Forum: Story Ideas

What you mention has been covered many times

True, and I read quite a few. Maybe someone has a different take on the common theme. Maybe the bad guys are running Timeline Control.

I take the view that time is an artificial construct imagined by humans as a way to quantify the rate of change.

If you only regard time as the mechanical device to measure spaces less than sunrise to sunrise you'd have a good case. However, nature has time aspects built into her with the very cyclic nature of the day night cycle, seasons, years etc. Since those all occur on the natural cycles as per their time cycle, all man is doing is trying to keep in sync with them and to note them well enough to predict when they'll appear again so they can be ready for them.

Erwin Schrödinger wishes you to call him to discuss the whereabouts of his cat.

Although finding somebody else's pussy is not high on my skills list.

I made it all the way through my teen years without finding any pussy.

Time is our construct to enable measurement.

Not exactly. The actual units that we use - seconds, minutes, hours, etc., are the constructs we've made to measure the FLOW of time. But time itself is not a construct.

The Final Front Ear, in TOS (The Original Series, for you poor bastards who have no taste in science fiction), did major time travel stories five times. And of course, many other times in the rest of the shows.

In 'The Naked Time' the Enterprise has experiences, travels backwards in time three days, and changes course so they don't experience the same three days - but as a closed universe, the crew that were killed remain dead.

In 'Tomorrow is Yesterday', while the crew of the Enterprise interacted with people in the past, by returning them to their locations BEFORE they met the Enterprise crew, they were able to erase the memories of the Earth pilot and guard, while the Enterprise still kept that knowledge.

'The City on the Edge of Forever' was the big time travel episode, but other than the mechanical rice picker joke, really sort of wasn't in the flow with the rest of the series.

'Assignment Earth' was actually a pilot for another series, but the actions of the Enterprise appear to have actually been a part of the recorded timeline in their own future.

It's interesting to note that in 'All Our Yesterdays', since the Enterprise was so far in the past that Vulcan wasn't civilized, that Spock was reverting to a more primitive way of behavior. At the same time, the humans in the past didn't - which may be an indication we're still the same savages now (and in the future) that we've always been.

Most people and animals only have two.

While the nearby corn field has thousands.

Perhaps we specialize in corny jokes.

you only just realising that, after all the serial cereal jokes we make? Talk about slow!

I am all ears…
Most people and animals only have two.

Trekkies have a final front ear.

(There, saved someone the bother)

AJ

Sorry to dampen the time travel thing ...

You haven't dampened it. Your view is interesting. The problem I perceive with you view is 'change' implies something different from what was before. The concept of 'before' and 'after' require the passage of 'Time'.

There for if there is no 'Time', there can be no 'Before' and 'After', which means there can be no 'Change' because 'Change' requires the passage of time.

that somehow time causes change

That may be the common view, but it is not what I am saying.

We all know that one object cannot be in two different states simultaneously. We know that an object like water can be in a gaseous, liquid, or solid state; but not simultaneously. We also know that it is the amount of heat energy that causes these changes in the water's state; not time. In changing from one state to another, there is an earlier state and a later state, and earlier and later indicate a passage of time.

Interesting that you mention memory. There are a clique of people who believe Memories are not stored in our minds. They believe we recreate past occurrences instead of pulling a stored memory from our mind.

You concept of the perception of time is like the belief that there are no stored memories. In the no stored memory concept, something is stored in the mind. In recalling memory, the mind uses that something. To me it is just semantics as to what gets stored; something is stored and that is what we call a memory. Your definition of time is the same thing.

Another way would be if there was some 'bleed over' between the original timeline and the altered one and someone had access to the awareness of their counterpart.

That would be a person on one timeline being aware of what happened on another timeline. It doesn't matter how they become aware of what happens.

I wonder if there is a story here in SOL, that describes a scenario where someone goes into the past to deliberately change the future only to come back to a future changed in a way he didn't expect.

SPirit Quest may suit your wishes

https://storiesonline.net/s/15868/spirit-quest

Your remarks sound a lot like an observation my MC makes in the Introduction to The Ark Part 1, the time loop mentioned will appear in Part 2.

The MC has copies of stories he wrote, but he never wrote the stories. His advisors see it as a time loop and tell him he has to write the stories to close the time loop. He is about ready to send the stories back in time and in thinking about the time loop, he says:

Why did the stories need to exist?

No, I wasn't thinking about my creating the stories to close the time loop. What I mean is someone or something determined that the existence of the stories was necessary for some reason. It seems to me that someone is using me as a puppet for a reason that I cannot determine. Obviously, someone created the open-ended time loop to force me into writing the stories. I can think of no other reason for the stories' existence. Since the stories are of no importance to the past, the existence of the stories and time loop suggests that it is important for the future. So I asked myself, why are stories describing the history of the Ark for a period of two hundred and fifty-three years important? I find it extremely disturbing to be trying to find an answer to a question that should not even exist. Namely, why was the time loop created and what does the answer mean for my future, the future of my family, and the future of humanity?

You can't change history because the history you know already accounts for whatever you will do after time traveling to the past.

In the global time line, your actions are already known in the past, but in your personal time line it's 'future' because you haven't done them yet, as you follow the loop backwards.

In other words, you've already done it even though you haven't experienced yet. So you're not changing anything.

In other words, you've already done it even though you haven't experienced yet. So you're not changing anything.

The paradox is, if you went back in time and changed the problem that caused you to go back into the past, then your past will reflect that change and you will have no reason to go back into the past.

In my previous post I suggested 2 alternating problems, but the solution to the second problem may create a third problem, then a fourth until the first pops-up again.

That sounds similar to The Flashpoint Paradox

but created a new problem which can only be solved by going back in time.

And when you go back in time and correct that second problem, you end up with the same paradox - not seeing a problem that would result in the second trip back in time.

And who knows, you might run into yourself fixing the first problem. :)