Ethical and Economic Implications of Time Travel

[Jay Walker]

I was walking from the store today listening to BabyMetal and I had a few moments of clarity and wanted to write them down before I forget them. This is my train of thought sequentially.

According to TT_0, time travel had only been invented about a year before he began his mission, so that means the photos he took were of a gen1 or gen2 unit.

"Implication?" (Something my internal monologue likes to ask)

There are more gens that will be developed. New gens would be safer, and able to go back further with more divergence confidence.

Implication?

There will be opportunity for monetary purposes. Especially if GE is the developers.

"What kind of purpose would time traveling serve in a for profit application?

Banish fugitives? Maybe dump all the worlds trash into the past?

Then, it hit me.

Vacations. Holidays.

Like total recall (original) instead a vacation to mars or virtual vacations, you take the family to see JFK get shot, or whatever.

Down side?

If JT_0 was correct about travelers not really caring too much about a world-line because it won't effect the line that he will be returning to.

That might imply people doing some messed up stuff to a world line, like trip Jesse Owens the day before the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

That wouldn't matter to them, because when they returned no one would ever know what you did.

So there would have to be a way of monitoring people.

Then I thought...

If people committed crimes in other world-lines, they would get away with it. This would be troubling to say the least.

But then, I remembered, that you could still get arrested and have to serve your time, because you need access to your time machine.

If you murder someone, and get caught, there will be no way of ditching the punishment.

In conclusion. There are many implications technologically, economically, and sociologically.

Reminds me of something John said when he was offering to send messages to your past self in '98. He asked in response to people suggesting the messages might have unethical intentions, (not verbatim) "Don't you trust yourself, to not send yourself something that could have consequences? In other words, I am not my brother's keeper, personal responsibility, not relying on others to tell you not to do something you already know not to do.

Implications? Conclusion? Final thoughts?

Yes, but for the sake of not sounding too preachy, or dogmatic, I think people can infer on their own my implications.

What do you think?

 

[Darby]

There will be opportunity for monetary purposes. Especially if GE is the developers

The question is, will there actually be an opportunity to make money because you have a time machine? The answer is not so straight forward as it might initially seem to be.

Let's use Microsoft stock as an example. A time traveler goes back to 1986 and purchases 1,000 shares of Microsoft at $21.00 a share during the IPO. Since then Microsoft stock has split 9 times for a cumulative total of x288. Thus today our time traveler would have 288,000 shares of Microsoft. It closed today at $416.00. The value of the time traveler's investment would be $119,808,000 less the $21,000 initial investment.

This sounds great, right? But not so fast. Time machines have been invented. Other time travelers literally have forever to likewise travel to 1986 and purchase Microsoft stock. Not only can they buy the stock but they can go home, check their investment and then start traveling back between 1986 and 1998 and continue buying up stock until there is no more stock available to trade. And they are holding onto the stock until 2024. But the stock is virtually worthless because there is no market - no one is trading the stock because there is no stock available to trade. No trades means no market. No market means no value. Stock value is wholly dependent on sales volume.

There will be no stock splits. The price will tank. There will be no history of Microsoft stock ever being a hugely profitable stock investment. The time traveler has no incentive to go back and invest in Microsoft. Now there is a paradox (even though the time traveler wouldn't be aware of it); who killed to Golden Goose opportunity and why?

 

[Darby]

There are many implications technologically, economically, and sociologically.

Indeed there are technological implications. It is those implications that should let one know if time travel is possible and whether it is ever invented.

Technology is technology - no matter how a person or a government tries to keep secret "prohibited" technology they fail. This is a result of scientific and technological (engineering) advances are never made in a vacuum. Scientists and engineers belong to professional societies that have professional journals associated with them. Advancements in their fields are published in the journals. Scientists and engineers read the articles and from them can look ahead as it were and expand on the topics they read about.

Time travel devices, if it was possible, would be based on ongoing research - research that would be published long before governments could glean the implication that the research was the precursors to time travel. In the end time machines would no more be a secret than nuclear fission leading to nuclear weapons was a secret in the 1930s. Multiple entities would independently and somewhat simultaneously invent and build time machines. They would use the machines to travel to the past. As in my previous post, they have literally forever to accidentally or purposely leak modern technology to the past. Again the paradox that is invisible to the future - "modern" technology has always been there in the past including time travel. There is no "first time traveler", there is no "original inventor" of time travel. The technology, all of it, just "is and always was."

Our history on this planet is not that history. That implies that time travel is never invented.

 

[Jay Walker]

I can tell you have been pondering these concepts for some time. I can relate, but only to a much more limited extent. If I may pick your brain and possibly create some cognitive dissonance.

Maybe you can answer something for me that may or may not have been addressed by TT_0.

If someone were to travel ahead a few minutes in the company of observers watching the traveler disappear, would the observers just wait the few minutes for the traveler to re-appear? or would the traveler be on a completely different world line than the observers and would not have that interaction of watching the traveler jump ahead, or possibly never had any interaction with that traveler, from the traveler's perspective? Logically, I would have to go with the latter. Reason being, observers that interacted with the traveler would never be able to catch up with the traveler, unless they themselves had a machine to jump ahead like the traveler, making the new observers people that know nothing of the traveler, because on that world line, the traveler didn't exist until he appeared?

I don't know about causing you cognitive dissonance, but that should at least make your head spin.

However, the sociological implications, if you were manipulating more than just stocks, but like John's example of mediating a successful alert to the pending attack on Pearl Harbor changing that timeline so dramatically, Hitler then might have built the bomb before us. The implications of that are staggering.
Yet, I can't help but draw conclusions based on John's primary mission being akin to our Y2K resembling a situation that still looms called Y2K38. January 19th, 2038, is when the 32-bit integer used to store UNIX time will overflow. Giving me a sense that perhaps John was telling us indirectly that the theory he was testing (referring to his first fax sent to Coast to Coast in '98) was to see what would happen if Y2K wasn't a disaster. Low and behold, what should have been a tragic technical disaster was nothing more than a fart from a flea. One of the last things he said, was if anyone questioned why Y2K wasn't a disaster. He actually gave a couple examples of travelers making changes and what moral implications were. That could be a revealing detail that he thought about it quite a bit.

Btw, the above conversation is the reason for my so-called random thoughts. I had been stuck on those letters he said he would send for people to their younger self. Having to rely on people to enforce personal responsibility on themselves had me questioning a lot about our society. Ultimately, either it was just a goof if John was fake, or it wouldn't matter to him, seeing as he could have made some changes himself and would be hypocritical to tell others not to. Either way, it wouldn't affect where he came from. Or, if it was a prank of some sort, no harm, no foul.

I am almost certain that this has already been discussed, so if you had any thoughts on the matter, or relay someone else's point of view, I would be happy to hear them.

 

[Traveler 25042]

There's a great many things I agree with you on Darby (more than you might think) but this isn't one of them.
In every universe I have ventured, whenever/wherever "time travel" emerges it is quickly followed by destruction and cleanup.
The universe reset just a few days ago and most people didn't even notice because "time", relative to a single observer, still appears the same, e.g., we look back with our telescopes and see ~14B years. I don't have anything more I can give on this for now, but I do still plan to. Take it with the big grain of salt you normally do.

 

[Darby]

If someone were to travel ahead a few minutes in the company of observers watching the traveler disappear, would the observers just wait the few minutes for the traveler to re-appear? or would the traveler be on a completely different world line than the observers and would not have that interaction of watching the traveler jump ahead, or possibly never had any interaction with that traveler, from the traveler's perspective? Logically, I would have to go with the latter. Reason being, observers that interacted with the traveler would never be able to catch up with the traveler, unless they themselves had a machine to jump ahead like the traveler, making the new observers people that know nothing of the traveler, because on that world line, the traveler didn't exist until he appeared

"In the company of observers..." I'm assuming that the observers don't actually accompany the traveler. They are just in the "lab" watching the experiment. The answer is who knows what the observers have in mind? Anyway they watch the TT disappear. I don't know what the nexus is between them being observers and the TT ending up on a completely different "world line". When people talk about time travel and "other world lines" they apparently relate the situation to the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (aka "MWI" - Hugh Everett III, John A. Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt, et al). Unfortunately other than reading Internet posts or visiting alt-sci sites they likely have never read what Everett, Wheeler and DeWitt actually said. If they read what Everett, Wheeler, DeWitt have to say they would realize that their notion of "other world lines" has nothing at all in common with MWI. The time traveler would never be on some other "world line" in the sense of a visitor vacationing in Paris who will soon return home. In MWI you don't travel to some other universe, you never leave this world and you never experience a splitting into alternatives. MWI was an attempt by Everett to resolve the century old debate beween Einstein-Schrödinger and Heisenberg-Bohr-Born over the Coperhagen Interpretation; determinisn vs. indeterminism and objective reality.

"Because on that world line, the traveler didn't exist until he appeared..." While that's true if you follow the misapplied Internet logic the bottom line would be, "And what then...?" In the end the TT is nothing more than a collection of water, carbon, calcium and some other minor constituents. The time travel gadget probably has iron, copper and aluminum. Nothing special. The universe would simply not be affected. Yes, a couple hundred Kg of matter would suddenly appear seemingly "out of nowhere" and interact with other matter. But the theory of conservation of energy/mass is local, not universal. It applies to a closed system and the universe isn't closed. So far as we know it is infinite thus the amount of mass/energy is infinite. It just that we only see a tiny portion of the universe because there is an event horizon beyond which we will never be able to see due to the fixed maximum universal velocity of light.

You are correct. If the time traveler went to the future and stayed there and the observers did not experience some form of accelerated time then they would never "catch up."

 

[Jay Walker]

As much as I appreciate what science is doing in the world of theoretical physics, there seems to be a disconnect whenever discussing technology that presently isn't possible. What's difficult about having a theoretical or hypothetical conversation is that it always leads to the inevitable predestination of "it isn't real." You know, like the age-old question, "Do zombies poop?" It is a wild ride of a convo that ends as fast as it started.

Conversely to the zombie poop inquiry, time travel on the other hand seems to carry some weight being theoretically and mathematically possible. With anything that is possible, with enough time, is inevitable. Similar to the ultimate discovery of information traveling on a beam of light. No one would have imagined such a thing was possible, because it is not a necessity in nature. What purpose does wireless tech serve in nature? It isn't like we produced wireless tech from scratch, the capability was always there waiting to be discovered. We as people figured out how to harness it because it meant big money and had war-time practicality.
In one of Carl Jung’s interviews, he recounted a fascinating case involving a patient who exhibited unusual behavior by staring at the sun. This patient, who was suffering from schizophrenia, believed that by staring at the sun, he could influence its movements and control the world.
There is a notable coincidence involving another psychiatrist, Dr. John Weir Perry, who also wrote about a patient with similar delusions. Perry, who was influenced by Jung’s work, described a patient who believed they could control the sun and other celestial bodies through their thoughts. Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious was developed in the early 20th century, with significant work on the concept beginning around 1910. Jung formally introduced the idea in his writings and lectures throughout the 1910s and 1920s.
Quantum entanglement, on the other hand, was first theorized in 1935 by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen in their famous EPR paper. Jung even collaborated with physicist Wolfgang Pauli, one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics, on the relationship between psychology and physics. I think Jung was on to something, when Einstein refers to quantum entanglement as "spooky action at a distance." Because the interaction between energy/matter is supposed to be local. Carl Jung called similar phenomenon from a psychological standpoint synchronicities.

In other words, there are still undiscovered mediums in this reality waiting for us to stumble across and either weaponize, monetize or both.
(Typically, both)
If a time machine is invented, there will be plenty of time to poke around at its gears and springs to figure out how it operates, but there is still the consequences and benefits that can easily be misused and abused.

Just thought I would throw that out there mainly because of another thought I had. I asked myself, why did John_0 treat this forum like it was his second part-time job? If by his own admission suggested that regardless of what we think, it won't matter to where he was returning to. So, why did he bother? Why make sure to answer everyone's questions as if he were getting paid for it, then suddenly disappear. Never cashing in.

I personally believe him. It seems like the only logical explanation for this happening. So, if I believe him, why do I think he posted everything for everyone but himself?

I believe it was an act of authentic altruism. Not the kind that can be described in animated YouTube explainers that describes a man helping an old lady across the street because it will make the man feel good about himself. Instead, the man would help the lady across the street because it would make the world a better place. Or by John's example of helping a stranger on the side of the road, he was actually talking about us. The "why" gets lost in the noise of believing if he was an actual time traveler or not, or if it were even possible from our perspective.

Thanks for entertaining my thoughts.

- j