Ask Lemmy

The world has yet to notice me traveling one day into the future every 24 hours.

Going back a few hours and getting some more sleep sounds nice

Rewind the last 15 seconds of a meal to enjoy the last bite again.

Let's just say no one's noticed anything yet

"Alright, it says my microwave meal takes four minutes..."

Instead of rewinding the video, just rewind causality.

And when you skip ads you really skip ads.

Watch Primer, that's the whole point of the movie, how a couple of engineers who discover time travel try to profit from it while causing the least impact possible.

Also easily my favorite time travel movie by a long shot, and I'm a time travel movie fan.

Future time travellers going back in time to the moment the first time machine was invented to figure out how that one worked because in the future theirs suck and are locked down to prevent abuse.

Time travel to 12 hours ago so I can get more sleep

Anthropology while cloaked, as the Temporal Prime Directive requires

Going forward three days to when it's $2 beer night at the bar.

We are all travelling through time right now with very little impact.

Yes I know, I suck.

By doing it in the vastness of empty space.

Cheap and easy food storage.

Make a dozen extra servings of whatever I'm cooking and just leave it in the pot on the stove. When I'm hungry in the future I'll come back and serve myself up another bowl. When I take the last serving, I leave a note saying when I came from so I know to prepare another batch by then.

Go back in time and prevent your time machine from working.

Nice tight little loop. Minimal interference, hopefully.

I am seeing this comment right after I finished 'Life is Strange'...

Going forward at all seems less harmful than going back, but perhaps more dangerous.

Traveling a second back in time to scratch that itch before it even happens. Maybe going back in time to tell yourself not to order that taco bell. Skipping forward in time to skip a hot pocket cooking in the microwave. Traveling a couple of minutes into the future to skip a boring conversation with the officer that pulled you over.

Here's the real question, if it's possible to time travel isn't it just part of the timeline even if it doesn't seem like it. If you could traverse forward and backwards in time like a tape deck isn't it already laid out including all of the time traveling you'll ever do.

Travel forward in time to when the shower is warm.

Going massive events that are either completely void of people or full of people.

Star exploding? No one around, nothing to change.

Parade for the astronauts coming back from the moon?

What's another guy standing around, just minding my own business.

If it were ever possible, I'd say, just as an observer. There are lots of things I'd love to experience for the first time again but I personally have little desire to change the past.

Doing it in the style of a Connie Willis novel?

Or like the comic-book Flash instead of the current-day MCU Avengers team post Endgame?

The Avengers tampered with time for corporate reasons, but I think the Flash understands time.

As for the Connie Willis novels, think like Black Out or Doomsday Book, those that I’ve read.

Going forward.

Go back in time and fill the lottery, but don't check the winning numbers before going back.

To me the rules of time travel are that it is time travel only. Go forward or back more than a few seconds and you'll find yourself floating in the vacuum of space rapidly dying as the earth, the galaxy and the universe continues moving.

Depends on the type of "time travel". Backwards time travel doesn't seem plausible, so I guess we're talking only about 1 way physical transport time travel. That kind of time travel is achieved either by traveling at speeds approaching the speed of light or via intense gravity, unless you consider something like being cryogenically frozen and then reanimated at some point in the future to be "time travel".

As far as least amount of impact? I guess in terms of impact, its best to travel to the nearest point in the future that you possibly can, so that hopefully very little has changed and you're still more or less the same person living the same life (with just a short gap from leaving the present and arriving in the future). Otherwise, you could take a huge risk and try to travel to the distant future to a time when all traces of your current life have disappeared and peoples' memory of you has long been forgotten.

Depends on which model of time travel you subscribe to.

If you're working under "Back to the Future" logic, then the best way is to not use time travel at all. Butterfly effect and all that.

If you're working under "Avengers: Endgame" logic where you're actually in an alternate reality, then you could muck around a bit without destroying your own "present" though you would be meddling with the destiny of that parallel universe (assuming you subscribe to the Prime Directive, that would be a bad thing).