SMBC Comics Forum

I just want to have the pleasure of standing in front of a quantum machine gun.

The bullets may reflect, but there's still a probability that they will still tunnel right through any barrier.

No, it's the one where it either goes off or misfires based on a quantum event. If you are standing in front of it, and it is certain to kill you if it goes off, then it will never fire.

From your perspective. Obviously in most universes you will have committed suicide, but your awareness will travel to the ones where you live.

Hahah that'd be weird, if by quantum states you never actually die because there's always the slimmest chance in your world that you live.

I read an SF story about that once. It was awhile ago, but the protagonist was a dude who was aware of all his quantum states at once. He saw a girl being kidnapped and went through this whole moral dilemma and went to save her, and all his quantum states except one got killed in the process. Then when he was in hospital visiting the girl thinking that it was still worth it, he started to peel off into different quantum states again.
Good stuff.

Apocalyptus wrote:I read an SF story about that once. It was awhile ago, but the protagonist was a dude who was aware of all his quantum states at once. He saw a girl being kidnapped and went through this whole moral dilemma and went to save her, and all his quantum states except one got killed in the process. Then when he was in hospital visiting the girl thinking that it was still worth it, he started to peel off into different quantum states again.
Good stuff.

Aaaaaaaannnnnd we're back to books.

Don't jinx it!!

That's actually a theme that's brought up in Vellum. The main characters exist in multiple states in multiple times, and certain people can jump from state to state (sort of). The difference is that a lot of the states aren't real, but rather just myths, yet they still occur as if they were real. And a lot of the states go against the laws of physics (for instance, killing your younger self doesn't cause a paradox under certain conditions).

Yeah, I mean, how does killing your younger self actually endanger you? You just went back in time, duh. You are there. Your matter exists. The memories are imprinted in your brain. Like, if you traveled back in time and your body reverted to what it was at the time, then you'd not know you time traveled, the electrical storage system of your memories would have been altered as well, and you would be indistinguished from you at all. So when you travel, you need to retain your properties of your self to do anything. After seven years our cells are dead anyways, right? If you can exist seperate from the body of you at the time, then destroying it won't do anything to you existing already. You'd just be remembered as dead by everyone, unless you STRAIGHT UP COME OUT AND SAY YOU ARE A TIME TRAVELING THAT KILLED YOURSELF. Possibly applications are pity sex with your really hot 6th grade teacher before you turn 18 and she turns ugly.

It endangers you because you don't exist to go back in time?

What's the point of time travel stories if you can change nothing? There's not a lot of angles to approach that from.

Oh, no. You change a ton of stuff. Let's say that you don't open a black hole or whatever. Let's say all the consequences of the act of actually traveling back in time happen at the time you attempt to travel, so there are no black holes or whatever. If you killed your younger self, everyone you knew would be different. BUT YOU WOULDN'T BE. You can't get a job, maybe you'd be arrested for impersonation at your time if they didn't know about this kind of crap happening, like you doing an experiment. It's like Marty McFly (hope i speld it wite) where he comes back and EVERYTHING is different, but he didn't even know. He is unchanged, because he exists as he exists.

When you go back, that is a different issue. I need to explain two scenarios for this to fully present the logic. If you go back and kill your younger self, then that means you didn't just appear in your body at the time. Your body and mind was moved back in time, not space, and remained unaltered. You go up to yourself, expose him to the worst fetish porn you could just out of spite, and straight up kill him. Take his spleen too, your's didn't work so well since that trip to costa rica. You go back, your mom think's she's seeing a ghost, the childhood sweetheart you missed your chance with is so happy to see you again she bones you, but you lost the deposit on the sweet tanning bed you rented. I mean, everything you had ever done and achieved is gone, except for what you put into your body and what you remember; and your memories are no longer reflective of this reality. Seeing how our society is so materialistic, I hope she bones you more than once. By the way, don't mention you killed yourself deliberately, or they'd ignore you for purposefully subjecting them to the years of suffering you put them through during the jump.
Now, let's say you AREN'T A HUGE FUCKING DICK, so you don't kill yourself. Instead, you teach him how to pick up chicks, so you could end up with your sweetheart that you are always masturbating to in your thought when she went out with your best friend. I hope I'm making you guys feel bad while reading this, by the way. Anyways, he becomes smarter, stronger, healthier, more successful in life. He is able to make a ton of money, but you are careful with what you teach him so that he doesn't drastically alter the progression of society, but rather introducing concepts mere months before the ideas are born, and preventing anyone who would have made the original ideas progress even further due to the head start from working on them. Guess what? If you could have killed him in the first place by co-existing in the timeline, when you go back, he'll still be there. Living that life. You think you could take that your mother likes him more than you? That the girl you like won't sleep with you because she can tell the difference and wouldn't have dated the you that you are even less than if you didn't create a version that she was happy with? That aside from occassional attempts at immitating that you when you don't know his bank, his passwords, etc, you can't do anything? Fucking shit bro.

Reading the Great Divorce by CS Lewis and in the preface he mentions a story he had read that involved time travel, where the guy couldn't alter anything. In that he was sort of a ghost, and everything he touched was heavy and hard so that the rain would pierce him and he couldn't eat anything. Because the past was permanent he couldn't make any changes.

Ahmet, I don't see why you still exist. What is it about the time travel process that archives you in the universe's clipboard for time travellers?

Think of the futurama movie, except without the paradox, and twice the depression. Cirtur, you represent the spammers.

That movie didn't make sense!!