Hacker News Reader

Comment by fareesh | Hacker News Reader

Killed by a time traveller. That technology led to an apocalyptic period

Always remember: If you think the current world is bleak and problematic, ask yourself how many time travelers prevented an even worse situation.

Who’s to say we’re living in the corrected branch? Commit fae12 doesn’t benefit from a patch being applied to its great grand parent and the history since then being rebased off of that.

Lordy, I hope this is actually a branch in a corrupted filesystem.

It doesn’t speak well of time travellers if this is a corrected branch.

Physic is not random. If time traveller is here now, then it was here forever, because to be here at time T, it must be here at time T-1 too. Even if we develop a time machine to change Universe at time T, then change will propagate in both T+1 and T-1 directions. Timetravelers are our brothers and sisters.

> If time traveller is here now, then it was here forever, because to be here at time T, it must be here at time T-1 too

If you believe in non-random deterministic universe then at T-1 (and always since big bang) traveler was already here in the shape of ancestors, just like at some point you existed in your mom and dad and before that in whatever big bang elements etc.

No energy is being added or removed in the system

In my most Hotep-y daydreams, I've sometimes wondered if this is the timeline where a group of scrappy, persecuted white dudes traveled back in time to make sure that Western civilization would become the primary world power (instead of, like, an expansionist ancient China or Egypt or Persia).

(inb4 GGS rec)

I would say that this sounds like a great idea for a novel, and then I remembered that Orson Scott Card already wrote Pastwatch :)

What's GGS? Only found Guns, Germs, and Steel in that context, is that the one?

Oh, that's good to know, though I'd love to see someone other than Card take a swing at it.

>What's GGS? Only found Guns, Germs, and Steel in that context, is that the one?

You got it!

Yeah, it's exactly what you would expect someone like Card to write, but if you go into it knowing the views of its author, it almost becomes like a parody of his politics and becomes quite an enjoyable read on "I wonder how many crazy reasons he's going to bring up why Columbus was actually a hero".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com