Time Babies, Do They Exist?

[Dryson]

Do Time Babies exist?

A Time Baby is a baby born between a time traveler or temporal agent who couldn't control their natural impulse to mate, no matter where you go or what time you go, Mother Nature is always there, she always finds a way, either naturally or artificially.

Although Starfleet Temporal Agents would be the least likely to conceive Time Babies other species wanting to bend the will of time to their side and win the Temporal War definitely would.

But what happens though when a temporal agent conceives a Time Baby in a time line? Does the Time Baby get super knowledge to advance the time line that it was placed into? How does the DNA of two different time lines function?

 

[LAFR]

Have you been chatting with Jayson?

 

[Mage]

No...... Not here as well.....

 

[Tim Thomason]

What? A time baby would just be a regular baby, formed from one cell from the father and a ton of cells from the mother, that replicate to form a person (the process likely varies considerably across species and during hybridization).

That a parent is from another time is immaterial to the child's physical makeup. There's a bit of a Theseus effect going on with the physicality involved, so it's unlikely any matter in a child (especially after birth) will be from the "wrong timeline" (and thus, extra matter in the universe breaking the conservation of mass) if that's the concern.

The Futurama paradox of becoming one's own grandfather does bring up questions along the lines of the Bootstrap Paradox: where do certain genetic traits along the father's line come from? A timeline (no longer extant) where the time traveler wasn't his own grandfather? Or does a near-infinite loop of successive time traveling match-ups result in a grandson who miraculously carries zero traits from his grandfather/himself?

 

[Guy Gardener]

Tom Paris had sex with Sarah Silverman in a very uncomfortable place.

 

[Tosk]

Good point. Gil Hicks should have specified Beetle. A Kombi Van would be just fine.

 

[at Quark's]

I see no reason why a Time Baby would be anything special. Except of course when it would disrupt the timeline, or create some logical paradox (the child becoming its own ancestor for example)

The Futurama paradox of becoming one's own grandfather does bring up questions along the lines of the Bootstrap Paradox: where do certain genetic traits along the father's line come from? A timeline (no longer extant) where the time traveler wasn't his own grandfather? Or does a near-infinite loop of successive time traveling match-ups result in a grandson who miraculously carries zero traits from his grandfather/himself?

And of course, the further back you go in time, the harder it would be to avoid such paradoxes. It's relatively easy to avoid becoming your own grandfather (I suppose). But, if you are of European descent (including all (partially) white Americans, Australians, etc) and you travel back to Europe , in , say, the 8th century, creating offspring with _anyone_ probably would create such a paradox.

 

[somebuddyX]

Sela was the product of two different time periods and she wasn't anything special. She's no Melody Pond.

 

[Tim Thomason]

I see no reason why a Time Baby would be anything special. Except of course when it would disrupt the timeline, or create some logical paradox (the child becoming its own ancestor for example)



And of course, the further back you go in time, the harder it would be to avoid such paradoxes. It's relatively easy to avoid becoming your own grandfather (I suppose). But, if you are of European descent (including all (partially) white Americans, Australians, etc) and you travel back to Europe , in , say, the 8th century, creating offspring with _anyone_ probably would create such a paradox.

That's true, although the further back you go, the less related you are to the random ancestor and the more likely your genes will never be inherited by you.

 

[at Quark's]

That's true, although the further back you go, the less related you are to the random ancestor and the more likely your genes will never be inherited by you.

Yes, so the effect (whatever it would be) would probably become less severe, but with higher probability, or some such thing.

I'm not really certain where it ends, though. I mean I understand that statistically speaking you're supposed to inherit 50% from each parent, 25% from each grandparent, and so on, but how many generations would you have to go back to make the probability less than, say, 10% you inherited _any_ genetic material at all from a specific ancestor of that generation? There's a smallest 'unit' of genetic information, after all.

And that's not even taking into account that the further you go back, the more convoluted these ancestry trees become. Given that theoretically I would have around 1 trillion ancestors around 800 AD (assuming 40 generations), and there were only about 25 million Europeans alive at the time (assuming I'm exclusively from European descent), that would mean I would descend from any of them over around 40 thousand different lineages on average.

Perhaps it would be simpler to conclude that I would rougly have 1/25 millionth of genetic material of any random European person from that century). Of course, that would be a very primitive approximation since not even within Europe, each person would have been equally likely to contribute to my DNA/ create the same number of lineages; I would expect a higher number of lineages to connect to me from people already living in the area than from people living on the other side of the continent, and so on.

 

[Tosk]

Sela was the product of two different time periods and she wasn't anything special. She's no Melody Pond.

And then you have John Connor, who is the savior of the human race...but not just because his papa did the nasty in the past-y.

 

[1001001]

I see no reason why a Time Baby would be anything special. Except of course when it would disrupt the timeline, or create some logical paradox (the child becoming its own ancestor for example)

Fry went back in time and became his own grandpa.

This created an abnormality that allowed him to defeat the evil invading brains as an adult.



Time baby, yeah!

 

[Tim Thomason]

Yes, so the effect (whatever it would be) would probably become less severe, but with higher probability, or some such thing.

I'm not really certain where it ends, though. I mean I understand that statistically speaking you're supposed to inherit 50% from each parent, 25% from each grandparent, and so on, but how many generations would you have to go back to make the probability less than, say, 10% you inherited _any_ genetic material at all from a specific ancestor of that generation? There's a smallest 'unit' of genetic information, after all.

And that's not even taking into account that the further you go back, the more convoluted these ancestry trees become. Given that theoretically I would have around 1 trillion ancestors around 800 AD (assuming 40 generations), and there were only about 25 million Europeans alive at the time (assuming I'm exclusively from European descent), that would mean I would descend from any of them over around 40 thousand different lineages on average.

Perhaps it would be simpler to conclude that I would rougly have 1/25 millionth of genetic material of any random European person from that century). Of course, that would be a very primitive approximation since not even within Europe, each person would have been equally likely to contribute to my DNA/ create the same number of lineages; I would expect a higher number of lineages to connect to me from people already living in the area than from people living on the other side of the continent, and so on.

Many of those 25 million Europeans never had kids to begin with (especially with high mortality rates), and some that did, only had children who never had children or grandchildren. Abraham Lincoln, for example, despite having four children, has no surviving descendants. Only one child survived to adulthood, but he had three children who gave him three grandchildren, not one of which had children themselves. Statistically, a man with three great-grandchildren who survive into adulthood (all of whom lived into their seventies) should be pretty safe to continue their genetic legacy into eternity, but that did not happen in this case.

You pick a random European in the 800s and father or mother a child, you'd have to follow the family legacy a while and may have to jump in and father or mother a child later on down the line with one of your later descendants/possible ancestors.

 

[cooleddie74]

Time Babies was both the most ambitious Jim Henson animation project as well as his most disappointing.

 

[publiusr]

Tom Paris had sex with Sarah Silverman in a very uncomfortable place.

In an alternate universe?

That’s why they’re called ‘side babies.’

Guy, you are the father

 

[JirinPanthosa]

There's no genetic memory. Time babies are regular babies, with no more knowledge than their parents tell them.

 

[Guy Gardener]

There's no genetic memory. Time babies are regular babies, with no more knowledge than their parents tell them.

Episode of Time Trax, this kid runs a 2 minute mile in high school, on TV, and the world freaks out, which is something a lot of people can do in the future. So the temporal bounty hunter, Darian Lambert, tracks down the kid, just in case one of his parents is a time criminal.

 

[Dryson]

Yes, so the effect (whatever it would be) would probably become less severe, but with higher probability, or some such thing.

I'm not really certain where it ends, though. I mean I understand that statistically speaking you're supposed to inherit 50% from each parent, 25% from each grandparent, and so on, but how many generations would you have to go back to make the probability less than, say, 10% you inherited _any_ genetic material at all from a specific ancestor of that generation? There's a smallest 'unit' of genetic information, after all.

And that's not even taking into account that the further you go back, the more convoluted these ancestry trees become. Given that theoretically I would have around 1 trillion ancestors around 800 AD (assuming 40 generations), and there were only about 25 million Europeans alive at the time (assuming I'm exclusively from European descent), that would mean I would descend from any of them over around 40 thousand different lineages on average.

Perhaps it would be simpler to conclude that I would rougly have 1/25 millionth of genetic material of any random European person from that century). Of course, that would be a very primitive approximation since not even within Europe, each person would have been equally likely to contribute to my DNA/ create the same number of lineages; I would expect a higher number of lineages to connect to me from people already living in the area than from people living on the other side of the continent, and so on.

But if you are a Temporal Agent whose DNA has been protected from any type of contamination and you suddenly appear on planet where the humans are less developed, DNA wise, say Earth in the Stone Age and you have a Time Baby, how does such an alteration of the Stone Age babies DNA effect the outcome of the entire human species?

Basically you are taking Stone Age DNA and combining it with 32nd century DNA which are millions of years apart in development. Are you brining millions of years of developmental and evolutionary changes to a life form? What happens when you combine millions of years of DNA change with very old and less developed DNA?

There would have to some drastic biological change when you suddenly smash millions of years of evolution into the DNA of the past. Thus the new life would then be taken into various futures to super enhance that DNA as well.

 

[Silvercrest]

Basically you are taking Stone Age DNA and combining it with 32nd century DNA which are millions of years apart in development. Are you brining millions of years

Thousands, Professor Scott! Thousands!

 

[at Quark's]

Many of those 25 million Europeans never had kids to begin with (especially with high mortality rates), and some that did, only had children who never had children or grandchildren. Abraham Lincoln, for example, despite having four children, has no surviving descendants. Only one child survived to adulthood, but he had three children who gave him three grandchildren, not one of which had children themselves. Statistically, a man with three great-grandchildren who survive into adulthood (all of whom lived into their seventies) should be pretty safe to continue their genetic legacy into eternity, but that did not happen in this case.

You pick a random European in the 800s and father or mother a child, you'd have to follow the family legacy a while and may have to jump in and father or mother a child later on down the line with one of your later descendants/possible ancestors.

To be honest, I implicitly assumed that the estimation I read was talking about a stable population of 25 million Europeans, i.e. people that had survived into adulthood, but I don't know if that is actually the case. I would think that most people that survived into adulthood would have had children themselves, but you're right, we don't know that for certain. I always had the idea that these medieval people had a lot of children, and that a lot of them died as well. How that would average out in the long run, I wouldn't know.

As for the Abraham Lincoln case: it might have been atypical, or fairly common. I really don't know. Also, I have no idea if a nineteenth century American family can be compared in this respect to a Dark Ages European one, and of course other socio-economic factors would come into play too (e.g. the particular circumstances of the Lincoln family).

But the case you make is interesting: perhaps a significant portion (not even considering the clergy) ultimately didn't proliferate their genetic material into our times at all.

But if you are a Temporal Agent whose DNA has been protected from any type of contamination and you suddenly appear on planet where the humans are less developed, DNA wise, say Earth in the Stone Age and you have a Time Baby, how does such an alteration of the Stone Age babies DNA effect the outcome of the entire human species?

Basically you are taking Stone Age DNA and combining it with 32nd century DNA which are millions of years apart in development. Are you brining millions of years of developmental and evolutionary changes to a life form? What happens when you combine millions of years of DNA change with very old and less developed DNA?

There would have to some drastic biological change when you suddenly smash millions of years of evolution into the DNA of the past. Thus the new life would then be taken into various futures to super enhance that DNA as well.

If you'd go back millions of years, sure. If you'd go back 'only' ten thousand years (that would still land you firmly in the Stone Age), probably less so.

My own feeling would be that probably the factor of evolution could be ignored after the advent of Behavioural Modernity (about 50.000 years ago).. It's there after that, but probably it hasn't made any major differences we know of since then yet. (I'd say more in the ballpark of blue eyes, lactose tolerance, and so on). But I'm certainly no expert so I could be wrong in that.