Zonetrooper

.ml complaining about being an echo chamber. I didn't realize today was comedy day all around the political spectrum.

Now this is the good stuff I look for in a Tech community.

Subjectively, I've been seeing a lot of high ping/packet loss in gaming and sites loading tonight. Can't help but wonder if something more fundamental is going on.

I wasn't talking about him, but more other people who - if you see a headline of "XY succinctly summarizes [issue]", all it will be is distilling a messy, nuanced topic down to "You should feel A," often with ragebait to convince you.

Add in "succinctly explains" too. That's shorthand for "reduces complex issue to a paragraph".

To be fair, Star Trek always had its fantasy element as well. They dressed it up with Treknobabble a lot, but many of the episodes had fundamentally fantasy elements as well. Like, remember the time Kirk gets beamed down to a planet where the inhabitants use literal, actual magic and it turns out the Salem witches were actual witches?

Y'know, I was just browsing earlier and thinking that there wasn't even any technology stuff in my feed anymore, it'd all been subsumed by the political churn...

Anyhow, to answer properly: I like Star Wars' aesthetic better, but Star Trek also had some incredible stuff. I've also been increasingly burned out on Star Wars since the Disney takeover, to the point I barely follow it anymore. Back in the day I was neck-deep in the community of nerds who loved analyzing how the technology in the setting worked!

But the real love of my science-fiction life is Babylon 5. Something about how they planned the show's myth arc out over multiple seasons leading to huge payoffs for both characters and the overall story.

This entire "glitch" is posited on the idea that altering your subjective past does not alter your absolute present.

And you're right - that's ridiculous. Why wouldn't taking away something from the past alter the present? This is called causality and thermodynamics, and it's one of the reasons physics, as we understand it presently, doesn't really allow for time travel as it is popularly conceived. It's not about gold coins, exactly, but the idea that you can't end up with more energy than you started out with (or the mass equivalent of energy).

But OP started with the idea that a time machine which break causality and thermodymnamics exists, so I just pointed out how massively broken such a machine would be.

Assuming the following conditions:

• Energy is not conserved - that is, you expend less energy traveling to the past than the net energy value of something you send to or bring from the past.

• It takes approximately 1 minute for the time machine to recharge and target a new time and location after use.

• The time machine can transport any object that can be contained in a space, but the space is fairly easy to expand. Think, "setting up a tent".

All of this, I should emphasize, horribly breaks physics. But it's not a stupid question. The answer is, essentially, "the economy, as we know it, collapses."

A lot of people are going to point out that you can duplicate energy sources, items, etc... by bringing them from the past. Yes, that's true. But what people are missing is that this enables exponential growth as well:

• I buy a gold coin. I put it in a large space.

• 2 minutes later, I set my time machine to go 1 minute back in time, collect the coin from myself, bring it to the present. Now I have 2 gold coins.

• 2 minutes later, I do this again - collecting the 2 gold coins and bringing them to the (new) present. Now I have 4 gold coins.

• An hour later of doing this, I have over 536 million gold coins.

This works for any reasonably sized object, by the way. A hamburger. A tank of oil. That sweet RTX 5090 for your new gaming rig. A nuclear warhead.

Society, as we know it, isn't to survive this. The Earth probably isn't going to survive this. The universe may very well not, although we've already broken so many laws of physics getting to this point that it's a wash anyway.

tl;dr - time machines as popular culture imagines them are a cheat code.

I'm sorry I came to this late, but this one's really the best answer.

We talk a lot about how kids are struggling to recognize fake news, find reputable sources, etc... but I also think about how hard it is to find decent sources these days! I honestly can't comprehend how kids are learning to do research projects and so on without the ability to easily search for stuff on the internet.

And while there's lots of stuff on this threat that was cool while it lasted, I think search engines are one of those things where we never even considered the possibility it would change. Businesses fail, prices go up, experiences get skimped on, but search engines were goddamn magic. They just were. Why would anyone ever want to make them worse? The idea never even crossed out minds.

Yep. Apparently I'm blind. Nevermind me.

This. There was something vaguely ritualistic about getting out a box to open all the little plastic packages into, then spreading out the instructions and getting to work.

For a while there the instructions sometimes even had little comics at the bottom of the pages, and so you could read the comic and then go back and actually build the thing.