Steampunk, Time Travel and Suspension of Disbelief

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Glad you liked it.

Seen or read any other time travel stories that you like? My standards aren't as strict as yours, but I do enjoy a good tale of time travel.

[/ QUOTE ]Wish I could remember the names now. I have actually mentioned these to friends in the past, but now the names are all escaping. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency did a very interesting job of it (but failed to handle the problem of replication). I think it's 'Eternal War' that handles a kind of time travel (only into the future), but damned if I can remember the title well enough to recommend it. And as much as I despise the show itself, the model of time travel in Lost as I've had it explained to me actually makes sense.

Also, and this might sound funny, I actually really enjoyed Back To The Future one and two. Not because it was good time travel or it made sense scientifically, but because the fantasy-style device of time travel was used to explore 'what if' scenarios. I assume three is also a decent movie due to star power and because there's no real relation to science for them to eff up.

We're now straying into the realm of my own very core beliefs, one of which being that we deserve and can have smart entertainment, and that science, in entertainment, has been largely stifled under black boxes or bad understandings of poor principles because 'people can't handle' or 'people don't want.' I think that raising consciousness by putting even just good science in stories is very important, so it can really ruin something for me when it pretends to be sciency but just drops the ball completely.

CSI is a show with a lot of science dressing. A lot of the time, when they touch on showing the viewer the methodology required for the application of the science, they tend to mess up. Things like DNA processing taking a few minutes (which it might do these days, but I know when the show first came out, it didn't), the absolute directive of evidence (a lot of the time in real police work, CSI are only part of a case - the rest tends to be done by beat cops and questioning), the way criminologists are called upon to do psych, interrogation and even arrests, etc. These things all diminish my enjoyment of the show. On the other hand, it does talk about real science topics - things like how DNA testing can be flummoxed, the way chemical testing can expound on what's going on at a scene, and a lot of very interesting things that remind me almost of an episode of QI. In CSI's case, I can forgive the mediocre execution because of the Interesting Sciencey Stuff.

Then let's consider the Transformers movie. In this movie, we have a supposed expert on communications talk about how 'we can't rely on fourier transforms' to the chagrin of my two engineer friends. This would be like the military advisor to the pentagon informing the president, 'We can't rely on throwing rocks at them.' It's a case of someone finding a sciencey word and throwing it into the pot and therefore, creating an illusion of understanding only to the ignorant. You might as well talk about your Arglebonks wearing Quinnips on their Blafoogas.

When you get to this point in a time travel story, you have left the realm of Science fiction and entered the realm of Science Fantasy. I'm okay with that. I just draw a clear distinction between one and the other in my mind. Quantum Leap, for example, is fantasy. If the whole thing was done with a magical ring, it'd make complete sense to me - and hell, didn't Satan appear as an alternative leaper at one point, with the implication that the protaganist was actually kind of like an angel? Many World theories unfortunately bug me too, because the vast, vast, vast majority of many worlds would be inhospitable smears of antimatter.

In the end, most science fiction has to rely on a black box. They have to say 'Here is the Unobtanium that makes the rest of the actual science work.' I can accept that. If you say there's a special pendulum composed of antimatter in your victorian clock that deforms time around it, okay, whatever. But, you don't get to keep inventing black boxes to cover your black boxes. There gets to be a point where you have to look back at what you're doing and realise that you've stepped into the same realm as 'a wizard did it.'

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I remember, in fact, a short story that had fun with the whole 'time travel' is cheap and easy in the future' premise: a time traveller travels back to witness an important event, but he can't get a hotel room because all the hotels are full of other time travellers who have gone back to witness the same event.

[/ QUOTE ]Splinter world theories are also interesting but they tend to get lost in themselves the second you involve a second time traveller. I've even tried to write this kind of thing.

Oh - and Braid is a wonderfully done story about time travel.

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You'd probably really enjoy the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars). It's pretty firmly grounded in believable technological advances (what some of my friends call "hard" sci-fi).

I quite enjoyed The Anubis Gates, not because it handled time travel particularly well - it probably didn't - but because it included time travel, cloning, and mind control all in the same plot, to the point where you had no idea whether a character you were viewing was really who or when they were supposed to be. It was so mind-bending sorting through all the details that any flaws it had in execution would have been Fridge Logic moments I never got to.

I think my favorite time travel story of all time is a quick one-off by Philip K. Dick, in which a time traveler goes back in time and ends up giving himself a pen... which he keeps until he invents time travel, goes back in time, and gives it to himself again. Pretty awesome mind screw IMHO though I've now forgotten the name. The technique is mirrored to some extent in the psychology of Timecrimes, a recent low-budget rig way better than its title would suggest.

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And for a while things were cold,
They were scared down in their holes
The forest that once was green
Was colored black by those killing machines

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You'd probably really enjoy the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars). It's pretty firmly grounded in believable technological advances (what some of my friends call "hard" sci-fi).

I quite enjoyed The Anubis Gates, not because it handled time travel particularly well - it probably didn't - but because it included time travel, cloning, and mind control all in the same plot, to the point where you had no idea whether a character you were viewing was really who or when they were supposed to be. It was so mind-bending sorting through all the details that any flaws it had in execution would have been Fridge Logic moments I never got to.

I think my favorite time travel story of all time is a quick one-off by Philip K. Dick, in which a time traveler goes back in time and ends up giving himself a pen... which he keeps until he invents time travel, goes back in time, and gives it to himself again. Pretty awesome mind screw IMHO though I've now forgotten the name. The technique is mirrored to some extent in the psychology of Timecrimes, a recent low-budget rig way better than its title would suggest.

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Ive decided that if ever I invent a time machine, I'll come back in tine and give myself the schematics.

Any day now, I'm sure to turn up...

Eco

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MArcs:

The Echo, Arc ID 1688 (5mish, easy, drama)
The Audition, Arc ID 221240 (6 mish, complex mech, comedy)
Storming Citadel, Arc ID 379488 (lowbie, 1mish, 10-min timed)

"If only it had worked -- you could go back and not waste your time on it."

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Rise of the Copper Legion (#60280; with soundtrack)
The Fractured Dreamer (#498588; with musical theme)

"Now Leaving: Paragon City": original composition for the end of CoH

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Ive decided that if ever I invent a time machine, I'll come back in tine and give myself the schematics.

Any day now, I'm sure to turn up...

Eco

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Except that now you're just waiting for your future self to come back and hand it to you instead of figuring out how to invent it. Self-unfulfilling prophecy, as it were.

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Ive decided that if ever I invent a time machine, I'll come back in tine and give myself the schematics.

Any day now, I'm sure to turn up...

Eco

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Except that now you're just waiting for your future self to come back and hand it to you instead of figuring out how to invent it. Self-unfulfilling prophecy, as it were.

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But if I invent it before i give it to myself, i'll create a paradox! I owe it to the timeline to NOT invent time travel!
Eco.

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MArcs:

The Echo, Arc ID 1688 (5mish, easy, drama)
The Audition, Arc ID 221240 (6 mish, complex mech, comedy)
Storming Citadel, Arc ID 379488 (lowbie, 1mish, 10-min timed)

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But if I invent it before i give it to myself, i'll create a paradox! I owe it to the timeline to NOT invent time travel!
Eco.

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Good thing we have such a responsible person with their finger in the dam... I shudder to think what fate would await us at the hands of a less scrupulous person.

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And for a while things were cold,
They were scared down in their holes
The forest that once was green
Was colored black by those killing machines

Another time travel short story I like involves a character who travels to the future and comes back looking shocked, worried and confused.

When the scientists ask him what he saw, he replies, "All I can remember is someone in the future asking me whether I wanted to remember what I had seen when I went back."

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Story Arcs I created:

Every Rose: (#17702) Villainous vs Legacy Chain. Forget Arachnos, join the CoT!

Cosplay Madness!: (#3643) Neutral vs Custom Foes. Heroes at a pop culture convention!

Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!

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But if I invent it before i give it to myself, i'll create a paradox! I owe it to the timeline to NOT invent time travel!
Eco.

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Good thing we have such a responsible person with their finger in the dam... I shudder to think what fate would await us at the hands of a less scrupulous person.

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Can't wait until I get my free pair of immortality rings!!!!11

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One of my favorite time travel stories is _The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World_. It dances around all of the contradictions just plausibly enough and with enough extra-added-fun that when the whole thing wraps up in a Douglas Adams moment that you're left with the realization that the universe is a weird place.

The fun takes precedence over the plausibility, of course. I don't think anyone ever accused a James Bolivar DiGris story of being anything like hard science fiction.

As far as City of Heroes goes, whether they planned it that way or not, the theory they've been evincing is that the Universe has a tendency towards "temporal inertia". Ouroboros doesn't manage to change the timeline to get the results they want just because they fiddle with time a little bit.

Recluse's Victory is not a picture of the future, it's a picture of a potential future, and the potential depends on, essentially, shifting the equilibrium of the lowest energy state. Our world never changes, and it seems from talking to the Menders that our future also never changes perceptibly. It seems that the "causality fields" are really nothing more than the same kind of "potential" as that of Recluse's Victory.

Ubellman is foiled because the Universe produces an opposing force. Doctor Echo is apparently a real time traveler but, like Ubellman, a self-fulfilling prophecy sort who is thwarted by the inertia of the Universe itself.

So far, the only time traveler who could be said to have done anything effective in changing the past (and therefore, the future) is Holsten Armitage, and we don't really know if he's a true time traveler or simply a whacko who's also a scientific genius.

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As far as City of Heroes goes, whether they planned it that way or not, the theory they've been evincing is that the Universe has a tendency towards "temporal inertia". Ouroboros doesn't manage to change the timeline to get the results they want just because they fiddle with time a little bit.


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so you are saying that they are just making work for themselves? which is pretty funny in its implications...

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global: ridiculous girl
Hero Therapy! (TM) - 119228
welcome to donut world - 1233

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Allow me to rephrase. Let's say it takes five years' worth of gathering resources to send an agent into the past. So what? We've got hundreds of years. Lots of time to send agent after agent after agent to now.

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If your using an agent to gather resources in the past you will be displacing those existing resources from their initial use. All resources are finite, and if the agent is greatly disturbing the original resource distribution and competing against the native activities and inhabitants of the the Time Line, you will create enormous disruptions to the Time Line the agent would have come from. Even if Time was some-what elastic to allow for minor changes, at some point it would be stressed passed the point of improbability and create a paradox, at which point you've killed your original Time Travel program.

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If your using an agent to gather resources in the past you will be displacing those existing resources from their initial use. All resources are finite, and if the agent is greatly disturbing the original resource distribution and competing against the native activities and inhabitants of the the Time Line, you will create enormous disruptions to the Time Line the agent would have come from. Even if Time was some-what elastic to allow for minor changes, at some point it would be stressed passed the point of improbability and create a paradox, at which point you've killed your original Time Travel program.

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No, you're harvesting resources in your own present to send agents into the past. You can direct all of them to the same time, forever (for low values of 'forever').

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What shall claim a Sky Kings' Ransom?

PPD & Resistance Epic Archetypes

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#1. No, I'm not. Jurassic park's understanding of DNA was idiotic even for the time it was made. Verne, Asimov and Wells were writing with good scientific understanding of their days, and extrapolated into interesting fields based on that. They didn't invent stuff and dress it up as 'sciencey.' No matter what time you're talking about, since we've found velociraptors, we have known that they are about the size of a basset hound.

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That was the movie, not the book. Hollywood make some changes from the book due to difficulty in generating the special effects, as CGI creatures were a very new thing in special effects that the movie premiered. This meant limiting the amount of creatures generated and animated in the movie ( the movie had only 3 raptors, the book had dozens and they were multiplying too, so the park really didn't know how many it had.) Also, generating realistic CGI feathers was beyond the technical capability of CGI animation at the time. To make up for the reduce number of Raptors, they made them bigger, and scaly rather than feathery due to CGI limitations.

The DNA process they used in the movie was glossed over, and actually had several key plot points that were critical in the book that were eliminated from the movie. In the book, they were sampling as much of the DNA as they could, using chaos theory and tons of computer algorithms to make as much sense out of it they could, they used existing animal DNA like frogs and birds to fill in the holes and help sync up the fragments, and after incubating it, IF it lived after many, many tries and reformulations, IF it looked like a dinosaur, Hammond called it a dinosaur, and they cloned it. All the "dinosaurs" in Jurassic Park where more like DNA Frankensteins then anything their original DNA resembled. This was all based on pre-1990 (and probably much earlier than that) genetics theory.

Verne, Asimov, and Wells, did make stuff up in order to bridge why "X" is possible. All robots in Asimov's books used a Platinum Iridium sponge for a brain which worked by channeling Positrons (i.e. the antimatter version of an Electron) thru it in circuitry. H.G. Wells made up the entire War of the Worlds where martians had a rule about 3's, and Jules Verne's Nautilius in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was completely made up before even the first hints of atomic power were know (radioactivity was not discovered until 1896, the book was published in 1870.) The submarine was electrically powered, and anything being electrical at that time was high tech.


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#2. The engine that powers your car is much more efficient and much better than the engines that were being created in the 1900s. The pen you use is better designed than the pen your grandfather used. The toilet paper you use is better than the toilet paper that was used. The firearms being used today in common purchase are better than the best the military had to offer two hundred years ago.

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Cars are more expensive, and more complex, and the industry is suffering, and fuel efficiency has really not improved greatly. Things like Pens, Toilet Paper, and Firearms are really bad comparisons, as they are way too simple. Firearms really haven't improved in the last 100 years and there science was very well defined at that time, Toilet paper was used in ancient china, and the biggest development for pens was being able to engineer a ball point mechanism that would not leak and write on a paper surface at about the time of WWII.

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No, you're harvesting resources in your own present to send agents into the past. You can direct all of them to the same time, forever (for low values of 'forever').

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Oh, I see, your trying to Loop Resources. That might work for a little bit. It can not be kept up indefinitely. Parts break, corrosion happens, wear and tear, entropy takes hold, manpower must be constantly employed during all phases, maintenance will be required, people will want to get paid and have time off, expendables like power, fuel, and parts will be needed. Land will be needed to facilitate the equipment, which you can not send back and will have to acquire it from that time period for every repetition. And at the end, if everything is sent back to the past, there is nothing for the future to use except some very worn out nonfunctional junk pile.

That's a logistical nightmare. Something is sure to go wrong in a very spectacular way.

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I cannot believe there has been an 18-page thread about "suspension of disbelief" on a message board for a game based on a fictional genre that involves grown men, women and occasionally children putting on colored underwear in order to fight/commit crime, giving themselves names like "Spiderman" and "Mr. Freeze" in the process. Not to mention developing the ability to stick to walls, fly faster than light, shoot laser beams out of their eyes and build doomsday devices, jet-powered cars and battle armor out of supplies purchased from the local Home Depot.
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A high capacity for suspension of disbelief is kinda intrinsic to appreciating the format.

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[Laughing Out Loud] That is what I would have thought. It is apparently not true, and the requirement for a Suspension of Disbelief is not a game playing requirement nor covered in the EULA.

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Cars are more expensive, and more complex, and the industry is suffering, and fuel efficiency has really not improved greatly. Things like Pens, Toilet Paper, and Firearms are really bad comparisons, as they are way too simple. Firearms really haven't improved in the last 100 years and there science was very well defined at that time, Toilet paper was used in ancient china, and the biggest development for pens was being able to engineer a ball point mechanism that would not leak and write on a paper surface at about the time of WWII.

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Just to add, you know the AK-47? That 47 stands for 1947, the year it was made. It's still the most popular assault rifle in the world, and is also one of the most reliable. "Old" technology doesn't mean bad. Some things still work hundreds of years later. There are buildings in Oxford that have been there since the 1200s. Modern buildings don't tend to last more than a century. If anything, technological trends tend to make things LESS reliable in favour of being cheaper to produce.

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No, you're harvesting resources in your own present to send agents into the past. You can direct all of them to the same time, forever (for low values of 'forever').

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Oh, I see, your trying to Loop Resources.

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I think you're entirely missing the point, which is that whoever possesses time travel can throw an infinitely regenerable army at whatever critical event they choose. If the first 100 agents you sent couldn't get the job done, send another 1000. Or 10,000. Or 1,000,000. The fact that it takes a century to train and dispatch 1000 agents doesn't matter because they all end up at the same destination. If the event is important enough to the possessors of time travel, they will eventually pile enough of their side onto it to win.

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And for a while things were cold,
They were scared down in their holes
The forest that once was green
Was colored black by those killing machines

What about catbats, then? And batcats.

We still haven't come to a satisfactory consensus on the question of:

Catbats vs Batcats - who would win?

Eco

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MArcs:

The Echo, Arc ID 1688 (5mish, easy, drama)
The Audition, Arc ID 221240 (6 mish, complex mech, comedy)
Storming Citadel, Arc ID 379488 (lowbie, 1mish, 10-min timed)

Just remember, people: Thinking about things you enjoy is a bad thing.

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Oh, I see, your trying to Loop Resources.

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I think you're entirely missing the point, which is that whoever possesses time travel can throw an infinitely regenerable army at whatever critical event they choose. If the first 100 agents you sent couldn't get the job done, send another 1000. Or 10,000. Or 1,000,000. The fact that it takes a century to train and dispatch 1000 agents doesn't matter because they all end up at the same destination. If the event is important enough to the possessors of time travel, they will eventually pile enough of their side onto it to win.

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Show me a society that has carried a consistent set of goals for that kind of period of time. Especially one whose numbers are consistently winnowed due to this never-ending war you're creating.

Like I said before: If you open up that "what if" box, you've got to pick a point where you close it. You're saying "They'll just keep coming" and I'm saying "from where?" If you can't accept a story for what it is because of what happens hundreds or thousands of years in the future, then you can't just stop at "They could send more." If you want to write the next few thousand years of a story's history, then you'd better really write them.

What if their religion changes? What if there's a natural disaster that changes their paradigm? What if the charismatic leader who is sending all these troops back has a sudden massive coronary and his second in command is a terrible leader no one will follow? What if a meteor falls from the sky and takes out the facility they're time traveling from? What if one of their technicians is a boob and spills coffee on their time machine's control panel and sends a whole group of them to the wrong period of time? What if their educational system becomes increasingly weak because of their reliance on a single method of world domination and they essentially forget how their machines work, eventually becoming unable to repair or operate them? What if aliens show up? How about wizards?

Saying that time traveling civilizations have all the time in the world to do something ignores a lot of basic facts about human nature. There are a lot of technologies out there even today that whole parts of the world have no access to or grasp of. There are endless of examples of lost arts that we have forgotten how to do (my wife actually owns some jewelry that no person alive on the planet knows how to make). Languages flourish and die. Society is not constant.

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Just remember, people: Thinking about things you enjoy is a bad thing.

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Now you're just giving up.

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Now you're just giving up.

[/ QUOTE ]It's more 'abandoning in disgust.'

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Show me a society that has carried a consistent set of goals for that kind of period of time. Especially one whose numbers are consistently winnowed due to this never-ending war you're creating.

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I was just trying to explain what I saw as a miscommunication.

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And for a while things were cold,
They were scared down in their holes
The forest that once was green
Was colored black by those killing machines

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Like I said before: If you open up that "what if" box, you've got to pick a point where you close it. You're saying "They'll just keep coming" and I'm saying "from where?" If you can't accept a story for what it is because of what happens hundreds or thousands of years in the future, then you can't just stop at "They could send more." If you want to write the next few thousand years of a story's history, then you'd better really write them.

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Which is exactly our point. The box should be closed.

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What shall claim a Sky Kings' Ransom?

PPD & Resistance Epic Archetypes

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I cannot believe there has been an 18-page thread about "suspension of disbelief" on a message board for a game based on a fictional genre that involves grown men, women and occasionally children putting on colored underwear in order to fight/commit crime, giving themselves names like "Spiderman" and "Mr. Freeze" in the process. Not to mention developing the ability to stick to walls, fly faster than light, shoot laser beams out of their eyes and build doomsday devices, jet-powered cars and battle armor out of supplies purchased from the local Home Depot.
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A high capacity for suspension of disbelief is kinda intrinsic to appreciating the format.

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HEY!!!! It Could Happen!

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I believe that a Kheldian Gold Standard should be based on SO's, and for anything above that... there's Platinum!

Save Ms. Liberty (#5349) � Augmenting Peacebringers � The Umbra Illuminati