Should time travelers have the right to steal our stuff?

[C C]

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/geeks-guide-wesley-chu/

EXCERPT: If time travel is possible, why haven’t we been visited by tourists from the future? One possibility is that time travelers keep a low profile in order to avoid changing the past. But if they can’t change history, why would they even want to come here? Well, maybe they’re stealing our stuff.

It’s an idea Wesley Chu explores in his new novel "Time Salvager"—currently being adapted into a film by Michael Bay—about time travelers who visit the scenes of famous disasters and salvage materials that are destined to be destroyed anyway.

“The number one rule for time travel should be that you don’t change the timeline,” Chu says in Episode 160 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “But if you jump to moments before a disaster, you can cover your tracks....”

[stryder]

On the subject of fiction:
Nice idea but it still has serious implications, for instance imagine the atomic tests didn't go the way they were expected and it had actually ignited the planets atmosphere.  By that fictional logic someone could go back with an armed team and steal the bomb, but then the question could be raised as to if the event of such reclamation was actually involved in making the situation a disaster to begin with.  (It would suggest that the dystopic nihilism that writers use to tear away at the floors to any utopic system would likely end up bringing up the question of what if the disasters were made by those that wanted to steal)

As for the ethics of time travel itself,  *if* it was possible it wouldn't be good having people "thieve". 

For instance a future technology could be about generating a mental malady were a person hears people in their head and that person might be inventive coming up with hundreds of designs that would otherwise be made possible in their world, however those people listening in are stealing those ideas away and undermining any potential of that individual to be able to put those things into reality (e.g. hospitalising them etc)

This in turn heightens the psychological impact on that individual as every idea they came up with eventually comes into the world under the guise of some big businesses design which has all the paperwork to backup that it came from them.  So any claim they attempt to raise is automatically brushed off due to their posed lunacy.

(Incidentally such industrial espionage doesn't need time travel to be made possible.)

Personally I'd be against the concept of someone running off with someone else's idea.  When someone researches something they usually do so because they already have a clue as to what they are looking at and attempt to understand the full interpretation of what it is they are researching (They don't leave stones unturned or cut corners).   Those that would just take for themselves do so out of greed and don't have the same concerns as those they thieve from, this leads to sloppy research and poor research (inferior products or science)

On the subject quantum theory:
There is also a caveat that if spacetime was made of many parallels, they would likely almost be completely identical to one another.  The reason for this is down to why parallels would exist and what the actual designs purpose is. 

An analogy that can give an approximation of how I mean is quite simply how server farms use RAID (wikipedia.org) to maintain the integrity of data.  (You can't destroy energy much like you don't want to lose data)

The concept is that data isn't stored in just one place on one drive, it's actually stored in multiple physical locations in multiple formats.  When data is processed live (rather than just being stored) this requires a Fuzzy Logic (wikipedia.org) method of applying all those data arrays together to merge together to maintain an overall live process.  During which time there might be failures in the hardware or discrepancies in the data's logic at the level of one those "parallel" layers, this causes odd "Spooky" effects which when applied to the physics of the real universe are more than likely responsible for generating some quantum physics effects.

We wouldn't just keep parallels as similar as possible to try and maintain the accuracy of the data but also to simplify the mathematics that would be required if we were to actually attempt to utilise such a design to our own advantage.  (Having infinite completely different parallels would create too much chaos for it to have any functional use and would likely undermine the very nature of the universe that we empirically observe)

The conclusion of course here implies that our universe is manufactured, simulated and quite possibly controllable by us (Humans et Co) eventually (should of course we choose to negate the spiral of entropy and actually venture forth with that as a game plan)

[Yazata]

EXCERPT: If time travel is possible, why haven’t we been visited by tourists from the future?

Who says we haven't? Assuming UFOs are something real, then perhaps they aren't space-aliens at all, but rather time-travelers.

The widespread reports of humanoid aliens suggests that if the reports are accurate, then the mystery beings have some evolutionary relationship with us. Bipedal chordates with eyes, noses and mouths in the familiar positions. Hands with fingers. (Real space aliens will more likely be... alien, both in anatomy and biochemistry.)

One possibility is that time travelers keep a low profile in order to avoid changing the past. But if they can’t change history, why would they even want to come here? Well, maybe they’re stealing our stuff.

It’s an idea Wesley Chu explores in his new novel "Time Salvager"—currently being adapted into a film by Michael Bay—about time travelers who visit the scenes of famous disasters and salvage materials that are destined to be destroyed anyway.

That plot has already been done, by John Varley in his truly excellent early 1980's novel 'Millennium'. It was made into a movie starring Kris Kristofferson, but the movie wasn't nearly as good as the book.

That one imagines a human civilization 1,000 years from now, living on a ruined earth with pollution and runaway diseases so rampant that human beings never live much past 30. They live fairly normally till they are about 20, then their bodies start to rot with cancers and infections. By the time they are 30, they are little more than heads tethered to life support machines as one organ after another has to be replaced.

Human reproduction in their time has almost hit zero and they realize that the human race is doomed. So they decide to create a human colony in their own far distant future, several million years away, after the earth has had time to regenerate itself. But they can't colonize it themselves, since their genomes already contain too many debilitating viruses.

So they need pristine breeding stock for the colony. And it has to come from before all the future diseases ruined the human species. The one thing they have going for them is time travel, but they can't make any changes in the past for fear of creating time paradoxes.

So what they do is target passenger aircraft that are doomed to crash with no survivors, open time portals into the planes and take off all the passengers, replacing them with corpses. (In one case there's a little girl who is the sole survivor of a crash who talks hysterically about the strangers coming out of a bright light and guiding everyone else into the light while telling her she has to stay, but everyone in our time dismisses her report as a NDE fantasy.)

Then a female time agent from the future, one of the book's protagonists, loses a future device in the present. It's found in the plane wreckage by a National Transportation Safety Board investigator, the novel's other protagonist. So the future time agent goes back to try to smooth over the paradox and retrieve the artifact originating a thousand years in the future. One of the things that makes the novel cool is that the agent, who has to visit our time repeatedly, and the investigator don't experience events in the same order. But they fall in love anyway.

There are some interesting touches, as she tries to conceal how ravaged her body already is by our standards (she's one of the healthiest specimens in the future) and her habit of chain-smoking absolutely noxious time-agent cigarettes, since our (relatively) pure air is poisonous to those who are adapted to breathing future pollution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_(film)

[stryder]

Yazata's post reminds me of one of those fleeting works of fiction that I never did quite get penned.

The concept is based around the Roswell crash of 1947, in it the suggestion is that a "Singularity" experiment is created with the knowledge that the time travel end point is Roswell.  A secret underground laboratory is setup to study into creating this time loop, where the resulting crash at Roswell is known and therefore staged to happen again.

The Secrect Laboratory is given a simple rule, any technological or evolutional enhancements stay within the confines of the Laboratory, it's now allowed out into the world since it would be too advanced and likely be treated a national security risk.

With every iteration of it's occurrence a number of things occur, the first is the potential for any technologies sent through to be reverse engineered, remade with any addition changes (upgrades) and then sent again.  This means technologies that appear alien would potentially appear in some universes.

One experiment involves sending a nuclear material to identify the number of times that the loop has been engage (since nuclear material degrades with time, the time period between the crash and when it's sent back again is what would be used to count each universal iteration.)  

Another experiment involves "evolution", the concept is that if you have a closed system in your laboratory you could cycle many iterations of life through the loop, which means you would see in some universes either things that look primitive or future potentials of evolution occur.  This could be applied from a Petri dish right through to following the evolution of homids.

Lastly another way to maintain tracking time, a cross section of a Red Wood (Ponder which ghostly film probably made me consider this).  The concept is the tree is not felled until the day before the capsule is looped back.

The capsule itself wouldn't have any country markings, in fact it wouldn't have words on it at all, just some Navaho glyphs that are an ode to "Freedom". (The concept here is that getting stuck in a repetitive cycle has to be considered whether we have freedom or choose to replicate action just to maintain our understanding of the knowledge of what once was, this of course couldn't be mentioned straight forwards due to security concerns and complete denialability, so to use stenography for a message in a language that had only recently at that time been used in WWII to thwart Japanese intelligence seemed like a good pick. )

You can guess this base for a story could lead to a myriad of twists and turns.