this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
33 points (86.7% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35826 readers
1066 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

And what were the dominant terrestrial species at said time? Would there even be any? I have zero idea of what's the expected survival rate of an iPhone in the fossil record, but I like to imagine a giant sloth stepped on one once and we are none the wiser.

Alternative title:

"Assuming the timeline is stable and time travel is possible, but no evidence is ever found until its invention, what would be the earliest acceptable time period for time-travel tourism, and the latest cut-off point no one would be allowed to go to?"

all 14 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[โ€“] AmidFuror@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I know you updated the post and what you're really interested in is any tech they dropped not surviving, but I wanted to point out that "cell phones" would be useless with the infrastructure. They would be better off bringing radios or Star Trek-like communicators which transmit directly from one to another.

[โ€“] DrQuint@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was actually thinking of tourists taking photos in the past with cameras, but I found that a smartphone would be more realistic.

[โ€“] AmidFuror@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

Ah, yep. So more like they bring their multi-function communication / information / documentation / entertainment devices with them. Heck, they may even use those devices for the time-travel itself. And then when they get to the ancient past, they pay no attention to the scenery and just watch reruns.

[โ€“] JoBo@feddit.uk 5 points 1 year ago

If they dropped just one piece of future tech, the chances of any archaeologist ever finding it is infinitesimally small even if it could survive indefinitely. They haven't dug up every inch of the earth's surface. The stuff they find is the stuff that was common enough for them to have a decent chance of finding it.

[โ€“] sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They need to go back to when earth was very hot ball of molten metal. Anything more recent than that means there is a non zero chance that the smart phone or parts of it would remain intact. There is also a chance of turning into a fossil (the phone gets buried into some mud, the mud dries and turn into a rock, eventually the phone dissolve and disappear leaving behind its print in the rock

[โ€“] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

You could go check out Earth 1.0 before the collision that created the moon and melted the Earth in the process.

[โ€“] jesterraiin@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can't tell precisely since there are conditions, that might conserve a piece of technology to the point that it's still going to be recovered and recognized as OOPART.

I guess that a million years or further is relatively safe bet, but even that isn't granted.

[โ€“] C4d@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

TIL; "Out of Place Artefact"

[โ€“] jesterraiin@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Do not mistake with OP ART.

[โ€“] C4d@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

No idea.

Hawking threw a party once to see if any time travellers would turn up.

Assuming the time line is stable I would say any time in before a global catastrophic event such as the K-T dinosaur extinction event since any meddling there will be likely erased by the destruction. The latest cut-off point should be when the first true humans appeared, around 2-6 million years ago.

However, how does your novel account for not disrupting the timeline? Is the model a parallel universe, i.e. going back in time creates a new reality branch? If such is the case, then there are ethical issues for the putative time traveller.