Best Practices for Time Travelers (2003) | Hacker News Reader

Best Practices for Time Travelers (2003)

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81 pointsweird_user43 comments

If I wanted to gain access to places in 2023 without too much trouble, I'd don a hard-hat, reflective vest, and a clipboard. However, what is the equivalent attire for 1880's London? 500's Mesoamerica? 300's Rome? Please answer fast as my rift is opening.

Use your rift to check back for late answers...

A real time traveler would know that opening a rift just to get the latest Hacker News was banned in 2052

Sorry for nitpicking on your grammar, but you are supposed to use the prophetic perfect for stating future events as if they were past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophetic_perfect_tense

I think "was banned" is correct according to that link -

> future events ... are referred to in the past tense as if they had already happened

Lots of wordy theologist writing elsewhere in the article but it sounds like in practice it's just using the past tense.

By Imperial Edict of Dang I

> the equivalent attire for 1880's London?

Either a top-hat and a suitably wealthy attitude, or dress like a washerwoman who has come to scrub the floors.

As long as you use the servants' entrance, anyway!

In most of human history there has been wider differentiation between the classes than there has been in the past 30 years or so, and as such there is unlikely to be just one uniform that allows authoritative access to every where, in most cases you will want a number of costumes suited to what you are attempting to do.

In 1880s London prepare an upper class costume as already suggested, a copper's outfit - this will also allow you to bear a formidable truncheon, it is nice to have access to weaponry when getting access to places when someone discovers you have gained access to said places.

In most civilizations before reformation era Europe you would be best off dressing as some sort of priest or scribe.

Not sure about 1800's London, but for those earlier dates, the typical community you'd be visiting was small enough that everyone knows of most members, so you'd be discovered no matter the outfit, if enough people saw your face.

The tip from 'bryanrasmussen is good - dressing as a priest is probably the safest bet; alternatively, as a soldier (in Rome) - the few people who had recognizable uniforms and were commonly traveling outsiders.

I recently watched this hour-long instructional video for time travellers into medieval Europe and found it very useful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aSdFrPnlRg

A useful source of tips is in 'Percival Dunwoody Idiot Time Traveller From 1909' [0] as long as you do the exact opposite.

My personal advice: Don't get in that time machine and travel back! Not if you are on any sort of meds.

[0] e.g. https://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2010/11/12

Well, disease may be another big risk, but not for you, for the people in the past.

If you shed MSRA you could make all the drugs of the 20th century ineffective killing billions.

John Titor said he arrived in a 1967 Corvette that he brought with him from 2036. I do not think he said it was a 2036 Corvette. If he planned to travel to the early 1970's, that makes sense.

Here is a bit about it. I can not confirm any of what they are saying: https://www.reddit.com/r/JohnTitor/comments/yago4w/john_tito...

Could carbon dating prove age or is that too accurate eg. needs to be 100s of years apart.

That is an interesting idea.

We are unlikely to ever get a resolution, but...

There are imperfections from the factory in every car. Welds were done by hand in 1976. Repairs were done by hand. I wonder what improbable similarities the 2 cars could have.

The car would be authentic, built in 1967. What the person is asking is whether there's a technique to distinguish a car from 1967 from a sibling that was brought back from 2036.

Look for radioisotopes from the war of 2031.

Let's say there was a Corvette made in 1967. Let's say that in the 2030's, John Titor brought it back to the past. Let's say we found this car because it had a duplicate VIN number.

Then if we put the 2 cars side-by-side, we should be able to tell if one is a re-VINed stolen car, or if they are both the same car.

I suggested we look at welds that were done by hand in 1967 to determine if the 2 cars were the same car.

Does that make sense?

In this scenario, both cars would be made in 1967.

One of the cars would be a few years old.

The other car would be about 70 years old.

Yeah?

> One of the cars would be a few years old.

Let's recheck your math. A 1967 Corvette would me more than a few years old in 2023.

We’re talking 1969 when the time travel scenario occurs.

Not that I am any sort of expert on the subject, but the way I understand it is:

1. If you have a fossil you can carbon date it based on the amount of C14, which is an isotope of carbon, and is present in relatively stable amounts in living organisms. That's because a living organism takes carbon from its environment and then incorporates it in itself and C14 is continuously generated in the environment because of the radiation from the sun. As the organism dies, the intake stops, so then you can determine its age based on the half life of the C14 and the amount of it still remaining in the remains. Long story short: it cannot be accurate.

2. You can only measure this in remains of dead organisms. Maybe in leather, if the car had some, otherwise I don't think you could easily carbon date a car :)

If there's even a diode worth of band-gap technology in there: yes, ageing would be demonstrably different in a device that lived a couple of decades longer. The crystal lattice is not set in stone and atoms move around.

You can probably carbon date the rubber in the tires:

https://meridian.allenpress.com/rct/article-abstract/50/4/81...

It is unlikely that a 1967 Corvette has tires on it that are more than a few years old.

Discussed 13 years later:

Best Practices for Time Travelers (2003) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13051116 - Nov 2016 (76 comments)

That discussion is what prompted me to go back and write the original

Perfect comment.

Thank you for your writing, Maciej. It’s so good.

I told a buddy about this and he replied in some ways I found interesting, so I have attempted to the best of my abilities to replicate his response herein:

Long, exaggerated sigh for effect...OK, Titor is a totally reasonable time traveler for someone employed by the U.S Army, that is to say he is not especially creative. The Army values people who can think inside the box, and this guy can.

If this is what you do for time traveling you might as well go see a movie, and not a very good one either.

If you have a quick layover somewhere, make it interesting - I recently wrote the guide to 10 concerts you should see if you are a time traveler https://medium.com/p/8d2ead8cb643

or maybe you might just like to go get high with the quality drugs of yesteryear? https://medium.com/luminasticity/using-time-travel-to-score-...

Maybe there is a favorite food that you can no longer get? My guilty pleasure was 7-11 Nachos from the 80s when you could pile it up high enough to survive all day on one box, as long as you didn't care overmuch about what it did to your insides https://medium.com/luminasticity/a-stopover-for-nachos-8aed8...

Or indulge in some revenge on your worst enemies after they're gone and can't get even https://medium.com/luminasticity/money-making-opportunities-...

These may not be best practices, but they are enjoyable practices, and someone able to access all of time and space that doesn't attempt to enjoy themselves has definitely something a bit wrong in the head - just saying. Lucky this guy found someone to order him around in his life.

I was hoping to see "Best Practices for Time Travelers (2043)"

Probably not a best practice.

The author learned that the hard way. It took three trips to correct.

This was republished in violation of the Time Travel Ban of 1954, which was later repealed in 1942 and reinstated in 1941. The ban remains in effect until 2066 and finally legalized in 2051 with restrictions of no travel before 2025 due to the "intervention leading to the Temporal Event of 2015".

Avoid paradoxes is likely the one thing even someone trying to change the past needs / wants to accomplish.

It'd be nice if some tiny pool of government resources (everywhere) were set aside in 'untraceable' ways that only someone from many years later could use, by which time any untapped resources would be rolled into a new investment area or returned to the general fund.

The non time traveler version would be completely off the books spy operations, so plausibly someone might rarely need that for non-time traveler reasons and thus hide any time travelers.

John Titor inspired Steins;Gate my favorite Anime about Time Travel. It's a masterpiece.

Here's a joke I like telling:

Regarding astral projection, Woody Allen once wrote, "It is not a bad way to travel, although there is usually a half-hour wait for your luggage."

We had time travel in the 90's. It's a peculiarity of this simulation where the formation of mushrooms is oddly consistent in pretty much every evolutionary system. We used them to open a rift and send messages into the future called voicemail.

What about alternative historical timelines arriving in 2023? There's fewer mention of those H.G. Wells style Edwardian gentlemen showing up in some other timeline 150 years into their future!

Appearing at a science fiction convention as a Steampunk character allows them to blend right in.

I’ve seen hundreds of these travelers go by.

Some with lighter dress have passed as artisanal bartenders too

While time travel is scientifically possible, the Fermi paradox ends any civilization long before they are able to make it a reality

Hm, seems a black hole would have to be at least about the mass of an asteroid in order to be down to a manageable temperature...

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