There is no way of knowing whether this is actually happening right now or not.
And if it does, it has been happening, is happening, and will be happening all the time and simultaneously.
Maybe someone can help me remember? I read a short story or novella that was the best time travel thing I’d ever read but I can’t recall the title or author. A guy finds a time travel machine (I want to say it was a belt but that might be a different story) and he tries over numerous trips to improve the world but it never works out (I distinctly remember he killed Jesus and came back to find slavery still a thing in the modern age). All the trips result in numerous iterations of himself and they spend time hanging out together in the far future? Ring any bells?
Heinlein’s By His Bootstraps and ’-All You Zombies-‘ are my favorites besides the one above I can’t remember the title of. Zombies was adapted to the fantastic film Predestination staring Ethan Hawk and Sadie Snook.
It is interesting. But I can’t recall Jesus saying something against slavery…
Alfred Bester’s The Men Who Murdered Mohammed is good, but I doubt it’s the one you’re thinking of. (Changing the past doesn’t work, but no multiple iterations.)
Sadly, time going forward may be a simple, algebraic fact of life and be utterly irreversible.
Cole Furey’s (friend of a friend) Ph.d. thesis works with the system of those algebras where addition, multiplication, subtraction and division exist. There are only four such number systems, starting with the familiar real numbers, and the complex numbers you learned about in high school. She works towards recasting physics in terms of particles that use these simple operations on 8, 4, 2 and 1 dimensional numbers. That, in turn, explains why time goes “forward”:
Addition and multiplication are examples of uninvertible binary operations. Therefore,
an event can be seen to be irreversible, it cannot ‘unhappen’. For example, if we are given
only the output of 9, it is impossible to tell if 9 came from the inputs of 6+3, or 8+1, or
4+5, etc.
Time, then, is simply a sequence of calculations, and is clearly irreversible. The related
notion of ‘now’ can be seen to be an entirely local concept within the causal set.
Furthermore, her work suggests that even space itself might not be a fundamental requirement for our universe:
The question we are then asking here is whether or not space-time can be seen to be as
surprisingly unnecessary as was the luminiferous aether from one hundred years ago. Can particles exist independently, without the crutch of a fundamental space-time to support
them?
What does travel in space mean then? Stay tuned…
Yeah this is going to drive me crazy now. I feel like it was written in the late 60’s/early 70’s (but I could be wrong). In a far far future time he hooks up with a female version of himself.
I’m pretty sure you’re thinking of “The Man Who Folded Himself” by David Gerrold, 1972.
Multiple iterations of himself, female versions of himself. Don’t recall the Jesus bit.
Starts with day-after self coming back, waking up new self and betting on horses?
I read this as a kid, then decades later had to rely on internet samaritans to help me find it.
ETA: Just got the book down off the shelf - page 11:
“It was a belt.
A black leather belt. With a stainless-steel plate for a buckle.
A belt.”
This IS the droid book you are looking for.
I knew you’d say that.
It’s the same thing you said tomorrow.
You may do exactly as you please.
In my intro I fucked with two of my heroes, Darwin and Attenborough.
The only rule is to have fun with it.
Whenever someone invents time travel, it starts modifying the timeline, and it does not become stable again until the discovery of time travel is prevented from happening. The exception is if some of the futures that would modify the past cease to exist. Therefore, time travel is only possible when the survival of the universe itself is at stake.
That’s my movie idea, anyway.
Bingo! Thank you. Now I need to find a copy.
Somebody needs to edit the Wikipedia page of time travel stories cause it ain’t on there!
That’s the first place I checked!
I was looking for this a couple of years ago.
After a month or so, some kind bod on Reddit got me there.
I did that tomorrow
I’ve really been thinking on this one, and if I had a time machine I’d want to go back in time to see the Pyramids of Giza when they were freshly finished, but also to see what the area looked like before they were there, too.
I’d want to go visit Mount Rushmore before it got it defaced (or I guess, ‘faced’), see Mount St. Helens before the eruption. Go to Crater Lake when the basin was newly formed but hadn’t yet filled with water. It’d be cool to experience Krakatoa’s eruption, too!
If I had a time machine, I’d go back and do this day over.
Me too.