# Would this concept be feasible?



## ironpony (Jun 8, 2017)

I have an idea for a story where time travel is legal.  Legal as in anyone can buy a time machine and use it to do what they want to improve their lives, as long as it's regulated I suppose.  But is it believable that the government would allow citizens to have that freedom?


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## wulfAlpha (Jun 8, 2017)

I would say it depends on how you play it. It might be best if you took a "too good to be true" angle where it is hard/ impossible to change the past, or maybe time travel is regulated so it won't matter who can get their hands on a time machine. Like I said it all depends. One more thing taking it the other way would be good to. Just really think about the consequences and I would suggest planning out any time travel in advance as that can make things more consistent.


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## ironpony (Jun 9, 2017)

What if I wrote it so that since time travel is not technically illegal, a company manages to sell a bunch of time machines, long before it takes for such new laws to pass?  That way the story can take place in the that time frame, before the laws can be passed, which might take like a year perhaps?


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## Terry D (Jun 9, 2017)

The idea of legal time travel was a part of Ray Bradbury's classic short story, A Time of Thunder. In that story you could legally take Time Safaris back to hunt dinosaurs. The story's theme was what we now call the 'Butterfly Effect' of time travel in no small part because of this story (not to be confused with the Butterfly Effect as it is used in meteorology).


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## JustRob (Jun 9, 2017)

Terry, I remember reading that story long ago but, on checking now, the title appears to be _A Sound of Thunder_. Given the mess arising from our general election yesterday, if anyone has a time machine handy I feel the need to go and stomp on a butterfly right now ... well, not right now but back then, whenever would be appropriate.

If one follows the convention that changing the past creates an alternative future for oneself but doesn't influence the one that one left, then there could hardly be any legal objections by anyone else about doing it. For example, if you know the results of a random lottery and travel back in time to bet on it, the lottery is still random at that time and could still come up with a different result from the one that you knew about in that other future. Hence you don't gain any advantage no matter how many times you go back over the same part of history. I use this principle in my planned trilogy of novels, that a man living the same life several times over thinks that his knowledge of the future will give him the opportunity of a better life, but whether it does or not has little to do with that knowledge alone because of other variables. In fact if many people were simultaneously travelling back in time the resultant chaos could not be guaranteed to benefit any of them and the enterprise would soon become unpopular because of the diminishing returns, but only in the versions of the future in which this was known of course. The only ones definitely to benefit from time travel would be the people building and selling the machines but not using them probably.

P.S.
My character does solve the problem eventually and lives a better life as a result, but then I am a problem solver at heart, more so than a writer unfortunately.


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## Terry D (Jun 9, 2017)

You are right, Rob. The correct title is A Sound of Thunder.


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## Theglasshouse (Jun 9, 2017)

The gist of the story is time travel and tourism. I read it one day when at the bookstore. That would could make it legal. It was a surprising read. So maybe merge both themes?


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## wulfAlpha (Jun 9, 2017)

That might be fun to explore


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## ironpony (Jun 9, 2017)

Okay thanks.  However, in my idea, people are using time travel to make money, though, and not just for tourism.  So is it convincing that the government would be okay with private citizens using it to make money?


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## wulfAlpha (Jun 9, 2017)

With regulations and taxes i think so


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## Theglasshouse (Jun 9, 2017)

Agreed with wulfalpha.


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## plawrence (Jun 9, 2017)

The problem with time travel stories is changing the past, which changes the present. If you wrote a story where time travel was legal but you could only observe, not change anything, that might work, but that destroys the premise of your idea, that you could go back and make changes to improve your current life. It gets complicated in a hurry, and every change triggers another change and then another and so on. If you write it so only the "traveler" can change their life and no one else's life is changed, it wouldn't be believable. If you do allow others to change, then your task is much more complicated.


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## Theglasshouse (Jun 10, 2017)

That's the butterfly effect, but they write time traveler tales a lot. I might get information tomorrow since I have a book that comments on time traveler philosophers, and maybe even scientists.


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## ironpony (Jun 10, 2017)

Okay thanks.  I can write it so that other people's lives are changed besides the main character's for sure.  Basically I have a time travel story, and I'm not sure how to end it.  The MC, an IRS agent investigates a case where fraud is suspected since the suspect has been making a lot more money in his company, than one would think.

When the MC gets to the bottom of it, he finds out at the company boss is not guilty of fraud, but has been using time travel to make all his money with a time machine.  The boss wants to silent him to keep him from getting word of the time machine out.

I haven't come up with an ending though, and was wondering if the this would work:

In order to protect himself, the MC sends the machine back to a time in the past, when it is discovered, and then time travel becomes the new way people make money and everyone is doing it.  However the MC's profession is changed, cause with time travel available to make money, there is no fraud anymore, and therefore no IRS anymore.

But is that a good ending?  It feels gimmicky, or off, or like something is missing.  But what do you think?


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## JustRob (Jun 10, 2017)

On another thread I recently mentioned similarities between the abstract human ideas of money and time. Consider the old adage that time is money. Perhaps that could be an inspiration for your ending and even the story's moral. 

Money is just currency, i.e. something that can be exchanged for other things. It is also paradoxically merely trust in other people. Someone with many physical possessions but no money does not have so much need to trust others as someone with much money but no possessions. Therefore the reclusive miser is a strange person as he isolates himself from society but has great faith in it to fulfil its promises. Our Bank of England banknotes actually state "I promise to pay the bearer on demand ... " and are signed by the chief cashier, so are nothing but promissory notes. The exchange rate for the pound has dropped again recently as outsiders have had doubts about our ability to fulfil our promises to them. Money is then an entirely artificial concept.

If conventional money becomes less significant in life because of your time travellers' activities then something else is bound to replace it as a form of currency. The natural thing to do that would be permits to time travel issued by the government and regulated by them. Operating like some futuristic bitcoin currency they could incorporate a taxation element which ensured that the government always had sufficient time travel resources to police such activities. 

The trick may be to make operation of the time machines dependent on some limited resource, creating a physical equivalent of gold in our financial world. For example, tantalum is an element essential to the construction of miniaturised electronic equipment such as used in mobile phones, so tantalum mining is closely controlled. Think of the Latinum used as a currency in the Star Trek stories; it is valuable because it has a rare property in not being replicable by replicators, so supplies are limited and it can be used as currency. You need something similar that is essential to fuelling the time machines and is consumed in the process, so that journeys are limited by how much of this material anyone owns. Perhaps some quantum pseudoscience involving the creation of temporally disentangled particles which cause physical temporal transportation when re-entangled might serve the purpose. Well, that's probably got some of you scratching your heads just by my writing it, I suspect. It's certainly got me scratching mine. I know next to nothing about quantum mechanics.

As a result of this shift in the nature of currency your IRS agent who started out investigating a single incident involving time travel ends up as a full time time cop because, as we all know, time is money.

My invoice for services rendered is in the post, but fortunately my advice is dirt cheap, so you can just pay me in dirt ... from Mars that is. Who knows? One day it could be the new currency.


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## kilroy214 (Jun 10, 2017)

Terry D said:


> The idea of legal time travel was a part of Ray Bradbury's classic short story, A Time of Thunder. In that story you could legally take Time Safaris back to hunt dinosaurs. The story's theme was what we now call the 'Butterfly Effect' of time travel in no small part because of this story (not to be confused with the Butterfly Effect as it is used in meteorology).



I remember reading this story in high school english and I could never remember the title or author. I'll have to look it back up.

Okay, sorry to interrupt, keep discussing everyone.


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## Theglasshouse (Jun 10, 2017)

> The pieces by David Lewis and coauthors Michael Lockwood and David Deutsch both attempt to respond to the Grandfather Paradox. While Lewis uses philosophical resources to do so, Lockwood and Deutsch employ the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics to attempt to dissolve the paradox.


 Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence (p. 12). 

Here is part of it of what I promised. You can look up these authors and research them. Or maybe buy this book as well.(which I have)
What is the grandfather paradox? That you'd be killing your grandfather if you time traveled by accident sort of like butterfly effect. But I haven't read the papers so give it a try before you make a conclusion.


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## Winston (Jun 10, 2017)

The only way this thesis would be viable is if it was a non-contact, "view-only" endeavor.  Some kind of advanced one-way mirror, or a "stealth" device where those in the past do not know that they are being watched.
So, no dinosaur safaris, unless it's photographic only.  

Even in this safe mode, it's is likely that criminals would find ways to manipulate the system for their gain.  So the entire time travel business would have to be made illegal.


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## ironpony (Jun 10, 2017)

Okay thanks.  But criminals use other ways to manipulate the system to make money and the government still doesn't make things illegal though.  For example criminals use automobiles to smuggle, and make money, yet the government doesn't outlaw driving.  Or criminals commit computer hacking crimes, yet it's still legal, to be able to use the internet. Or how poeple have used firearms to commit crimes, yet citizens are still allowed to own one.  So could I write it so that only time travel crimes are illegal, where as time travel in general is not, for law abiding people?


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## Winston (Jun 10, 2017)

ironpony said:


> Okay thanks.  But criminals use other ways to manipulate the system to make money and the government still doesn't make things illegal though.  For example criminals use automobiles to smuggle, and make money, yet the government doesn't outlaw driving.  Or criminals commit computer hacking crimes, yet it's still legal, to be able to use the internet. Or how poeple have used firearms to commit crimes, yet citizens are still allowed to own one.  So could I write it so that only time travel crimes are illegal, where as time travel in general is not, for law abiding people?



Apples and oranges.
If an errant firearm ends-up in the hands of a criminal, a few people die.  Same with a crazed driver running over people.  
But... altering a timeline?  Causing a divergent split, multiple realities?  Millions, even billions might die.  The possible consequences make the word "genocide" an inadequate descriptor. 
Even James Comey wouldn't leak that.  Unless it would get him more face time.  Hell, he'd hug a T-Rex for that.


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## ironpony (Jun 10, 2017)

Okay thanks.  But I was thinking that the poeple who wanted to alter their timelines to make money, would check with the government, when they pay for the service, and the government, would make sure no one was going to die in the altering of the timeline first and make sure it was okay, as oppose to just letting people do it without checking first.


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## Winston (Jun 10, 2017)

ironpony said:


> Okay thanks.  But I was thinking that the poeple who wanted to alter their timelines to make money, would check with the government, when they pay for the service, and the government, would make sure no one was going to die in the altering of the timeline first and make sure it was okay, as oppose to just letting people do it without checking first.



The whole concept of Chaos Theory is "The Law of Unintended Consequences".
Perhaps some future society could spawn a government so wise, as to see every possible outcome that could occur when someone interacts with people and things in the past.
I, for one, never see that happening.  Our government is inept and corrupt.  Future societies would be the same screw-ups we are. All it would take is one, tiny mistake. 

And criminals don't follow rules well.  Even if an all-knowing power told some criminal what and what-not to do, do you really think the criminal would comply?   
I worked in a jail.  The criminals I saw could barely keep their pants up and their shoes on.  98% of criminals are dumber than a box of rocks.  

So yeah.  A super-smart government AND compliant, intelligent criminals.  Riding Unicorns.


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## ironpony (Jun 11, 2017)

Okay thanks.  So I guess maybe I shouldn't have that ending then.


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## JustRob (Jun 11, 2017)

ironpony said:


> Okay thanks.  So I guess maybe I shouldn't have that ending then.



When writing a story involving time travel you can't think in terms of beginning, middle and ending; the whole story is effectively the middle. That was a problem that I had when writing my novel, that I had all the chapters but there was no satisfactory order in which to put them because every one came after another. Once you introduce time travel the situation can never settle down into an ending either. I had to destroy my time machine to force one, but of course it returned because that is what they do. Even when I extended the plot into a trilogy my main characters were still tackling their problems at the end but had at least become experienced enough to cope with them. All that you can do is relate the experiences of a particular individual, your MC, but that will only be his personal view of events and others may disagree with him, both about what events happened and in what order.

Wholesale time travel causes too much chaos. To maintain any plausible story structure you have to place tight constraints on it. For a real example of the problems look at what happened to the stock markets when electronic trading was introduced. The trading got faster and faster and then computers were programmed to create the trades automatically and started competing with each other, so then profits could be gained and lost again within split seconds. If they had been quantum computers capable of predicting every possible scenario then the situation would have been even more chaotic. If any developed the ability to probe even a tiny distance into the future, and that might just be possible in the quantum world, then the ultimate chaos would ensue because one cannot benefit from knowing that the future will be chaotic. On the other hand, money is itself an illusion and one person acquiring it from another doesn't change the reality of what is available in the world. True wealth depends on there being something to gain in the first place.

So, given that all the events in your story have effectively already happened when it starts, your MC is already struggling to exist in a totally chaotic world because of your permissive plot. Space-time is effectively stable and unchanging, so time travel without a many worlds context would not change the past but simply change or provide the reasons why it happened. Many time travel stories revolve around that idea. _Behold The Man _by Michael Moorcock is typical. In it a time traveller trying to witness the life of Jesus eventually lives the life of Jesus himself. He himself becomes the person behind the stories, so history doesn't change.

In 2011 I wrote a novel about this subject for no reason at all. Since then I have gradually been creating the reasons for my decisions while writing it almost word by word, but doing so doesn't change what I wrote in that early draft; it only fills in the blanks in history, the why and the how but not the what. That is probably all that time travel can achieve.

You have already written the ending to your story. The unusually wealthy man succeeds in becoming unusually wealthy. How your main character fails to change that is what you have to write. He has to fail because he evidently already has even before he tries. Perhaps your story should be about why the wealthy man's success was actually a good thing, which is what your MC discovers through his personal experiences. In fact perhaps, as in _Behold The Man_, he even contributes to the wealthy man's success when he realises what the alternative would have been. It's tricky stuff to write but great fun.

A the end of your story all that has changed is that your MC is more content with his life and can move on with it. Either his curiosity about the case has been satisfied or he no longer has a need to investigate it for some reason, depending on how much he remembers. That is what I am trying to achieve with my research into my novel, but my life moves on in the meantime as well anyway.


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## ironpony (Jun 11, 2017)

Okay thanks.  But when it comes to a time travel story, should I first decide on the what kind of ending I want theme wise, before deciding on the time travel twists?  I feel that maybe I should decide on the theme first, and then whatever time travel plot turns, happen, be done to compliment the theme, if that makes sense.  Basically I have no idea what my theme is.  I have a premise, with some twists and turns and have written most of it, accept the ending, since I don't know what I am trying to say really though.

What if I wrote it so that time travel is illegal, but everyone is illegally buying time machines off the streets and they are selling like hotcakes, and the police cannot do anything much about it, because people who are using it to make money, are not really breaking any laws, since they are using time travel to alter events in their lives, rather than committing actual crimes?  And the police have a hard time proving any crimes, since history keeps changing causing people to forget it even happened.  So it's not legal, but everyone's doing it, and it cannot be stopped sort of thing.  Is that better?


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## JustRob (Jun 12, 2017)

I think you are overlooking human nature by assuming that people would only use time machines to acquire money if they were easily available. In my novel the unthinkable possibilities are mentioned but not pursued. These are things like prostitutes in brothels remaining perpetual virgins and people being tortured to the point of death and then restored so that the torture can be carried out over and over again without there being any evidence that it happened afterwards. The direction in which your story heads will be determined by the exact way that your time machines behave, their limitations and availability. As I wrote before, if you are too permissive with your setting then the story will either get out of control or else become unbelievable, depending on whether you take human nature into account realistically or not. You have to put natural scientific constraints in place from the outset to prevent a chaotic society from evolving. I don't think humanly imposed laws would be sufficient. If something can physically be done then someone will do it.

Also you have to consider the basic problem of alternative world building, that if its unusual aspects have been in effect for some time then human society will already have reached a quite different equilibrium from our own. Normally a story is about some event that disrupts the current equilibrium and how a new equilibrium is reached following it. This is how apocalypse stories tend to work. In the case of time machines being easily available you would have to consider how this came about and how society evolved during that process. If they had been available for some time then society would already be radically different when the story starts and you would have to have some idea of how those changes came about even though they wouldn't be part of the immediate story.

 Alternatively, if the story started at the point when some company dumped many time machines on society then there would be a period of enormous instability and your specific story would be insignificant against the background of everything else going on, like that unlimited uncontrollable sadistic behaviour that I hinted at in my novel. In fact in that novel it is the risk of such things happening that makes those who know about the one time machine in existence determined to keep it a secret. Eventually they end up too busy using the machine itself to prevent knowledge of its existence becoming widespread to use it for any other purpose. I just don't know how you would be able to use your opposite basic premise and come up with a plausible well structured plot. Personally I wouldn't try it.

It can't be emphasised too much that time travel has extremely volatile consequences if one pursues its consequences in a plausible fashion.


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## w.riter (Jun 12, 2017)

Post removed.


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## ironpony (Jun 14, 2017)

Okay thanks.  I wasn't really going for a story, where a chaotic society erupts.  I was going for more like a The Wolf of Wall Street type tone, where you have people just wanting to make money, like in that movie, but instead of insider trading, they do it through using time travel to their advantage.  I wanted to concentrate on a money take on it, more than a chaos society take on it.


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## Jamboree (Jun 14, 2017)

Perhaps you could have it where the MC is a detective of financial fraud. He is investigating a series of events where a business man/physicist/other wins a bizarre series of bets and lottery and selling/buying of stocks. Seems too good to be luck but nothing obvious to suggest otherwise. The time travel is used by a single person and shouldn't have a huge impact on your universe.

However, where it changes is perhaps the protagonist gets greedy or more daring and tries something a little crazy. Eg. trying to save his girlfriend who tragically died when younger, plots a bomb to make huge money in selling stocks. This is where something can go wrong and the MC finds the protagonist and they go back to fix the past. Or another solution. 
Alternatively the tech gets stolen but the MC needs to find it before it can be utilised for some big event (in which he knows the terrorists/criminals are going to target).  

Just a couple of ideas.


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## ironpony (Jun 15, 2017)

The first idea is really what my story is.  I detective of fraud is investigating a case, which leads him to a time machine, and he is put in danger.

In order for him to save himself from danger, he exposes the antagonist's secret, and people get their hands on the time machine.  But then I wanted to write it so that after, time travel becomes popular, everyone is doing it, and then the MC is out a of a job cause there is no fraud anymore, in a world where everyone can do time travel.  If that ending works (shrug).


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## Space Cadet (Jun 15, 2017)

Obtaining time travel capabilities was originally developed and is currently in stage VI Beta testing at 3 major life insurance companies (and their subsidiaries) backed by the largest financial institutions, investment and wealth management holding companies in the world.


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## JustRob (Jun 15, 2017)

ironpony said:


> ... and then the MC is out a of a job cause there is no fraud anymore, in a world where everyone can do time travel. If that ending works (shrug).



But he wouldn't be out of a job that he was never in, once the timelines have been changed, so he must have had a career in some other job. Time travel doesn't just erase history but creates a new one potentially for everyone. If your man had to have had some other job then he probably got it instead of someone else, who therefore did something else and so on and so on. As a result of this the man who invented fluorocarbons maybe never did, the ozone layer was never damaged, nobody noticed global warming and the president of the USA was ... someone entirely different, not that that mattered much. 

It's difficult to localise the effect of time travel to one aspect of society unless it is really small and gets lost in the wash anyway, which then doesn't make much of a story in itself. 

In the science fiction film _Frequency_ the only unusual thing that happens is that a boy contacts his father in the past using a radio, but that is enough for a plot to develop. Just fragments of information travelling through time rather than anything physical have a significant local effect without causing massive historical changes. Creating a plausible time travel plot is so tricky, but the alternative is to forget plausibility and just make it fun.


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## ironpony (Jun 15, 2017)

Yeah I could write it that way.  The way I wrote it is, is that the main character goes to work and his boss tells him that there is no fraud anymore, cause of all this time travel that has been happening all of a sudden.  Time could change so much that his memory could be wiped, but I felt it could happen, so people are not going back far enough yet, to change the main character's job entirely.

As for making a realistic time travel story in the sense that everything holds together completely, has there ever been one?  It seems there is always a couple of holes at least, and I just accept it, and have fun, but what do you think?


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