World, Writing, Wealth discussion

If you take any figure you like from a thousand years in the past, lets say - Richard the lionheart, do you think he'd fare well in contemporary world?
Would you, on the other hand, - a millennium ago or Goodreads and cell phones would be hard to compensate? -:)

Most of the people from the past that I admire would not fare well if transplanted today, because most of them wouldn't take long before ending in some psychiatric facility. Their customs and core beliefs are too different and would attract immediate public attention on them (bad kind of attention). For example:
- Joan of Arc (my favorite historical heroine): would probably be instutionalized for 'hearing voices' and claiming to act in the name of God. She also would probably go berserk at any mention of 'England' or 'Englishmen'. Please don't make her jump time just to land her in the middle of London!
- Ragnar Lotbrok: Forget it! He would kill promptly anyone who would argue with him or contradict him, in public or in private. He would also break the front window or presentation counter of the first jewelry store he would see and serve himself at the tip of his sword.
- Gengis Khan: same as for Ragnar Lotbrok, with extra cruelty. Would be gunned down by Police as a public menace.
- Galileo: Yeahh... Would certainly be enthusiastic to see all that we now know about the planets and the stars, but would become depressed on seeing the years of extra studies he would need just to know as much as a modern college student.
- Lucrece Borgia: How long is the typical prison sentence for murder by poison?
- Lord Walsingham (head spymaster of Queen Elizabeth I): Would probably fare better than the others due to his sharp intelligence, cunning and habit to hide his secrets. Would also spend the rest of his life glued in front of a computer, googling about all the things he wanted to know about that are now on the Internet.

As for me, I probably wouldn't last long in the distant past, because I would be cut off from any supply of the various medications I take for my various health problems. That is, if the Inquisition doesn't put me on trial as a heretic and sorcerer and then burn me at the stake. No thank you! By the way, for those who would be tempted to go in the past to go jump the bones of their favorite historical beauties, think again: in most of the Renaissance and Middle Ages, people rarely bathed, had some repulsive hygiene habits (or none at all) and often were hosts to some nasty venereal diseases.

-:) Thanks for such an elaborate simulation!

Time travel is actually my favorite writing theme, Nik, so this thread attracted me like honey.

From what I hear time travel/jumping book market is currently red-hot in Russian lingo... Sometimes one can jump time, but not the lingo. Not sure there is a lot of exchange through translations -:)

I tried my hand at bringing a Roman to the near future, and if he is young enough and has done enough (What I had him do was possible, but so improbable as to make no difference from impossible) I could get him past most of that Michel raised, but then there is a new problem - the person would have no idea of the culture. In the novels, he could not fit in, and I think that is the most likely outcome. If young enough, your Galileo could learn calculus if he had to rather quickly, but could he ever learn to live in a society like ours and behave like one of us? I do not think so.

If you did the transition slowly, it might work.

First, go to his time, introduce yourself, explain that he will jump ahead in time. If he agrees, you jump ahead 20 or 50 years, and let him take a while to get used to things. Then you repeat until you're in our present day.

You all suggest an interesting idea...use this premise for a horror story where you bring people forward in time as a means of torture in and of itself, with the drastic cultural difference eventually driving them toward death.

-:)
Can imagine a death row comprised of time travelers

Yeah! I can imagine what the trial for multiple murder would look like for Gengis Khan or for most members of the Borgia family.

Michel wrote: "Yeah! I can imagine what the trial for multiple murder would look like for Gengis Khan or for most members of the Borgia family."

A bit short on witnesses, though, and there could be many arguments (i.e, a lawyer's paradise) over the connectivity of what direct forensic evidence is available. Evidence that passes through multiple hands is usually inadmissible.

Do you think Shakes would get past lit agents easily on the way to publication in the present time? Or how would Merkel or May fare 500 years ago?

I've done some serious thinking about time travel.

You can avoid all logical paradoxes if you physically travel far enough such that a light cone from where you arrive does not intersect with your point of origin.

I..e

Assuming Alpha Centauri is approx 4.367 light years away.

If you traveled backward in time 4 years, from 2018 to 2014, but pushed yourself through space to Alpha Centauri, there is no event you could initiate at Alpha Centauri that could impact events at your origin at Earth as light would take longer than four years to reach your origin point. Hence no logical paradoxes like going back in time and killing your younger self, therefore preventing yourself from journeying back in time to kill your younger self....

(I did point out I was a philosophy major and studied formal logic....)

Now, what if we concatenate events of time travel, one after the other. This is still "logically allowed = no paradoxes." Provided that each subsequent time travel event pushes you to a location where a light cone cannot intersect any of your origin points.

Stick to this rule and you can travel backward in time without creating logical paradoxes.

Is it physically possible? You have to be able to travel faster than light - problematic indeed.

Traveling forward in time is logically trivial as it creates no paradoxes. We are doing it now - perfectly safe.

Hi Graeme, Besides the problem of going faster than light, there are problems with the first two laws of thermodynamics - you violate them, although I suppose if you go outside your light cone there is no guarantee they apply.

Nup, you have to be able to violate the speed of light (somehow) to get yourself to a location that ensures your light cone can't intersect the origin point.

The distinction I'm making is between logical impossibility and physical impossibility (the 2nd in terms of current understanding of physics).

E.g.

[1] You can't make a square circle as that is logically impossible.

[2] Dragons are logically possible

[3] A small, lightly boned, genetically engineered dragon may well be both physically possible and technically possible in the not to distant future.

The key with combining physical FTL with travel backwards in time enables the avoidance of "logical issues associated with paradoxes."

And hence is logically OK.

Physically possible? Technically feasible? Doesn't look like it.

Here is a question for you Graeme. You head off at a speed greater than c, and travel in a circuitous route. By definition to start with you ar outside the defined light cone, but if you turn around (looping around some black holes) and come back you are now in it. So for a while you were [permitted but now you are not, so what happens? And what happens at the edge of said light cone?

"Never cross the streams!"

I anticipated this question.

The point I'm making that for a given scenario, displacing yourself further from your origin point than light can travel back to guarantees that you can't create a paradox.

Other scenarios are logically possible, but would also allow for the possibility of creating paradoxes.

My gut instinct is that the universe will strictly forbid logical impossibilities from occurring, including looped time paradoxes.

Graeme, I agree time travel backwards won't happen, and I raised that just for fun. My real view is the laws of thermodynamics will not be violated so backward time travel is impossible. In the event you could travel faster than light speed, then Einstein's relativity is wrong, and you cannot then argue for time reversal based on it. You cannot make a valid prediction from an erroneous theory where the effect depends critically on the part that you now find erroneous.

Note - that does not mean you cannot come to a correct conclusion from an erroneous theory, but merely that you cannot depend on it.

All good. From my POV, it was an interesting concept to explore.

From a soft SF perspective, there are all sorts of time travel stories, like the Back to the Future movies where time paradoxes occurred, and then had to be 'righted,'

It's narratively interesting.

I have written one series, going forward physically, but the events due to someone sending messages back to the past. The paradox possibilities there were removed by creating a new timeline, which is a bit like your light cone, except it introduces new physics, i.e. the existence of a second temporal dimension. That, of course, permits prophecy, by seeing into the future (go off at right angles to your time-line and look down the hypotenuse of the new triangle).

cool.

Basing on the principle of conservation of mass, I wonder if a future supercomputer can map all earth elements and track their transformation every given moment, whether we can then reverse-engineer past transformations to know how they were in any given moment in the past. Knowing position of each element lets say in the year 1000, can theoretically enable us to bring earth to the same state as then.. Or maybe it's too simplistic a thought...

Nik, my answer to that is to write down the mathematical equations that arise perforce from a snooker break, then solve them so you know exactly where every ball ends up. The physics are very clear, and you have all the balls in a well-known starting position and you can nominate the impact of the cue ball. Basically, the equations are horrible to solve. Yes, you have a supercomputer, but the problem has also got almost infinitely more complicated so while theoretically it is possible, I consider the probability as the nearest you are likely to get to zero as possible.

Ian wrote: "to write down the mathematical equations that arise perforce from a snooker break, then solve them so you know exactly where every ball ends up. The physics are very clear, and you have all the balls in a well-known starting position and you can nominate the impact of the cue ball...."

That's an excellent allegory formulating my thinking much better -:)
Yeah, looks impossible, but alchemists tried in futility to produce gold from other elements for centuries and now, as I understand, we can do that with nuclear transmutation, so who knows - maybe this impossibility will be just a kids game a couple of centuries further

It strikes me that the information density is too high - more or less infinite amounts of information which you have to represent and then calculate.

The universe in it's own way - does it naturally.

I would love to bring William Morris into the 21st century, but he'd absolutely hate it here; way too cheaply constructed, mass produced and ugly.

On the other hand, if I could go back to the 19th century I'd probably have a fabulous time hanging out with Topsy, Jane and the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood. My hair is ready, bring on the time machine.

Holly wrote: "My hair is ready, bring on the time machine...."

-:) Probably Uber has it, don't forget your cell phone

I once wrote a short story about a time machine that actually worked. The problem was, when it went back in time, a microsecond before it was turned on it was actually off, so obviously it had to turn itself off. But a microsecond later it was on, so . . .

Would you travel time, if you hadn't a return ticket? And if yes, where to? (Don't start to pack yet, the waiting list is quite long)

Me, no. At my age, starting over again is most unattractive. Hard to know if I were young. Going back in time would give you some advantages, but you would lose the present technology. Going forward in time would leave you at a distinct disadvantage, and those there might not be impressed with you.

Nik wrote: "Would you travel time, if you hadn't a return ticket? And if yes, where to? (Don't start to pack yet, the waiting list is quite long)"

Well I would definitely want a return ticket. :) The only reason I would love to go back into time would be to see the inventions that were made which we use every day or is somehow in our lives. That would be fascinating. :)

I would love to talk to Harold Godwinsson to ask him how he screwed up the Battle of Hastings so badly. He absolutely should've won.

It's tormented me so much I wrote a novel about it.

The Fighting Man

They were winning but lost their discipline, pursued the Normans down the hill and so lost the advantage of the upper ground.

Still, hard to criticise an army that had beat the Vikings in Yorkshire and then marched straight down to the South Coast for another battle against A1 opposition.

They don't make them like they used to :)

But all he had to do was not fight in the first place. If he'd waited one more day his army would have been more than twice as large (and it was already bigger than William's).

William's only chance was to kill Harold and cause a panic before the rest of the army arrived... which indeed he managed to do.

Very odd.

Good points, Adrian. I'm guessing he was either confident of victory anyway, unsure of reinforcements' position after the march down, or didn't have accurate intelligence of the enemy.

Did seem like they grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory but harsh to be too critical after the march from Stamford Bridge and all that.

Adrian wrote: "I would love to talk to Harold Godwinsson to ask him how he screwed up the Battle of Hastings so badly. He absolutely should've won.

It's tormented me so much I wrote a novel about it.

[book:The ..."

Considering that he died at the Battle of Hastings, you would have a very narrow window of opportunity to ask him WTF he was thinking. And I hope you are fluent in old English. Modern English would probably sound very French to Harold.

Best guess on his motivation for pressing the battle is that he couldn't be sure of when or if his reinforcements would arrive. But he could see the Normans right in front of him.

Godloseson

It is not clear to me whether Harold ordered the advance, or whether his men lost discipline. Pursuing a routed enemy is an important military tactic. As an example had Pompey pursued Caesar at Dyrrhachium he would have won and the Res Publica would have survived. Instead he accepted the situation, and then botched Pharsalus.

Pursuing William could have been OK, but the question had to be asked first, where were William's cavalry? It is wrong to pursue when you can't see the whole enemy fleeing.

Ian wrote: "It is not clear to me whether Harold ordered the advance, or whether his men lost discipline. Pursuing a routed enemy is an important military tactic. As an example had Pompey pursued Caesar at Dyr..."

Bringing up the collapse of the first Triumvirate is interesting. While I agree that Pompey Magnus could have taken out Caesar, I don't believe that he could have saved the Roman Republic.

The Republic had been tearing itself apart for a century. The gulf between the Patricians and the Plebeians was the greatest it had been since the monarchy and Caesar was the only patrician who was taking actions to mend the divide by addressing the problems of the plebs. I think that the Republic was already dead. Caesar was just the one who took it out back and put it down. Taking Caesar out when you suggest would not have saved the Republic. It would have just raised a question whether Pompey could have established himself as Praetor with the skill of Augustus. I don't know.

Circling back to Hastings. If Harold had driven out William, would it have secured an Anglo-Saxon monarchy for very long?

The Danelaw had been dead for over a century, but raids and invasions by Vikings were still regular events. (Harald was Norse and the Normans were only a few generations removed from Vikings.) It was bad luck that both Harald and William landed in 1066, but such events were bound to happen. Ultimately, it was the castle building and garrisoning carried out by the Normans that put an end to the cycle. Would Anglo-Saxon England have done that?

As for the republic, J., you are probably correct. My view is it was clearly falling apart at the time of the Gracchi brothers, and serious degradation occurred with Sulla. My point was that Pompey was allegedly fighting for the republic. What would have happened had Pompey won is difficult to say because prior to the patricians goading him into trying to defend against Caesar, Pompey looked like he was trying to retire. All I was really saying is that Pompey would have given it a chance. Maybe not much of one.

Would Harold have been able to maintain an Anglo Saxon monarchy? Again, we don't know, however, I disagree that castle-building put an end to the unrest. Look at the period of Stephen.

J. wrote: "Considering that he died at the Battle of Hastings, you would have a very narrow window of opportunity to ask him WTF he was thinking. And I hope you are fluent in old English. Modern English would probably sound very French to Harold.

Best guess on his motivation for pressing the battle is that he couldn't be sure of when or if his reinforcements would arrive. But he could see the Normans right in front of him."
Harold spoke Norman French as well as Saxon, but I don't need to talk to him. My character got to talk to him the night before Hastings and urged caution, along with Harold's brothers.

As for Harold's reasons... well, you'll have to get the book, which is a reinterpretation of the Bayeux Tapestry, among other things.