Aug. 21 - What to do with a time machine
I watched the Time Chasers episode of MST3K last night and I got to thinking about nifty things to do a time machine. Here are a few things that I came up with.
-Travel a few days into the future and commit horrible but desire-fulfilling crimes. You could do everything you ever wanted to do with no regard for the consequences. Then you could escape back to the present and arrive three seconds after you left and live your life like nothing happened. You would have to ensure that your time machine was not rendered inoperative or else you'd be stuck. You would also be able to see if your scheme works out because you could see what happens to your future self. You know, make sure you're not on death row or anything.
-Prevent the existence of South Carolina. Build a big wall around it, Dig-Dug it off the continent, whatever it takes to prevent all the social problems in the United States.
-Tell Abraham Lincoln, "Look out!"
-Help a medieval kingdom fight off an army of the undead. I think someone might have already thought of this but I'm not sure. Still, it'd be pretty cool. Just don't die.
-Go back to 2000 and place 3,000 pre-orders for the PlayStation 2. And piss everyone right the hell off.
-Go back to 1948 and kick then-7-year-old Kin Jong-Il's ass. Give him a strong, unnatural fear of Japan-shaped objects. And plutonium.
-Create an army of clones. Simply travel back ten minutes into the past. There are now two yous who are identical (just makes sure that ten minutes wasn't extraordinarily life-changing). You can repeat this process until there are as many yous as you want (or can stand). This works best if your time machine is portal-based. If your time machine is immobile and travels with you in time you will need to ensure that you don't travel back to a time when the time machine exists at that same position. This could perhaps be done by making a series of jumps to create a window of time when the time machine does not exist. Whether or not this would be a problem depends on the method of time travel and how physics would react to materializing objects.
For example, the H.G. Wells time machine always existed in its material position and could only travel through time in a continuous line, thus allowing the traveller to observe a sped-up version of history or the future. However, most other time machines travel to discrete points in the past or future. Both methods require their own strategeries for clone army creation. Perhaps these will follow later with visual aides.
Posted by Nathan
