• stebo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    0·
    10 months ago

    If we follow the logic of the Loki series, they can do whatever. History might change up until the asteroid strikes but after that all dinosaurs are wiped out anyways and history will go on the same as it did before.

    • hydroptic@sopuli.xyzOP
      0·
      10 months ago

      Dinosaurs didn’t all get wiped out though! Birbs are theropod dinosaurs, and the only known extant dinosaurs

    • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      10 months ago

      in the Pratchett novels he talks about a sort of ‘rubber-band history’ that tends to be self-healing. It’s the entire plot of one of the novels, a political leader escapes an assassination that was ‘meant’ to happen, and it ends up in reality having some sort of weird split where the world gets torn between an attraction point where she lives and another where she dies.

      • stebo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        0·
        10 months ago

        That might leave some archeologists very confused, especially when they try to date it and it turns out to be from the future.

        • tubaruco@lemm.ee
          0·
          10 months ago

          it would probably be paleontologists since no human existed at the time and dating just doesnt work like that, since the saddle fossil still aged millions of years (also from stuff this old its hard to age things, so its more probable something around the same layer would be aged instead of the specific fossil)

    • AlolanYoda@mander.xyz
      0·
      10 months ago

      I just want you to know this is one of the most beautiful comments I’ve ever read, and it came from a random comment section from an ok comic strip. So much so that I upvoted it once I saw it and came back hours later just to save it.

  • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
    0·
    10 months ago

    I mean, technically displacing the air with that time machine on such a massive time scale is just as likely to result in returning to a civilization of dolphin people as riding a dinosaur would.

    • hydroptic@sopuli.xyzOP
      0·
      10 months ago

      Or you shedding some of your microbiome’s bacteria and fungi into the environment and whoops: they outcompeted something “local” and now whole species change.

      I honestly don’t think there’d be any way to avoid doing something that could possibly change the future in a dramatic way, because that far back incredibly minute changes could possibly lead to huge differences (because chaos theory), to the level of “a butterfly didn’t flap its wings because I accidentally squashed it with my time machine, and now humanity never happened. Oops.” But any change that means you didn’t ever go on your trip means you have some sort of paradox on your hands, and then it becomes a question of how timelines work

      • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
        0·
        10 months ago

        I think you could drastically minimize any impact by doing the time travel in space and merely observing from high orbit, assuming your time machine has no form of exhaust, which if you have a time machine seems like a relatively small engineering challenge by comparison.

        You might displace a few atoms in the void, but it’s the safest way one could go about it.

        • hydroptic@sopuli.xyzOP
          0·
          10 months ago

          Oh yeah, like an observation platform. That’s probably the only way you’d be doing time travel anyhow since it’s also space travel because the Earth now isn’t where the Earth was 200 million years ago; doing an atmospheric re-entry across time when you’re not 100% sure where exactly everything will be sounds like an occupational health hazard and inadvisable at best. Gods fucking help you if anything goes wrong and you violently scatter pieces of your fancy time machine across a few square km of densely populated (by animals including genus Homo) area.