Hacker News Reader

Comment by cecilpl | Hacker News Reader

> There are also deep paradoxes which arise when one character with this power runs into another character with the same power. What does this person perceive when you rewind time, and vice versa? In a fight between you, who wins? How far back can you go? How much of your life are you willing to unravel and experience again just for the sake of a particular confrontation? How much of your life would you simply go back and re-experience over and over again?

This reminds me of the plot of the movie "Primer" (which, if you haven't seen, you owe it to yourself to go watch).

View on HN

Coincidentally, this writer has done several writeups on Primer and unraveling its twisted story-line.

http://qntm.org/primer

qntm loves his time travel.

Barely related, but I just thought I'd point out that the author writes, in my opinion, quite nice sci-fi too [1], ranging from short stories to a web serial.

[1] http://qntm.org/fiction

I first ran into qntm.org when someone reposted the story "The artifact was completely impenetrable to all forms of matter except living human flesh"[1] from the Oul's Egg section of Fine Structure. I couldn't leave the computer until I'd read everything on the site.

[1] http://qntm.org/impenetrable

Several web serials, as a matter of fact. Ed stories, Fine Structure, and Ra (his most recent). Sam's work is a bit unpolished and suffers heavily from a lack of planning (Ra's ending is a great demonstration of that as Sam himself said that it got away from him). But it's still some of the most amazing sci-fi I've read.

agreed. Excellent movie, won an award at sundance. Trailer here for anyone who is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CC60HJvZRE

I'm sure 90% of people who frequent hacker news can identify with the characters in this film (ie, young startup guys)

This RTS game does just that. http://www.achrongame.com/site/gameplay.php

The two sides have time travel where you can effectively go back and change your commands. It controls this by an energy bar where the amount of energy to perform an action increases the further back you go effectively putting a hard limit on how far you can go back.

One thing that got me was thinking what happened to loved ones when you redid time. While they are in some ways the same person, they are also vastly different. Say you had a child who was 10, and you went 12 years into the past. You could potentially not have the child, but even if you did, they would be a completely different child. What if you went 9.5 years back. The same DNA, but life experiences would be different. Either way, when you go back, you are effectively forever losing your 10 year old child. But, does that hold if you only go back 10 minutes or 10 hours?

It's not particularly rare in SciFi either: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Ships http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistborn_series

I second the recommendation. Also, if after seeing it you don't understand the movie and think it sucks, watch it again. With a pen and a piece of paper.

xkcd has a spoiler-free map. https://xkcd.com/657/

I tried that, but I can't read my hand writing anymore.

Did that. It still sucks and I wasted more hours now.

At least now you have a healthy appreciation of the problems involved in time travel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com