• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

If you had a time machine would you use it to solve unsolved crimes?

Hey I just realized in my rewatch of The Outer Limits Amanda Plummers character does the thing I was musing about in my OP. But her killing the people before they did their crimes causes drastic changes in the timeline every time.
 
This has nothing to do with time travel, but it always bothered me when so-called psychic mediums (Theresa Caputo, James Van Praagh, James Edward, etc.) tell audience members what their dearly departed family members are feeling and thinking from the afterlife. Since they claim to be able to speak with the dead, wouldn't a better use for their "skills" be naming the perpetrators responsible for unsolved murders? :rolleyes:
 
Last edited:
the only real use for time travel might be FTL/instantaneous communication. it might cause some minor causality problems, but in practical terms just (hypothetically) stablishes temporary reference points. If the method were some sort of non-causal synchronicity (I know, venturing into a weird area) then we're not stuck with the locality/nonlocality problems of some kind of entanglement communication system. But assuming there IS anything to synchronicity, making a non causality effect useful seems impossible.
 
This has nothing to do with time travel, but it always bothered me when so-called psychic mediums (Theresa Caputo, James Van Praagh, James Edward, etc.) tell audience members what their dearly departed family members are feeling and thinking from the afterlife. Since they claim to be able to speak with the dead, wouldn't a better use for their "skills" be naming the perpetrators responsible for unsolved murders? :rolleyes:

That's because the majority of them are fakes and outright liars, yet no one dare call them out on the bullshit.
 
Trailer...

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

First two episodes...

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Crime Traveller.

Just awful, but I love it.

Chloe Annette From Red Dwarf invents a Time Machine, and her friend, a policeman, gets to use it now and then, to solve crimes.

It's a fixed timeline.

You can't make changes.

So when then they go back to watch a robbery or a murder happen, they can't stop it, because they were already there the first time watching the crime unfold, and they still are, because its still the first time.

Mary Tamm , Romana 1, from Doctor Who, is the baddie in one episode.

8 episodes. 1998.

And Yes, because they are hanging out watching Crimes before they actually happen, our heroes do seem sketchy and guilty.
I watched the first three episodes, and it's like a game of "spot the Doctor Who/Britcom actors who guest star in it." It's fun, if rather silly.

I mentioned this show to the pizza guy one night (we chat about TV shows), and I told him about this. To my surprise, the next time he turned up, he said he'd watched it.

I have heard of SFX magazine and seen it but never bothered to pick up a copy of it back in the day. I did get all the Gor books and they are trashy as hell and super misogynistic in nature with some scenes. I did find it funny how in the middle of big US cities no one ever noticed regular runs of rocket ships leaving the city to take wayward captives off to Gor.
First off... I've read some of these (my grandmother looked at the front cover of Nomads of Gor, mistook it for a Tarzan novel, and bought it for me... yikes, she was upset when my grandfather read it and told her it was unsuitable for kids; I was 14 at the time).

They don't actually take off in the middle of cities. They kidnap people from cities, yes. But they're transported to some site out in the country or to some remote, abandoned location where they're not likely to be noticed. Besides, the author just handwaved this problem away with a reference to technology that the Priest-Kings and the Kur have that Earth scientists haven't discovered yet.

No, I wouldn't use a time machine for that. Crimes in general don't interest me.

I would use the time machine to witness historical events, especially those that have been surrounded by a lot of myths since the original event happened, and no-one can be 100% certain what actually happened because there are no trustworthy direct written contemporary sources, only historian's opinions and interpretations of later centuries.
I'd use a time machine to find out how much of the Arthurian legends and Robin Hood is based on historical fact and how much is just made up (most of it, of course, but I want to know the specific elements of each set of legends).

If I had a time machine, I would try to repair my best friendship. Nothing else is working.

But HARRY POTTER AND THE CURSED CHILD shows how time-altering can change way too much. I'm only halfway through, and Hermione has assumed the mantle of Dark Arts Minister.
Time-traveling Hermione is a huge sub-genre of Harry Potter fanfic. There are so many stories in which she goes back 20 years, either by accident or deliberately, and attempts to prevent Voldemort from killing James and Lily - while getting into a romance with either Sirius or Remus (in one story it was Regulus she got into a relationship with, in an attempt to prevent his death). Some of these stories are really quite good.

Going back in time to arrest a criminal might make your best friend wink out of existence—for that friend might be a descendant of said criminal who had a family due to not having been locked up.

The best thing is to somehow grab the soul of any murder victim and give them a fresh start in the future.
That's assuming souls exist.

In Star Trek, precrime I felt like it's "You are such an asshole, with the potential to same bad shit other versions of you did, it's just a certainty that you might do something similar as well eventually, so we cannot trust you, and you're in jail buddy."

With a Clerk in a flower shop, who gives a shit that some sideways universe version of that person killed a few people, but if you are the Captain of a Star Ship, that is not a risk worth taking.

Kirk should have gone to jail forever after he got those whales.
There's a story in which we find that bringing Gillian to the future actually created a new timeline that our heroes don't notice until Sulu's in trouble, Chekov's in trouble, and Uhura goes home to discover that surprise - she's married! :eek:

Gillian goes off on her new assignment... and stuff happens. It's a good story, though I question the sanity of anyone who names a shuttlecraft "Archie".

I use time travel to stop someone from committing a heinous crime. He goes to prison, doesn't meet his future wife and his kids are never born. I'm the only one who will ever know. What's my crime in all of this?
Causing those kids to be erased.

My group has invented time travel, but haven't been able to account for the earth not being in the same spot. So we're down to four members now.
This is a point raised by Robert Silverberg in his novel Up the Line. His main character points out that it's easier to travel across a thousand years of time than 20 miles from your point of arrival to the place where you want to go. And in the era where Jud intends to go, he has to find a horse or donkey to ride, as it's a long walk.
 
First off... I've read some of these (my grandmother looked at the front cover of Nomads of Gor, mistook it for a Tarzan novel, and bought it for me... yikes, she was upset when my grandfather read it and told her it was unsuitable for kids; I was 14 at the time).

They don't actually take off in the middle of cities. They kidnap people from cities, yes. But they're transported to some site out in the country or to some remote, abandoned location where they're not likely to be noticed. Besides, the author just handwaved this problem away with a reference to technology that the Priest-Kings and the Kur have that Earth scientists haven't discovered yet.


I never got that far, the only book I read parts of was one which starts off in NY I think and showed some woman being taken from her home in the city to Gor but the people that got her seemed to have mind powers or something because this guy says "take your clothes off" and she just willingly complies. and they look her over. They never mentioned where they leave Earth from so I assumed it was the city....

Blimey they made 37 books
 
I never got that far, the only book I read parts of was one which starts off in NY I think and showed some woman being taken from her home in the city to Gor but the people that got her seemed to have mind powers or something because this guy says "take your clothes off" and she just willingly complies. and they look her over. They never mentioned where they leave Earth from so I assumed it was the city....

Blimey they made 37 books
Nomads of Gor is the fourth book in the series, and I'm not sure which one you're talking about. There are several in which the Earth woman character comes from New York, but what you describe doesn't happen at any time in the early novels. Yes, they are taken to Gor, but they arrive there fully-clothed.

I haven't read all of them; the writing style and story arc changed quite a bit from the earlier ones, so I'm guessing that they weren't all written by the same person.
 
Nomads of Gor is the fourth book in the series, and I'm not sure which one you're talking about. There are several in which the Earth woman character comes from New York, but what you describe doesn't happen at any time in the early novels. Yes, they are taken to Gor, but they arrive there fully-clothed.

I haven't read all of them; the writing style and story arc changed quite a bit from the earlier ones, so I'm guessing that they weren't all written by the same person.

Oh so John Norman didn't write all of them?
 
Oh so John Norman didn't write all of them?
I don't know if he did or didn't. I suspect, based on the writing style of the latest ones vs. the early ones that he may have used a ghostwriter (or more than one) as time went on. I'm speculating on this, not stating it as fact.

It wouldn't be the first time that an author did this. Marion Zimmer Bradley suffered health problems and used ghostwriters for some of her Darkover novels, until eventually they got co-author status and then the series was officially "inherited" by Deborah Ross.
 
I use time travel to prevent a mass shooting, so instead of the shooter killing a lot of people, the cops kill him instead. Can his family sue me for wrongful death?
 
I use time travel to prevent a mass shooting, so instead of the shooter killing a lot of people, the cops kill him instead. Can his family sue me for wrongful death?

How exactly would they sue you? They'd have to prove something wouldn't they?
 
Appreciate he's not officially a criminal but I'd go back in time and kick Nigel Farages dad in the balls to prevent him ever having kids
 
I'd like to go back to 1975 or so.

They still spoke English.
McDonalds cooked the fries in beef tallow.
Led Zeppelin concerts.
ABBA and ELO were about to get big.
Vietnam was wrapping up.
Foil-wrapped Ding Dongs.

I mean, who really needs the internets and smart phones? Yup, 1975. I'd stay until about 1998 or so, and if I was still alive, I'd punch out back to... 1975.

Stopping crimes? Meh. Fuck it. When you read as much history as I do, you come to realize that there are no new problems under the sun, and people have been butchering each other for all of human history. You might prevent one or two here and there, but time will push back and others will simply die in their place.
 
I would like to go way back in history and see what some historical people looked like and how they lived and also to see how pyramids in Egypt and Mexico were built. Also everything about dinosaurs.
 
I'd love to go back to when Austin was on the coastline, with sandy beaches and a lagoon outside my balcony...
 
I'd like to hunt down the person who created the idea of privitization ..... Essential utilities should never be that way
 
I'd like to go back to 1975 or so.

They still spoke English.
McDonalds cooked the fries in beef tallow.
Led Zeppelin concerts.
ABBA and ELO were about to get big.
Vietnam was wrapping up.
Foil-wrapped Ding Dongs.

And you also have Star Wars to look forward to. I'd love to experience that period of our culture.
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top