.
Haha Mr. Robinson.
Thanks for the OT, Anja.

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Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.

Anja Geitz's picture

@earthling1

How about we go back to the 1970’s and bank roll Steve Jobs little endeavor? Hahaha!

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

lotlizard's picture

@Anja Geitz  
contrary to the image built up by their paid public relations experts, famous billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates did not start out poor. In almost every case, the rags-to-riches stories most people have been led to believe are false.

https://www.boredpanda.com/famous-billionaires-didnt-really-start-out-po...

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enhydra lutris's picture

needed for the psyche.

I'm personally somewhat reluctant to delve into the topic of time because. History, on the other hand is wonderful. The problem you open with is a problem of pedagogy and not history (nor any other subject). Often it is because the wrong questions are the focus. Too often the focus is too much on when something happened as opposed to why. The time sequence is highly important, but the number assigned to the year isn't, hence the wild proliferation of calendars doesn't prevent analysis of history.

Hope you're getting better.
be well and have a good one.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Anja Geitz's picture

@enhydra lutris

Glad you enjoyed. Never really gave too much thought about the calendars and time. Although if time travel were completely accidental then I’m not sure it would matter. If that makes sense.

The why’s that lead to a series of events is definitely rich with material to ponder. Although, I suspect if I ever was to travel back in time, I’d probably be more focused on the how.

Thanks for your always interesting contributions!

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

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@lotlizard
Yeah, I said that. Whatever. They're an easy mark.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Why the 3rd Quarter US Economic 'Rebound' Will Falter Good coverage of how we got here over the past decade and past six months, but without the standard doom and gloom rhetoric used by many writers. Readers are capable of applying their own doom and gloom words and imagery.

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In a history class, the professor said it was customary for Englishmen to walk to the right of their female companion so that she would not get splattered with the bucket of pee and poop being poured out of the windows above the city streets.
Better for the ladies to step in horse poo that get showered with a family's waste.
I enjoyed the OT.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

5th model, and thus misunderstanding Back to the Future.

In the 5th model, there is a single timeline, but it can be changed. This is a difficult concept. What does it mean, for it to change? To have changed? Change implies, itself, some sort of temporal component -- it was like that, but now it's like this. So it doesn't make any sense -- yet, it's the time-travel model most people "prefer", really. Who cares if you go back in time and fix some horrible event, if the horrible event still happened over in your original timeline, where everyone is still suffering the outcome?

Consider the movie and TV series Frequency, in which a character is able to communicate with another character 20 years in the past, and the two of them work to change the reality that the future character has experienced. Nope, no multiple timeline there. One timeline, but a changed reality. (Or if there were a multiple timeline, one of them just ... ended. Poof.)

The fact that it doesn't make sense isn't an obstacle. There are other things that are part of our reality that don't make any sense. Can you wrap your head around an infinite universe? (If you said yes ... well, to quote Bob Dylan: I don't believe you.) What existed before the big bang? "In" what did the big bang happen? i.e., If the universe is expanding ... what is it expanding in? These elements of our reality defy our grasp, so who cares if there's some element of our fiction that defies our grasp? And anyway, the predestined single-timeline doesn't make a helluva a lot more sense, since it generally requires that somehow something happen before it could have happened -- typically, in particular, a character creating the events that eventually lead to that character's own birth. (And I know of at least two stories -- but you'll hear no specific spoilers from me -- in which the time traveler "becomes" the historical figure that the time traveler has set out to meet ...)

I'm afraid that mostly, I don't have a romantic view of the past, so I wouldn't be eager to go back and experience it, especially if it were a one-way trip. If I found myself anywhere in the past, I'd almost immediately set about recreating various modern technologies in order to enjoy a little physical comfort and security. Sort of like in Peggy Sue Gets Married, when Peggy Sue (played by Katharine Turner, my God she was beautiful!) sews herself some panty hose. Though I think she does that because she figures if she's stuck in the past, she might as well get rich, and inventing panty hose seems like something she can manage.

I like vaccines. And antibiotics. And plate glass. And soap. And stainless steel. And electric light. And books. And eyeglasses (without which, I would be fucked). And ... electric guitars! And ice cream! And indoor plumbing. And hockey skates. Hell, ya know, they didn't even have whisky until sometime after 1100 or 1200. So basically, I don't think I'd want to travel farther back than about 1958, so I could check out a Buddy Holly show. Buy myself a strat and a les paul. After a few years, maybe pop down to the Village and show that new kid, Dylan, a couple of cool chord progressions. Bm, A, G, A, Bm. Hey, Bobby, how much wood would a wood chuck chuck? The answer is blowing in the wind, man. Hop on a Cunard liner, head over the Atlantic, hang out at the Cavern waiting for something interesting to happen. Build something cool out of transistors, because integrated circuits don't exist yet. Yes, I could build a fully functional digital computer, from scratch, using transistors and resistors and capacitors (and I've never even been recruited by Naval Intelligence, maybe cuz I couldn't build one out of tinkertoys, like those MIT guys did many years ago). That's a lot of soldering, though. And then everyone's freaking out over Cuba, and I'm like, take a chill pill bruh, it's all good.

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4 users have voted.

The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

@UntimelyRippd I once asked a 1964 Cambridge maths/computer science Phd why he hadn't invented a PC. His response, "I never learned how to solder."

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@Marie
knowledge of computer science qualifies you as a computer engineer, if only you could be bothered with mundane vocational skills like soldering. the average comp sci PhD these days barely understands how the machines actually work. Posers.

The trick to engineering the first "real" PC (as opposed to the kit-based curiosity, the Altair) was Wozniak's OCDish fascination with electronics, which had him spending endless hours flipping through TI and Fairchild and Intel semiconductor tech-books looking for cool new products. This comprehensive knowledge of what was available is what enabled him be the first to put together, for a manageable price, all of the components necessary to throw text up on a CRT.

Most geniuses have a substantial element of OCD and or ADHD in them; it was certainly true of Jobs and Wozniak.

The closest such thing that Bill Gates ever exhibited was his obsession with money, and with getting paid for "his" software. But then, Bill Gates isn't a genius, notwithstanding the blather of the PR campaigns mentioned in another current thread.

Seems to me, BTW, that in Peggy Sue Gets Married, she does put a bug in the ear of the school's uber-nerd, who then goes on to become some sort of tech billionaire dude. PSGM is a really good movie, although it is universally understood that Nicholas Cage very nearly ruined it by inexplicably adopting an incredibly annoying whiny nasal voice. Why his uncle the director didn't tell him to cut it the fuck out will be one of the never-resolved mysteries of late-20th-c pop culture.

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3 users have voted.

The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Anja Geitz's picture

@UntimelyRippd

Was when Peggy Sue burst out laughing at her Father’s brand new Edsel. A reference lost on anyone born after 1970 probably, but I sure got it. Lol.

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

@UntimelyRippd PSGM again as I don't recall anything from it other than the pantyhose.

Woz was fascinated by everything to do with computers from a young age and wanted one. Not sure I'd describe becoming a self-taught engineer/designer as OCDish. Good enough to land an engineering job at HP. Woz is an inventor and the invention is the thing.

Gates was a privileged kid that got to play with computers. He has no interest in hardware or engineering; that's grunt work. As with all entrepreneurs, money is Gates thing (as it was for Jobs).

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Anja Geitz's picture

@UntimelyRippd

After a few years, maybe pop down to the Village and show that new kid, Dylan, a couple of cool chord progressions. Bm, A, G, A, Bm. Hey, Bobby, how much wood would a wood chuck chuck? The answer is blowing in the wind, man.

Man, was that funny.

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

@Anja Geitz
the first person who tells me the song with that progression.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Anja Geitz's picture

@UntimelyRippd

I want my hat! Hahahaha!

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

@Anja Geitz
Don't think so, anyway. I've never learned to play it, strangely. We learned to sing it back in elementary school, though, because our teachers were young women with bee-hive hairdos who'd been into the folk thing in college (which they'd only very recently left).

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2 users have voted.

The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Anja Geitz's picture

@UntimelyRippd

In 3rd grade with a beehive hairdo who taught them the US. Marine song. This was about 1969. The next year he then had a very young teacher who sat the kids down in a circle, played the guitar and sang “This Land is Your Land”. The differences were noted. Also young teacher was very cute. That was noted as well.

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

@Anja Geitz
The Canadian version.

... from Bonavista, to Vancouver Island,
from the Arctic Circle, to the Great Lake waters ...

up
2 users have voted.

The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

@Anja Geitz
I saw in a small club in the autumn of 1984. His act included playing guitar and singing funny songs he'd written, but at one point, out of the blue, he just started singing, "How much wooooodd, would a wooooodchu-uck chuuuck ..." to the tune of Blowing in the Wind, in Dylanesque voice.

But you know, there's a conspiracy theory out there that Dylan didn't even write Blowing in the Wind. So.

BTW, that comic also taught me (well, all of us, it was a crowd participation thing) the only ASL phrase I've ever known, but long ago forgotten: "Sit on my face and I'll eat my way to your heart."

up
2 users have voted.

The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Anja Geitz's picture

@UntimelyRippd

Who cares if you go back in time and fix some horrible event, if the horrible event still happened over in your original timeline, where everyone is still suffering the outcome?

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

@Anja Geitz
(e.g., "groundhogs" or "whistlepigs") might be a plague vector, which makes me a little more nervous about the growing population in the vicinity of my house. Or maybe not. "Marmots" appear to be, in the American west, and woodchucks are a kind of marmot, soooo ...

up
1 user has voted.

The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Anja Geitz's picture

@UntimelyRippd

To stand sentry?

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

@Anja Geitz
about 30 times the mass of a chipmunk.

up
2 users have voted.

The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Anja Geitz's picture

@UntimelyRippd

Yeah, I guess you would. Lol.

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

TheOtherMaven's picture

@UntimelyRippd

(And I know of at least two stories -- but you'll hear no specific spoilers from me -- in which the time traveler "becomes" the historical figure that the time traveler has set out to meet ...)

Maybe a lot more than twice. Seems like a fairly obvious trope. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YouWillBeBeethoven

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.