Spoilers Timeless: Season 1 on NBC

[JD]

Watched the most recent episode. Pretty decent and interesting. Not a fan of the "monolithic, all-powerful, secret organization" trope but it seems to be starting to hit a stride here and, possibly, our characters on a path to side with the bad-guy on some level or another?

I've been expecting that since first started hearing about Rittenhouse.

On the "can't travel back to a time you're already in..." thing.

It seemed instead of trying to relax it or ignore they actually.... tightened it?

When it was originally brought up I took it as they can't go back to re-try because they're already there it'd cause a compounding of paradoxes that had unpredictable results. That's what I took from the "no second chances" thing; not that you couldn't go back to a time you already exist in at all. Which is pretty much on par with the "same matter cannot occupy the same space" thing from Timecop.

There's no "logical" reason why they couldn't travel back to a time they already exist in so long as they don't interact with the other version of themself (again causing paradoxes.) And it seems limiting as far as the time periods we'll see. We're really not going to see more of the 70s or the 80s and 90s at all?

I still suspect sooner or later they'll technobabble out of that handicap. Sort of like never nailing down how "fast" warp speeds are or how the technology in Trek works, it ties your hands. So this self-imposed handicap is going to be story block sooner or later and they're going to need to ditch it.

I was surprised by the approach to that too. I thought it just meant that they couldn't go back an exact same time and place where they were at that moment. Ithought they could go back to time they had been or after they were born as long as they were in a different place.

 

[Photoman15]

They can't go back to where "this team" has already been, not within their lifetimes.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Yes Photoman, that is what it sorta sounded like what they meant in the pilot, but they said something else this week.

If any of this were true, you have a time machine.
Why don't you just go back and save your family? Like how you want to save your wife? You know the rules as well as I do.
Can't go back to any time I already exist.
And since I don't know who put the hit out to begin with, I'm gonna just wipe

Rereading the transcript from the pilot, the rules have not changed, it was just easy to misunderstand their phrasing.

 

[Christopher]

When it was originally brought up I took it as they can't go back to re-try because they're already there it'd cause a compounding of paradoxes that had unpredictable results. That's what I took from the "no second chances" thing; not that you couldn't go back to a time you already exist in at all.

I took it to be a matter of physical coexistence, though I wasn't sure whether it just meant in the same general vicinity or anywhere in the world. Evidently it's the latter. Which is a clarification but not a contradiction of what we were told before. The only potential area of conflict, as I said, is that Matt Frewer's old enough to have been alive at the time of the Vegas episode, but his character could be 4-5 years younger and it would work.

There's no "logical" reason why they couldn't travel back to a time they already exist in so long as they don't interact with the other version of themself (again causing paradoxes.)

Fictional time travel is rarely logical. It almost always relies on unrealistic conceits -- like ignoring the Earth's movement through space. The Sun orbits the center of the galaxy at about 220 kilometers per second, which is about 7 billion kilometers per year. So traveling back 44 years to 1972 would be equivalent to traveling over 2000 astronomical units, or more than 50 times the average distance from the Sun to Pluto. Don't get me started on stories that assume you could time travel back to the "same place" in the past and end up in the same building or street instead of floating in the middle of space.

And it seems limiting as far as the time periods we'll see. We're really not going to see more of the 70s or the 80s and 90s at all?

I don't see how that's a problem. Quantum Leap limited its travel to within Sam Beckett's lifetime, so it never went earlier than 1953 (except in one extraordinary instance where he leaped into a Civil War ancestor of his). This is just flipping that over so that they can't be later than when Flynn was born.

I still suspect sooner or later they'll technobabble out of that handicap. Sort of like never nailing down how "fast" warp speeds are or how the technology in Trek works, it ties your hands. So this self-imposed handicap is going to be story block sooner or later and they're going to need to ditch it.

I think that's looking at it backwards. Limits can be good for fiction, by not making things too easy for the heroes. Or the villains, in this case. Imagine how much both sides could sabotage each other if they could go back to right before Flynn stole the machine or Bruhl invented it or whatever. This way, they have to take each other on in the more distant past. It's lazy writing to toss a limit aside the moment it inconveniences you. Good writing is finding a creative way to get what you want within the existing limits.

 

[Romulan_spy]

I get that if you directly interacted with your past self, you could create a nasty time paradox. So wouldn't time travelling to a time where your past self was already alive still be ok as long as you were spatially separated? For example, if I travel to China at a time when my past self is living in the US there is no chance of me meeting my past self. I would think that as long as there is no chance of actually interacting with my past self, things should be somewhat ok. But I wonder if the rule is not so much a physical law but rather a self imposed rule because of the risks of interacting with yourself and creating a time paradox.

 

[Photoman15]

Fictional time travel is rarely logical. It almost always relies on unrealistic conceits -- like ignoring the Earth's movement through space. The Sun orbits the center of the galaxy at about 220 kilometers per second, which is about 7 billion kilometers per year. So traveling back 44 years to 1972 would be equivalent to traveling over 2000 astronomical units, or more than 50 times the average distance from the Sun to Pluto. Don't get me started on stories that assume you could time travel back to the "same place" in the past and end up in the same building or street instead of floating in the middle of space.

That's why they needed Frank Parker. Seven Days took that into account. He had to "control" the sphere so it would materialize on Earth. Not necessarily where he needed to be.

 

[Christopher]

I get that if you directly interacted with your past self, you could create a nasty time paradox. So wouldn't time travelling to a time where your past self was already alive still be ok as long as you were spatially separated? For example, if I travel to China at a time when my past self is living in the US there is no chance of me meeting my past self. I would think that as long as there is no chance of actually interacting with my past self, things should be somewhat ok. But I wonder if the rule is not so much a physical law but rather a self imposed rule because of the risks of interacting with yourself and creating a time paradox.

Well, define "interaction." The laws of physics don't care about human perception and awareness; to them, human beings are just ensembles of subatomic particles. So even if two versions of a person aren't in the same place or consciously aware of each other, one of them is jostling air molecules and dust particles and adding heat and carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and creating other physical effects that would propagate from particle to particle and eventually affect their duplicate. We all "interact" with each other in ways we aren't conscious of.

Or maybe it's a quantum-superposition thing. Two copies of the same person at the same time are, theoretically, the same quantum object existing in two superposed states, like a particle being on both sides of a potential well, or like Schroedinger's Cat being both alive and dead. Normally, as a result of interaction with the larger environment (i.e. being "measured"), that particle will collapse into just one of those states. It can't endure in two places at once for very long. So two quantum copies of the same person existing at the same time would have to collapse together as well -- not through their interaction with each other, but through their interaction and correlation with the larger environment that they occupy.

The problem with this idea, once again, is that humans are just ensembles of subatomic particles, and the particles that make up our bodies change over time as our cells die and get replaced, as we respirate and eat and metabolize, etc. The old saw about completely replacing all our cells every 7 years is bogus; some cells get replenished every few weeks while others are permanent, although cells have their own internal metabolism, taking in nutrients and expelling waste, so even those permanent cells probably aren't made of the same specific particles for very long. So after a certain amount of time, you and your younger self might have very few particles in common and thus would be different entities from a quantum perspective, so the collapse wouldn't happen -- or rather, it would, but it would be with assorted particles spread out all over the world instead of with your past/future self specifically. Which would pretty much preclude you from traveling back in time at all if that were the case, because most of the particles that make us up have been on Earth for billions of years anyway.

On the other hand, subatomic particles are pretty much interchangeable and what defines them is the information describing their current state. So maybe it's the whole ensemble we call a person that exists as a distinct quantum object rather than the individual particles. This is the principle behind quantum teleportation -- you take the quantum state information from one set of particles and superimpose it on another, and it's quantum-mechanically the same entity as the original because the information is what actually defines it. In this sense, as long as your physical body and brain aren't too massively altered from your younger self, you might still count as the same quantum object, or close enough.

 

[Scout101]

Problem with so many sci-fi shows is that the plot prevents them from being able to act logically. They've got a time machine, seems they should be able to make this work somehow. Theirs was the prototype, so while it was kept to act as a 'lifeboat', does it have no actual ability to travel outside of where the main pod is? It MUST, because it doesn't end up in the exact same place as the other one, and seems to show up after the first one arrives. With time travel, no real reason to arrive late or out of position, is there? Not sure if they've explicitly said that time in the past = time in the present, so San Dimas time and all that, or if it's just been implied, but they should at least always be able to find the pod easily, yes?

And as it was the prototype, must be able to travel on its own, outside of what the main pod is doing. If it's just homing in on the other one, no need for a pilot as the destination is set. Seems they're just choosing to go there as well. Choose a week earlier and get there before Flynn. Our crew is younger than the bad guys' crew, travel somewhere closer that they can't go to, and you get to attack a version of the bad guys that hasn't even thought of being bad yet. If it's homing in on the other pod, it's realistically autopilot really, so could toss some teenaged 'agents' in there and get a decade closer to the bad guys than anyone can right now.

Star Trek has had similar problems with many of their concepts. Which is why most ideas are forgotten at the end of the episode, but even the basics are a problem. Transporters were introduced to save time/money while filming, but when thinking about what they do, they're basically the ultimate weapon. Why fire at each other, just beam a bomb onboard, or dematerialize an important component, piece of the hull, whatever. The Tantalus device was pitched as something special/unique/scary, but how's it functionally any different from a standard transporter other than the transporter makes a special effect noise (with most species' versions, at least)? Should also make everyone functionally immortal, cure all diseases, etc. We've seen little hints here and there, and sometimes they address it in passing, but the transporter is a terrifying device if they choose to use it for anything other than transportation of people/cargo.

 

[Christopher]

Problem with so many sci-fi shows is that the plot prevents them from being able to act logically. They've got a time machine, seems they should be able to make this work somehow. Theirs was the prototype, so while it was kept to act as a 'lifeboat', does it have no actual ability to travel outside of where the main pod is? It MUST, because it doesn't end up in the exact same place as the other one, and seems to show up after the first one arrives. With time travel, no real reason to arrive late or out of position, is there?

Sure there is -- if there's a margin of error that they can't reduce. The lifeboat can only follow the mothership to its destination, but it can only narrow it down to within a few kilometers or so. They don't have enough control to target their arrival more precisely.

(Although in stories like that, I always have to wonder why the error margin is always horizontal. Why don't they ever arrive in midair or underground? There have been some stories that have thought of that, but not many)

And as it was the prototype, must be able to travel on its own, outside of what the main pod is doing.

That doesn't follow. The first Wright "flyer" was really more a ground-effect vehicle that couldn't get too high in the air or travel very far. Project Mercury had to begin with suborbital flights before it could put people into orbit. Early prototypes are rarely as fully functional as later models.

If it's just homing in on the other one, no need for a pilot as the destination is set.

That doesn't follow either. As a prototype, it wouldn't be automatic. Piloting isn't just about setting the destination, it's about making sure the craft gets there. Given the inherent dangers of time travel, Rufus's job may be less about pointing the lifeboat in the right direction as making sure it doesn't get crushed or vaporized along the way. For instance, just for one hypothetical possibility, if the lifeboat and mothership are linked by some kind of wormhole, then steering the lifeboat into the walls of the wormhole could be disastrous.

 

[Trekker4747]

I took it to be a matter of physical coexistence, though I wasn't sure whether it just meant in the same general vicinity or anywhere in the world. Evidently it's the latter. Which is a clarification but not a contradiction of what we were told before. The only potential area of conflict, as I said, is that Matt Frewer's old enough to have been alive at the time of the Vegas episode, but his character could be 4-5 years younger and it would work.

.....

Fictional time travel is rarely logical. It almost always relies on unrealistic conceits -- like ignoring the Earth's movement through space. The Sun orbits the center of the galaxy at about 220 kilometers per second, which is about 7 billion kilometers per year. So traveling back 44 years to 1972 would be equivalent to traveling over 2000 astronomical units, or more than 50 times the average distance from the Sun to Pluto. Don't get me started on stories that assume you could time travel back to the "same place" in the past and end up in the same building or street instead of floating in the middle of space.

Yeah, but for me the rules should still make sense. There should be some "reason" why you can't go back to a time you already exist in other than "you can't." If it were just as simple as they can't go back and try again because they're already there failing and they'd just make things worse or compound paradoxes I'd get it. If it were the ridiculous notion of "same matter cannot occupy the same space" from Timecop it'd accept because even then I sort of hand-wave it away as just being a case of interacting with your other-self generates compounding paradoxes. Sort of "10 Print: "This is a paradox" 20 GOTO 10" sort of thing the universe corrects it by simply "rebooting" (or in this case removing the paradoxical encounter.) But I need something more than "you just can't, when we tried it turned out bad." Because, for me, that's not enough.

As for the movements of the sun, Earth and the Earth's own rotation, I've always just assumed that whatever medium the time machine uses to travel between two fourth dimensional points moves along with the Earth and other stellar bodies. In order to move between two points there has to be a connection between them, well we could extend this to time as well as we can two physical location. There is "something" connecting the two points in time the time machine uses to travel between temporal destinations. This "something" moves with the Earth as it moves through space orbiting the sun, the sun orbiting the galaxy, the galaxy moving through space, etc. Hell, this time machine itself can already move itself between physical locations as well as temporal ones so it's not too much of a stretch to say it's doing this on a stellar scale as well.

I don't see how that's a problem. Quantum Leap limited its travel to within Sam Beckett's lifetime, so it never went earlier than 1953 (except in one extraordinary instance where he leaped into a Civil War ancestor of his). This is just flipping that over so that they can't be later than when Flynn was born.

Not really a "problem" so much as it's just a limitation. There's plenty of interesting things that happened in the 70s, 80s, 90s and even 2000s they could exploit for story/nostalgia reasons. (Though traveling back to 2000 would hardly be a remarkable thing for either us or the characters.)

Why give yourself the handicap of not being able to explore Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, the end of the Cold War/fall of the USSR. Iran-Contra, "Lewinsky Gate" and so forth. There's material in the 80s and 90s to explore, why deny yourself that on some rule you can't even justify?

I think that's looking at it backwards. Limits can be good for fiction, by not making things too easy for the
heroes. Or the villains, in this case. Imagine how much both sides could sabotage each other if they could go back to right before Flynn stole the machine or Bruhl invented it or whatever. This way, they have to take each other on in the more distant past. It's lazy writing to toss a limit aside the moment it inconveniences you. Good writing is finding a creative way to get what you want within the existing limits.

Which is why I think the rule should be simply akin to "no do-overs." You can't interact with your past-self not just you can't exist in two temporal locations at once for "some reason."

But mark my words. That limitation will be thrown away or overcome at some point down the road if the series should go for the long-haul.

 

[Christopher]

Yeah, but for me the rules should still make sense.

That would rule out virtually all time travel fiction ever. Except for something like, oh, Robert L. Forward's Timemaster. Time travel is a story conceit that almost always relies on ignoring outright physical impossibilities and logical absurdities. Even in a science fiction context, it's essentially fantasy, and its rules are whatever serves the story.

Not really a "problem" so much as it's just a limitation. There's plenty of interesting things that happened in the 70s, 80s, 90s and even 2000s they could exploit for story/nostalgia reasons. (Though traveling back to 2000 would hardly be a remarkable thing for either us or the characters.)

Every show has its own focus. Elementary, say, is set in New York City even though there are no doubt interesting crimes happening in London or Istanbul or wherever. This show's focus is on American history before the lifetime of most of its audience. If you want time travel to the '80s or '90s, there's always Legends of Tomorrow and Frequency. (Well, maybe not always Frequency, since The CW declined to pick up the back end of its season.)

 

[Scout101]

Sure there is -- if there's a margin of error that they can't reduce. The lifeboat can only follow the mothership to its destination, but it can only narrow it down to within a few kilometers or so. They don't have enough control to target their arrival more precisely.

(Although in stories like that, I always have to wonder why the error margin is always horizontal. Why don't they ever arrive in midair or underground? There have been some stories that have thought of that, but not many)

They start every episode by telling us precisely what day the bad guys went to. They seem to show up that day, or a couple days after. Never before? Flynn seems to have had time to make contacts, arrange events, other stuff ahead of the good guys showing up to bust it up. Just odd.

That doesn't follow. The first Wright "flyer" was really more a ground-effect vehicle that couldn't get too high in the air or travel very far. Project Mercury had to begin with suborbital flights before it could put people into orbit. Early prototypes are rarely as fully functional as later models.

Agreed, on airplanes. The point on this one is that the prototype is SURELY capable of time travel independent of the newer pod, or it would be a terrible prototype. If this one can only follow the newer one around, how would they have tested the original? It MUST be capable of some level of independent operations. Maybe the newer one is more precise, or easier to use, or whatever, but the old one must have some of the same functions. How would they have tested the first one without a second one to act as master? This time machine DOES travel through time, so I'd say the most important function of the newer pod is existing in the prototype. And since they would have had to have proven that prior to building a newer version, gotta be able to do so independently of the new pod, yes?

That doesn't follow either. As a prototype, it wouldn't be automatic. Piloting isn't just about setting the destination, it's about making sure the craft gets there. Given the inherent dangers of time travel, Rufus's job may be less about pointing the lifeboat in the right direction as making sure it doesn't get crushed or vaporized along the way. For instance, just for one hypothetical possibility, if the lifeboat and mothership are linked by some kind of wormhole, then steering the lifeboat into the walls of the wormhole could be disastrous.

We actually don't know anything (as far as I can remember) about how it works, or why he's called a pilot vice operator or whatever. They've never shown him doing any more than flipping a couple switches and then they pop into a new place. Are they maneuvering through wormholes, or just being pulled to the set destination? That's the question I'm asking. It would have made more sense to describe him as the guy that could fix it if they got stuck/stranded or troubleshoot a crappy prototype system, as they don't really show any piloting that would seem to be over and above a 'set it and forget it' method of travel. Especially if they are linked to the main pod, should make the pilot function even more useless. Seems a fair question to ask, though, as they've yet to touch on it at all. And if he's not really flying, opens up a bunch of other possibilities.

 

[Christopher]

They start every episode by telling us precisely what day the bad guys went to. They seem to show up that day, or a couple days after. Never before? Flynn seems to have had time to make contacts, arrange events, other stuff ahead of the good guys showing up to bust it up. Just odd.

As mentioned, they seem to be implicitly going by "San Dimas time" -- i.e. the same amount of time passes in past and present. Which sorta makes sense if the lifeboat and mothership are connected by a wormhole or quantum entanglement or something (and those are both the same thing in some theories), which would tend to keep them in sync relative to each other. So the destination in space varies, but the destination in time is always as much time after the mothership arrives as it takes the team to get ready after they detect its time jump.

Agreed, on airplanes. The point on this one is that the prototype is SURELY capable of time travel independent of the newer pod, or it would be a terrible prototype. If this one can only follow the newer one around, how would they have tested the original? It MUST be capable of some level of independent operations.

Maybe not. It could be that it was only able to travel back to the point when some kind of anchor device was activated, no further. And the researchers would have to activate that anchor themselves, so the time machine couldn't go back any further than the start of the experiment. I.e. if they activated the anchor on June 10, 2016 then waited a week and sent the prototype back on June 17, it could only go back to June 10, 2016, no earlier. (This is actually how real wormhole-based time travel would have to work -- you couldn't go further back than the creation of the wormhole at the earliest.) The mothership, then, could be the first time pod that's able to travel back without an anchor, so that it can go back any length of time without needing an anchor. But the prototype/lifeboat still needs an anchor to draw it, and it uses the mothership as its anchor.

 

[Scout101]

Maybe, but not sure that would have constituted a total success, as the pilot would be somewhere he already existed, so the results can't have been great. What would their first 'successful' test have been, and how would they have gotten there without the anchor you suggest? Just not sure how they could classify that a success, never have anyone survive the trip, and then even determine why that is the problem. And then spend the resources and time to develop a more advanced version of the device hoping that maybe it's just because they weren't time traveling hard enough, and needed to take a bigger jump backwards in time for it to not kill the travelers...

And yes, I know you said maybe, it's just that yours seems a lot less plausible than mine. You don't refine the idea until you prove the underlying concept isn't garbage. Almost HAD to have had success with this before they built version 2.0.

 

[Scout101]

And how long before it dawns on anyone in the show that they aren't saving the timeline? Not only not in the week to week example, where they only break it a little, but in the bigger picture altogether. The timeline they are trying to save has Lucy's notebook from the future, with stories, or a diary, or whatever in the hands of Flynn. No idea what went on in the preceding version of events, but they're doing the whole thing from a starting point in an alternate universe. Prime Lucy and company are probably still working to wipe them out as well...

 

[Christopher]

Maybe, but not sure that would have constituted a total success, as the pilot would be somewhere he already existed, so the results can't have been great.

Science and invention aren't about instant gratification. It's an incremental process.There have to be partial successes of each individual element of a new technology before you can put them together into a finished device. They had to invent the wheel, the drive shaft, the piston, the spark plug, etc. separately before they put them together into cars.

What would their first 'successful' test have been, and how would they have gotten there without the anchor you suggest?

In science, success means that you learn something. Robert Goddard's rockets never got more than 9000 feet off the ground, but without them, we never would've gotten to the Moon 32 years later. There have to be incremental steps before the final result.

And yes, I know you said maybe, it's just that yours seems a lot less plausible than mine. You don't refine the idea until you prove the underlying concept isn't garbage. Almost HAD to have had success with this before they built version 2.0.

You have a strangely narrow definition of success. If they succeeded in sending the capsule back several days to when an anchor device was activated, that would prove that time travel to an existing anchor point is a success. That's proof of concept right there. That's actual travel back in time. It's just limited because you can't go farther back in time than the start of the experiment. (Which, as I said, is what the constraint on actual, physically plausible time travel would be: You could never go back to a time before the time-travel mechanism existed. If you found a wormhole that was 1000 years old, and one end of it was time-dilated by a factor of ten relative to the other, then the farthest back you could go was 900 years.) The next stage would be getting around that limit on destination and somehow (in defiance of known physics) inventing a way to send a craft back in time to a point before there was an extant anchor device.

Think of the lifeboat as the equivalent of Yuri Gagarin's suborbital flight or John Glenn's orbital flight, and the mothership as the equivalent of the Apollo capsules traveling to the Moon and back. The former flights weren't "failures" just because they didn't achieve the long-term goal right away; they were successes at getting humans into space and bringing them safely back. That was the first success we needed to achieve before we achieved the next success of sending humans to the Moon and bringing them safely back.

And how long before it dawns on anyone in the show that they aren't saving the timeline?

Their goal is not to save the timeline. Their goal is to save the United States of America. As long as the US still exists in essentially the same form, then Mason and Agent Christopher are okay with a few minor tweaks to its history. That was established in the pilot, when the travelers noted that the details of the Hindenburg disaster had been changed and Mason and Christopher were unconcerned.

No idea what went on in the preceding version of events, but they're doing the whole thing from a starting point in an alternate universe. Prime Lucy and company are probably still working to wipe them out as well...

It's pretty clear that this show is using the Back to the Future model of time travel where there's a single timeline that gets "rewritten," rather than a bunch of parallel alternates.

 

[Scout101]

I'm still of the belief that the lifeboat has to be able to perform time travel independent of the mothership. Lifeboat and Mothership are the new terms, but since they built the lifeboat first, it's gotta be able to do something without the newer mothership. And you shot down my idea about autopilot and not needing a crew (or at least Rufus) earlier, so maybe you think my definition of success is a tad narrow, but I'd put 100% crew mortality rate as a failure when evaluating time machines. They can make an anchor and draw the machine back, but you were pretty insistent it needed a pilot, so when he keeps showing up dead, I'd think that would stall the development somewhat. Then again, it's sort of a loop process, so they keep getting an updated machine arriving at the date they set the anchor, so maybe it doesn't take long to fix, just an infinite amount of 2-year loops to tweak the machine? Even in the 100th try, though, the pilot still dies, so I don't know if I'd spend money on a fancier one until someone survived a trip.

If the Gagarins or Glenns of the world died 100% of the time we tried suborbital launches, not sure 'fuck it, we're probably just not shooting these guys out far enough, let's try sending them to the moon!' would have been the logical outcome of that process. It would probably be trying to get them to survive the baby step first. In this case, it would mean sending someone back further in time using the prototype, so without an anchor. So, lifeboat should be able to travel independently like I suggested. If it's automated, that's fine, but should be able to automate using the mothership as an anchor just as easy, right?

I get the BTTF vs. alternate timeline thing, was just entertained by the thought that our heroes aren't from the 'real' timeline; we're focused on guys living in the Biff for President timeline instead. At some point, something went wrong in the 'prime' timeline, or they decided to intentionally make a serious change to the timeline that messed everything up and altered things already. we'll see if they go the Terminator route of dueling time travelers that just keep messing things up worse and worse until no one can even figure out what's going on anymore

 

[Christopher]

I'm still of the belief that the lifeboat has to be able to perform time travel independent of the mothership.

Yes, that's exactly the point of my hypothesis -- that the lifeboat can travel through time, it just can't navigate through time except by targeting an existing beacon/anchor in the past. So it can only travel to a specific target that already exists in the past. But the mothership is free of that limitation and can travel anywhere. That's why the mothership can go anywhere but the lifeboat can only follow the mothership.

It's like the difference between a train and a tank -- they can both travel, but one can only move along a predefined route, while the other can go pretty much anywhere. Or it's like the difference between the teleporter in The Fly, which could only teleport objects to a single receiving station, and a transporter in Star Trek, which can teleport objects to any destination.

And you shot down my idea about autopilot and not needing a crew (or at least Rufus) earlier, so maybe you think my definition of success is a tad narrow, but I'd put 100% crew mortality rate as a failure when evaluating time machines.

Sorry, I don't remember anything about crew mortality. Was that stated in an episode? I'm just trying to come up with a hypothetical explanation for why the lifeboat can only follow the mothership rather than traveling independently.

They can make an anchor and draw the machine back, but you were pretty insistent it needed a pilot...

I'm not "insistent" about anything. I'm just playing with ideas as a matter of intellectual curiosity. The show asserts that a pilot is necessary. That's an axiom within this conversation, not because of me but because of the show. Someone asked why it would be necessary, and I tried to come up with a possible explanation, merely as a suggestion. Because that's what I do as a writer -- I try to come up with reasons why a story premise could happen. It's just an exercise in creative thinking to me -- I have no deeper stake in it than that.

I get the BTTF vs. alternate timeline thing, was just entertained by the thought that our heroes aren't from the 'real' timeline; we're focused on guys living in the Biff for President timeline instead.

You realize that we actually are in the Biff for President timeline now, right...?

 

[Scout101]

Sorry, I don't remember anything about crew mortality. Was that stated in an episode? I'm just trying to come up with a hypothetical explanation for why the lifeboat can only follow the mothership rather than traveling independently.

yes, very explicitly. That's the reason they can't travel within their own lifetimes, they needed a mop and bucket to remove the pilot that tried it last time. So to use a beacon that they created as part of the tech, the lifeboat would have to operate independent of a pilot. Which ought to mean they don't need Rufus if they can use the mothership as the same sort of beacon. If they can send it through time without a beacon, means they can travel without the mothership doing so first. And again, it would seem that they probably would have had to have had some success with a living pilot prior to building another one. Maybe the new one has better control, and can target a moment instead of a more vague range, and the lifeboat can only be more specific by using the mothership as a beacon? that would make more sense to me.

I'm not "insistent" about anything. I'm just playing with ideas as a matter of intellectual curiosity. The show asserts that a pilot is necessary. That's not hypothetical, that's a "fact" within the reality of the show. Someone asked why it would be necessary, and I tried to come up with a possible explanation, merely as a suggestion. Because that's what I do as a writer -- I try to come up with reasons why a story premise could happen. It's just an exercise in creative thinking to me -- I have no deeper stake in it than that.

I get it, but you come across as your possible explanation being the only one that works. a lot. No one's ever said that your low probability potentials are impossible, just that it's odd that you often reject what seems like the higher probability answer in favor of saying yours isn't impossible.

Yes, they've said they need a pilot (but not why). They've also said you can't travel anywhere you exist; so not within your lifetime, and no moment you've already visited. Which would mean your hypothesis about the beacon is unlike to be correct, because judging by the ages of the people involved, they'd have had to have invented a beacon, waited ~30 years, and then tried to time travel. Unless a toddler can fly the machine (which means Rufus isn't doing much), they aren't trying to time travel back 1 minute like Doc Brown to prove his theory (well, forward in that example, but same idea). They said outright that they tried it, to spectacularly messy results.

You realize that we actually are in the Biff for President timeline now, right...?

Yes, that joke's been made a lot lately, especially since the Cubs teed it up by winning. But you raised BTTF, so that's the reference that was needed to describe the skewed timeline that our heroes are starting from.

 

[Christopher]

yes, very explicitly. That's the reason they can't travel within their own lifetimes, they needed a mop and bucket to remove the pilot that tried it last time.

Oh, I see what you're saying. In the model I'm proposing, the lifeboat only could travel within the operators' lifetimes. I hadn't made that connection. So I guess that shoots my hypothesis down. So much for trying to apply real physics ideas to a fantasy.