I mean, technically displacing the air with that time machine on such a massive time scale is just as likely to result in returning to a civilization of dolphin people as riding a dinosaur would.
Or you shedding some of your microbiome’s bacteria and fungi into the environment and whoops: they outcompeted something “local” and now whole species change.
I honestly don’t think there’d be any way to avoid doing something that could possibly change the future in a dramatic way, because that far back incredibly minute changes could possibly lead to huge differences (because chaos theory), to the level of “a butterfly didn’t flap its wings because I accidentally squashed it with my time machine, and now humanity never happened. Oops.” But any change that means you didn’t ever go on your trip means you have some sort of paradox on your hands, and then it becomes a question of how timelines work
I think you could drastically minimize any impact by doing the time travel in space and merely observing from high orbit, assuming your time machine has no form of exhaust, which if you have a time machine seems like a relatively small engineering challenge by comparison.
You might displace a few atoms in the void, but it’s the safest way one could go about it.
Oh yeah, like an observation platform. That’s probably the only way you’d be doing time travel anyhow since it’s also space travel because the Earth now isn’t where the Earth was 200 million years ago; doing an atmospheric re-entry across time when you’re not 100% sure where exactly everything will be sounds like an occupational health hazard and inadvisable at best. Gods fucking help you if anything goes wrong and you violently scatter pieces of your fancy time machine across a few square km of densely populated (by animals including genus Homo) area.
What do you think happened to the dinosaurs?
nothing, theyre still here
Just don’t take any annoying mathematical prodigies with you.
The only safe method of time travel is via Christmas ghost.
You could still cause a stampede.
That would require the Dinos to believe in me, so I’m safe
Or the time wound
Luckily, as far as we understand things, there’s no way to go back in time (only less fast to the future, which isn’t the same). For one thing, because there’s no backup mechanism for reality to jump back to.
Timelines are fiction. They hurt some fundamental principles of how the universe works. Time isn’t like a river or a line at all; better start thinking of time like the air around you: it’s just there, can be formed, affects things but there can’t be less than none.
Oh sure, but it’s fun to think about how time travel could maybe work if it was a thing.
My bad. My fun-detector is sleep deprived. Maybe i should work a bit instead of commenting.
Aww, it’s ok. And it’s good to point out that time travel to the past very likely isn’t a thing, people sometimes assume it’s something we’ll eventually be able to do
Yes, but…
fuck the butterfly effect, do what you want. you’ve thrived in chaos once already.
I just want you to know this is one of the most beautiful comments I’ve ever read, and it came from a random comment section from an ok comic strip. So much so that I upvoted it once I saw it and came back hours later just to save it.
I forget where I heard it from, but somebody said that it’s strange how we believe that if we go back in time and make a small change, it will have a huge effect on the future, but we also believe that making small changes today won’t make any difference in the future.
This is so inspiring.
If we follow the logic of the Loki series, they can do whatever. History might change up until the asteroid strikes but after that all dinosaurs are wiped out anyways and history will go on the same as it did before.
Dinosaurs didn’t all get wiped out though! Birbs are theropod dinosaurs, and the only known extant dinosaurs
Remember: you cannot ride birbs.
I bet I could ride a cassowary or emu.
Moa mount please
Can we ride ostriches?
Yeah but you have to risk romance.
… hwat
Now that is a proper war bird. How fucking majestic would it be to ride into battle on a birbosaur like a moa‽
Last ones that were big enough for that went extinct pretty recently in 1800th afaik
what about the giant saddle-shaped fossil
In order to be fossilized something has to be in specific conditions. It probably just gets destroyed
that is true, but its still possble for it to fossilize
Possible and very unlikely
I mean, in terms of preserving the timeline and not leaving the tiny chance of fossilised saddles. They brought it with them, why not just take it back too so it’s not even there.
I feel like it’s a lot more likely to be preserved than thin spongy dinoflesh. It’s already somewhat preserved, actually, so when the layer of molten debris comes in from the direction of central America it’s just going to get covered and leave a permanent imprint.
I don’t have any experience burning leather but wouldn’t “molten debris” be hot enough to completely destroy it?
Edit: Don’t thing’s like dinosaur skin only get preserved if they fell in tar pits or were encased in amber?
The main factor for preservation is a lack of biological activity to break down the creature’s remains. If it’s incased in anything hot that cools quickly, has any antibacterial qualities, or even just the right amount of soil alkalinity then it can be preserved. For hides, though, it’s normally more of an imprint left behind than any recoverable bodymass.
In fact, some fossils found in swamps have been almost perfectly preserved due to the Saponification of the oils and lipids in the carcass.
In general, being covered by a wave of hot dirt like in my previous example would seal them up like a can of soup. All of the liquids and chunks would keep moving around until they settled, but any thick hides or bones might still leave recoverable fossils.
That might leave some archeologists very confused, especially when they try to date it and it turns out to be from the future.
it would probably be paleontologists since no human existed at the time and dating just doesnt work like that, since the saddle fossil still aged millions of years (also from stuff this old its hard to age things, so its more probable something around the same layer would be aged instead of the specific fossil)
well obviously I was making a joke about the dating part
yeah
in the Pratchett novels he talks about a sort of ‘rubber-band history’ that tends to be self-healing. It’s the entire plot of one of the novels, a political leader escapes an assassination that was ‘meant’ to happen, and it ends up in reality having some sort of weird split where the world gets torn between an attraction point where she lives and another where she dies.
What if you scare our common ancestor to run across the ground to safety and end up getting eaten by a predator that sees it running?
Then I would have created the grandfather paradox and destroyed the entire universe. Cool, right?
I’m not sure what you mean by that
Take chances. Change doesn’t mean worse only different. What’s the point of time travel if you can’t ride a damn dinosaur!?
“I’m gonna assume this will just create an alternate timeline and do whatever!”
send a nuke to blast the asteroid extinction event
Like going to Bangkok. For a thing.
Yes,it’s really about going to Bangkok, even if it doesn’t seem like it at first
They are going to “ride” the dinosaur, aren’t they?
