this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
40 points (90.0% liked)
Showerthoughts
33701 readers
700 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Sadly, the only viable timeline is the one without time travel because if time travel exists horrific things in our past would have been prevented.
I think time travel is possible, but you can only change things from the perspective of the person who travelled back. The original timeline just keeps on going.
Person (a) travels back in time to kill Hitler and succeeds. That new timeline exists now without Hitler, but in the original timeline is already written in stone. There is no changing it. The moment that person travels back, they've created a new timeline. It's both impossible for them to change the original timeline, and impossible to ever return to the original timeline because if they go back to the future they'll only be travelling along the new timeline.
In Back to the Future, the timelines forked, so as long as they went back before the fork (point in time that a change was made), they would be in their original timeline.
You say there's no going back to the original timeline, and I'm wondering if and how that would differ from the BttF fork theory.
Because of wave function collapse.
Think of it this way:
We live in a universe where we did NOT travel back in time to kill Hitler.
If we then jump backwards in time to kill Hitler, we create a tangent universe in which we DID travel back in time to kill Hitler.
Its not the act of killing Hitler that creates the tangent universe, its the act of going back in time itself. We are moving from a universe in which we DIDN'T go back in time to one in which we DID.
If we then travel back to before our initial jump backwards, yes, we are travelling back along the original universe, but we are then simply creating a third tangent universe starting from THAT point.
The time-travel visual novel and anime Steins;Gate uses this multiverse premise, yeah.
The time travellers already got Hatler and Hetler. They are still working on the next letter.
Maybe the time travel is like Dark(the german series) where everything is set in stone and you cannot alter anything as your conscious won't allow it.
Or maybe the traveller is simply a cult, where they only allow to observe. Or can only be done in spiritual form.
That show's first episode was so slow and boring that I couldn't even finish it, sadly.
Yeah, it's a slow burn and then it get better then got unnecessary convoluted.
Unless the bad guys got to time travel first... then every timeline becomes the bad timeline.
Time travel could exist, but whatever a time traveler does, they were always going to do. If they didn't prevent a catastrophe, they couldn't have prevented the catastrophe. Something would always have prevented them.