Time travel is, of course, inhenrently as sticky a dragonette left unattended in a treacle tart factory!

A good Time travel story that happens to have dinosaurs too is Michael Swanwick's Bones of the Earth.

One idea I like is that essentially you can't change the recorded history nomatter what you do. Any changes you make in the past will go to create the present you come from anyway. (I remember one fun storry that sugested the reason so many sauropod skeletons have the head missing is because of time traveling big game hunters from the future keep smugling them home!)

If you tried to assasinate Hitler say, you'd fail. Because it hasn't happened. Either you'd get caught or be killed by a bombing raid or any of a number of unrecorded events.

This means it's much safer to visit the mesozoic than have dinner with Julius Caeser!  This is because any place you go where history exists you've got to be careful not to get caught out by it. where no history exists you've got more options left open to you.

This is the "rule of fate" idea. There's no real proof of this over any other theory but it does help shove the most of the whole paradoxology issue under the matt before it induces a migraine!

Quantum theory provides another interesting model. In a universe of possibilities history it's self exists as a mass of quantum probabilities with our observed history the "reality" we live in. Traveling back in time you could in theory do anything and it wouldn't change the future you came from as you'd simply be co-existing in another probability state in time while the history you remember runs as before somewhere else.

Quantum theory is fun, but can be rather odd....

Bronzewing; If you can't eat them, join them.

Now, see...I knew you were gonna bring up some thing about time travel I didn't agree with.    Of course, my opinion is just an opinion, and it's as plausible as most others, but...I dunno.   I just have my own theory about how stuff like that works which kinda refutes your statement, so here it is. 

At any given point in time (it's irrelevant for the point of this discussion whether time has a beginning or end), there are an infinite number of possibilities, or at least I think so.  My belief about the way spacetime works is that you can only deal with probabilities, not absolute certainties, and that nothing is 100% preordained.  So, given that there are an infinite number of possibilities, for each of those possibilities there are an infinite number of universes.  Let's say you were able to develop a device that would remove yourself, or a section of matter, or a time bubble or however you want to put it...let's say you were able to remove yourself from your particular universe.

My theory is that it would be impossible for you to return to that particular universe.  Any changes you're making in the infinity of past universes will, by default, not affect anything you do. 

This way of thinking solves most of the paradoxes you can think of.  You can't kill yourself, or prevent yourself from existing.  You can go back and meet 'yourself' as many times as you want, because it's not really you and it wouldn't do any good.  It does, however, mean that from the point you decide to go running amok in time, there is no more future 'you'.  You can travel to 50,000 AD and try to stop in the exact same place and time as many times as you want, but you'll never meet yourself.  There's an infinite number of futures to land in, and you couldn't possibly land in the same one twice.

Hrm...never thought of this particular point before...that there's no more future 'you.'  Wow...actually, that's pretty mindblowing.  Let's say someone invented a time machine.  He'd go off in it...and never return.  Ever.  There would be absolutely no way to prove that time travel is possible, and there would be absolutely no evidence of time travel.  But I wonder...because of the whole infinity thing...is that true?  I mean, would it, in actuality, be impossible to **** around with time, because you could never have a lasting effect?  Damn concept of infinity!

Any of this make any sense to anyone?  It's almost like tuning in a radio station with an analog tuner.  You can try and get nearest the "frequency" of your original universe as you like, but you'll never get to precisely the same one twice.  This also means, however, that you can tune way off your original "frequency" and come into some pretty ****ed up universes. 

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Dinosorceror, Administrator
Lava Dome Five Enterprises

To respond to Timanth now:  Well, that whole physical method of travelling through time never sat well with me.  I'm certainly no expert on the theory of relativity and its implications, but the whole speed-of-light thing seems goofy to me.  I mean, what's the deal with the sun, then?  There's as many particles/waves of light travelling towards us as there are travelling away from us on the opposite side of the sun.  So if you relate those two speeds, what the hell do you get?  Shouldn't the two particles/waves be travelling at twice the speed of light relative to each other?  I dunno, I'm sure there's some weird relativistic answer.

Or maybe the answer is that light is time. 

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Dinosorceror, Administrator
Lava Dome Five Enterprises

With regard to Dino's reply I think that what I mentioned about Quantum time as existing as a sea of possibilities covers your view on time travel. Your ever read a book called Corrupting Dr Nice?

That's a good, and amusing book that deals with the possibilities of infinite parallel history probabilities and the ability to travel through them.

Quantum theory does remove some seriously confusing paradoxes, but the only problem is the fact that in this interpretation Causality completely falls apart. An action no longer necessarily leads to an effect. This makes for a very free environment, but does make life confusing.

Of cause Relativity tells us the simplest way to travel back in time is to travel faster than the speed of light. trouble is as you accelerate some thing it's length gets shorter and it's mass get's bigger.

At light speed a physical object would have infinite mass, and zero length. Quite how you'd attain greater than infinite mass and negative length (Which you would have to do to go faster) is the problem.

Bronzewing. "I wasn't SINGING! It was bonking me on the head with a stick!"

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