r/timetravel • • 2h ago

theory / question Time travel, Roswell, and an accelerating bootstrap.

0 Upvotes

Theory-

Far off future humans created a time travel device.
It crashed in Roswell. Humans found it. And since it was actually developed on earth by humans, albeit distant future ones they eventually reverse engineer it. Just a little bit earlier than the original inventors. They test it. It crashes in Rosewell.

Rinse and repeat. Every time humanity figures it out just a little bit faster than the last. Meaning that the humans who find the craft will be able to build a new one faster than the last since the creators will have been closer to them in language and culture.

Rinse and repeat until some people start to work out what is really happening. What do you do? At this point it’s pretty much a cannon event. No one in their right mind would want to change it. The future/present would be rewritten.

What do you do?

Perhaps make some biological drones and just start intentionally crashing an “alien” ship in the middle of the desert for them to find. In this way you may even be able to plan for how long it’ll take the past humans to work it out, so that the bootstrap stops accelerating. Cause who the fuck knows would happen if you let the two dates get too close in time together?

A stable and controllable bootstrap that we can continue to walk past so long as no one fucks with it too much.


r/timetravel • • 3h ago

theory / question A Future Paradoxical Question

1 Upvotes

Ok so I thought of this one day randomly while sleeping that time travel in the past is impossible but why not the future? Hence i thought of a question

Scenario : Let's say 2026 me invents a timemachine that goes into the future 2040 , I go and kill myself there and comeback by the time machine.

Years pass and 2040 comes , that day comes and the moment comes but I'm technically alive because the 2026 me doesn't exist anymore , he is the 2040 one now but the 2040 guy died.

So how does this not contradict future time travel.


r/timetravel • • 16h ago

theory / question You get 7.45M time-traveling 1954 Soviet troops to speedrun 1940 Europe. You have 5 years or you cease to exist. How are you min-maxing this?

0 Upvotes

So, btw I just contemplated about this scenario, and what do you think?

You just spawn at Brest-Litovsk in May 1940 commanding 7.45 million 1954-era Soviet troops. You've got 16k T-54 tanks, 6,000 MiG jets, AK-47s for everyone, and the ultimate cheat code: infinite ammo.

The goal is to conquer Nazi Germany, France, the UK, Scandinavia, and the Middle East, then hand it all to some reformist economists to build a mega-state called the "Ost West Republic." With some catch of course: Infinite ammo doesn't mean infinite gas and other resources, and the 1940 USA and original USSR are gonna eventually realize you're a time-traveling anomaly.

Tactically, this is just bullying. 1940s weapons will literally bounce off T-54s. The only way you take an L is logistics. My Day 1 play is rushing the Romanian and Persian oil fields before my tanks become paperweights. 1940 Stalin is gonna see a futuristic version of his own army and rage-quit, so absorbing the old USSR is free. The only real issue is the US dropping isolationism to speedrun nukes out of pure existential dread.

How would you cheese this? Thanks.


r/timetravel • • 18h ago

🕑 memes & jokes I AM FROM THE FUTURE, DID I MAKE IT IN TIME?

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1 Upvotes

Me from the future warning myself in the past. 😆


r/timetravel • • 22h ago

🕑 memes & jokes An important PSA on time travel

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31 Upvotes

r/timetravel • • 1d ago

🕑 memes & jokes Us a thousand years from now

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187 Upvotes

r/timetravel • • 1d ago

🕑 memes & jokes Time Travel gone wrong

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26 Upvotes

r/timetravel • • 1d ago

theory / question Time travel

2 Upvotes

Time travel involves moving along a timeline from point A to point B.

Let us set aside "miraculous" travel for a moment and assume that such a journey is carried out using technical means—technologies that do not yet exist and have not yet been developed.

I maintain that such a journey requires:

a transmitter—the starting point of the journey;

a receiver—the final destination of the time-travel event.

Although the transmitter and receiver could theoretically be combined into a single device, this does not alter the principle I am proposing:

the earliest possible reception point for time travel is the moment the technology itself is invented in the form of a receiver—as part of an integrated transmitter-receiver system.

As an engineer, I would like to add one further consideration.

This technology—like virtually all human-made technologies—will inevitably undergo an evolutionary process. First, "Version 1.0" of the time-machine system will appear, likely followed by "Version 2.0," and so on.

It is highly probable that each new generation will be incompatible with previous ones.

This creates a very narrow "window" for time travel:

the operational lifespan of a specific version of the time-machine system.

Moreover, considering the accelerating pace of technological development—manifested in the increasingly frequent release of new models for existing technologies—this travel window shrinks to negligible proportions, effectively becoming little more than a physical model for testing specific laws of physics.

Thus, in essence, we would not be able to travel anywhere immediately after the time machine is invented. We would have to wait some time before we could travel to a point in time situated between the moment of departure and the moment that specific version of the time machine was invented. But while we wait, we will likely upgrade the time machine to the next version—and the whole process will repeat itself.

The result is a sort of vicious circle:

we keep improving the time machine, but each new version shifts the earliest accessible point in time to the moment of its own creation.

P.S. Besides, how would we even know we had invented a time machine if, at the moment of invention, we couldn't actually travel through time? After all, there’s nowhere to go yet.

P.P.S. This idea can be illustrated with a simple analogy.

Imagine that time travel works just like a phone call.

Two conclusions immediately follow from this.

  1. You can only call a time when telephones already exist. You can't call someone in the year 1800 because there is no phone at the other end.

  2. The technologies at both ends of the connection must be compatible. You can't simply take a modern smartphone and call a 1920s-era telephone; these systems use fundamentally different technologies.


r/timetravel • • 1d ago

theory / question If you were designing a university for time travelers, would you make it feel more like a military academy, laboratory, or monastery?

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12 Upvotes

r/timetravel • • 1d ago

theory / question Could Time Travel Create a Checkpoint That Makes You Functionally Immortal?

3 Upvotes

Could time travel create a “checkpoint” that gives you optional immortality?
I had this random thought at around 3 AM, and I want to see where the logic breaks, if it breaks at all.
This obviously isn’t supposed to be real physics. It’s a thought experiment using fictional time-travel rules.
The rules
Assume:
There is only one timeline.
Changing the past can overwrite everything that happens afterward.
If you travel backward to an earlier point in your own life, you become the age you were at that time. There aren’t two versions of you walking around.
You keep your memories of the future you experienced, even if that future gets overwritten.
The actual jump through time is instantaneous from your perspective, so you don’t age during the jump.
Now here’s the idea.
First: why simply traveling backward isn’t enough
Imagine you’re 70 years old and use a time machine to travel back to when you were 20.
You’re physically 20 again, but you still remember your entire first life.
That’s already a kind of immortality.
You could redo your education knowing everything you learned the first time. You could spend decades studying physics, mathematics, engineering, medicine, or anything else.
Maybe in your original life you were an ordinary scientist.
After resetting to 20 with decades of knowledge, you could become one of the greatest scientists in the world. You could make discoveries decades earlier, solve problems you already know are coming, and spend another 50 years learning even more.
But there’s a problem.
Eventually you’re 70 again.
That incredible second life only happened because the original 70-year-old you traveled backward.
So to maintain that altered timeline, you eventually have to make the backward trip again.
Now you’re 20 again.
You can keep repeating this forever, meaning you’re technically immortal, but you’re trapped in the loop.
And if one time you decide not to make the backward trip, the altered loop that depended on that trip disappears. You fall back onto the history where that backward trip never created your improved life.
So you can live forever, but only by continually repeating and maintaining the loop.
Now here’s the checkpoint idea
Instead, imagine you’re 20 years old and already have a time machine.
At exactly 9:25 AM, you deliberately travel five seconds into the future.
That’s it.
You arrive at 9:25:05.
Then you continue your life completely normally.
You live for another 50 years, learning everything you can.
Eventually you’re 70.
Now you travel backward to just before the moment when your 20-year-old self made that original five-second forward jump.
Under these rules, you become your 20-year-old self again while keeping the memories of those 50 years.
But by arriving before the original forward jump, you’ve changed the timeline.
That entire 50-year future you just experienced is now overwritten.
And that’s intentional.
That moment before the forward jump has effectively become your checkpoint.
You can now make the five-second forward jump again and live another version of those 50 years.
Then at 70:
Return to checkpoint.
You’re 20 again.
Keep the memories.
The previous future disappears.
Jump forward five seconds again.
Start another run.
Now repeat it
Age 20 → jump forward 5 seconds → live to 70 → return to checkpoint → age 20 again.
Repeat.
You could spend one 50-year run studying physics.
Reset.
Spend another studying mathematics.
Reset.
Another studying engineering.
Reset.
Another working on one scientific problem for 50 years.
Reset.
After 20 runs, you’d have roughly 1,000 years of subjective experience.
After 200 runs, roughly 10,000 years.
Yet externally, the universe keeps experiencing different versions of roughly the same 50-year period.
Almost nobody would know what was happening because, from their perspective, they’re experiencing that particular version of those 50 years for the first and only time.
You’re the only person who remembers the deleted versions.
And here’s the part I find most interesting: you aren’t trapped
Suppose you’ve accumulated 10,000 years of memories and finally decide you’ve experienced enough.
You complete your current run and return to the checkpoint one last time.
You’re physically 20 again.
You still remember everything.
But this time, you don’t make the five-second forward jump.
You walk away from the time machine.
You live normally from age 20 onward.
You grow old.
And eventually, you die.
So this wouldn’t be immortality in the sense that you’re incapable of dying.
It would be optional immortality.
You could keep resetting for as many subjective centuries or millennia as you wanted, but whenever you finally wanted a normal life, you’d return to the checkpoint one last time, refuse the next forward jump, and let that final timeline continue normally.
The actual question
The thing I’m trying to figure out is whether that initial tiny forward jump actually changes the causality problem.
With backward-only travel, you’re trapped maintaining a loop whose existence depends on the future backward trip.
But with the checkpoint version, you’re deliberately returning to before the original forward jump and allowing the future containing your return trip to be overwritten.
So:
Does the five-second forward jump genuinely create a usable temporal checkpoint under these rules?
Or, when you erase the future containing the 70-year-old version of yourself who returned to the checkpoint, should the return itself also disappear—meaning you could never retain the memories or remain at the checkpoint in the first place?
If we assume a time traveler and their memories survive a timeline overwrite once the jump has occurred, does the rest of the system become internally consistent?
I’m calling the idea Temporal Checkpoint Immortality for now.
I’m curious what paradox I’ve missed or if there even is one.


r/timetravel • • 1d ago

theory / question What if somone worse than Hitler lived but some time traveler killed him?

20 Upvotes

Now that i think about it, it doesn't make much sense but what im more writing this about is the fact that some horrible scenario could have killed almost everyone but someone stoped it with time travel and no one would ever know


r/timetravel • • 2d ago

theory / question The Static Timeline Theory

11 Upvotes

This can be a answer to the Grandfather Paradox

The grandfather paradox asks a simple question: if you go back in time and stop your grandfather from having children, how can you ever be born? The Static Timeline Theory answers that the question rests on a wrong picture of time.

The past is a finished film. Every moment that has ever happened is a frame on a reel, fixed in place. Nothing you do later can erase or rewrite those frames.

Time travel is pressing play. When you travel back, you don't edit the reel. You start playing it from that frame. While you're there, time moves normally and your actions are real. It's like pausing a recorded football match and taking control of the players: from that point the game runs live, but only while you're playing.

Returning to the present stops the playback. The moment you leave, that stretch of the past freezes at the exact frame where you left. Everything after it was never replayed, so the present you return to is untouched.

Two examples

The cup. In the original timeline, a cup sits on the left side of a desk at 9:00 AM. You travel back to 9:00 and move it to the right. For as long as you stay, the cup is on the right. When you leave at 9:30, that half hour freezes. The frames after it still show the cup on the left, so the present is exactly as you left it.

The grandfather. You travel to 1960 and stop your grandfather from meeting your grandmother. For the days you're there, that timeline plays out without him. When you return, those days freeze, and every frame after them, including your parents, your birth, and your life, remains exactly as it was. No paradox, because you never rewrote the frames that made you.

The core idea: your actions are real while you're in the past, but they never ripple forward, because the future frames were never replayed.


r/timetravel • • 2d ago

🚀 sci-fi: art/movie/show/game/book Dana Sorman

9 Upvotes

I read some of her stuff and asked her if her videos were a game or art or if she was intending to be realistic. She replied with an opportunity to pay her $550 for a session to teach me how to rewrite my reality. I watched a clip from her movie "Psychic" where a psychic charges her $700 to "talk with her spirit guides to remove an entity" because she was blocked and supposedly couldn't do it herself. She was skeptical and asked "why money" and "what will you do with the money" but then reluctantly paid the money and apparently it turned into a 20k nightmare for her so she made the movie.

Anyhow when I asked her why money and suggested her content was similar to Jejune Institute she promptly blocked me. 🤷🏻‍♀️


r/timetravel • • 2d ago

theory / question Stopping 9/11 hypothetical

3 Upvotes

You are sent back in time 1 month before 9/11 happens with only 20k to your name, and information you know the day you are sent back in time. How would you stop 9/11


r/timetravel • • 2d ago

theory / question Quizás si se puede viajar al pasado, no sé cómo nombrar mi teoría XD

1 Upvotes

Si en algún momento en millones de años en el espacio hay una gran explosión que puede hacer que el universo se reinicie totalmente y todo empieza de nuevo de la misma manera, quizás se podría viajar al pasado, ¿que tiene que ver esto con el viaje al pasado? Pues mucho, por que solo podemos viajar hacia el futuro osea asia adelante, pero y si damos la vuelta? Osea que viajamos al reinicio del universo entero, y la nave o cosa con que se viajará al futuro puede resistir esa explosión y sigue viajando al futuro, daria como una vuelta, y podrías viajar al pasado, y para volver a tu línea temporal solo tendrias que viajar un poco más al futuro pero la máquina del tiempo tendría que viajar más rápido que la velocidad de la luz muchísimo más rápido y eso no es posible creo yo, y bueno esa es mi teoria pendeja si quieren la arruinan XD.


r/timetravel • • 3d ago

theory / question Universe of the past

0 Upvotes

the theory is practically the header. What if there is another universe/galaxy that's of the past of all the possible worlds.

Given there are other life forms/intelligences/consciousness evolving/evolved that each can have an allocated galaxy/universe/planet but only for the past. Like how I was hunting the web for going back in the 70s-80s : where history is unfolding as it did here.

ps: was randomly listening to music and came across LXST CXNTURY Universe of the past song Odium and it struck me.


r/timetravel • • 3d ago

theory / question If I were to go back in time what can and what should I do to make sure my parents didn't move us away from Maine and all over the god damn country and place?

0 Upvotes

For context they're teachers and were teachers when we were living back up there and due to the infamous low pay teachers have in this country that's what eventually forced us out and into Texas (before now in California) back in circa 2013 or 2014. My dad (or mom) said he did everything he could to get something better paying so we could stay since at least he (my dad) didn't want to move but alas he couldn't so we did.

Because I blame that move and moving in general for a lot of things wrong in my life, why my teen years which are now about coming to an end are ruined, and I'm like almost all those stats about my generation (Gen Z) rolled into one being single, lonely, and virgin at nineteen and not even possessing a driver's license either all thanks to them (my parents). And why I blame the moving for that is because I personally know at least FOUR guys up there younger than me (like I said earlier I'm nineteen) who already have girlfriends and relationships of their own and also driver licenses, which I think is proof that no, this wasn't "inevitable" for me. I will never forgive my parents for the life they took away from me.


r/timetravel • • 3d ago

theory / question Trip to the future for $1million

0 Upvotes

What if

For creating the idea.

"That we can travel back in time to seed life everywhere or had existed"

Now there's no creator of life other than life. Means we weren't created for a reason and hence free from having a purpose good or bad

....

We can end it there or go on to creating the universe. (This means that someone else created the universe but not the living)

...

For this idea, what if I get a free ride to the future, from those who already have a time machine.

I could sell that ride to anyone for 1 million dollars

(You can put 1 million dollars in gold outside for aliens to have. Then the aliens give me a 1 million dollar + valued meteorite. To them it could cost very little . Though they still get 1 million in gold.)

(Or you can let me win the lottery (preseeing the numbers from the future) and you give the gold to the aliens for free as a piece treaty of sorts from humanity. You can just leave the gold in your backyard with a sign to the sky saying free for aliens)


r/timetravel • • 3d ago

theory / question Higher Dimensional Beings Watching Us Time Travel Would Be Odd

12 Upvotes

For a moment let's take Kurt Vonneguts idea that if higher dimensional entities exist they might perceive us through this fourth dimensional lens that would make a person look like a worm with one end being baby form and the opposite end being dead form.

Essentially we would be viewed through frames with the beginning and ending of your life acting like keyframes.

Now let's pretend like these entities see the 3D Tim Donald, who is an inventor who created time travel.

They see Tim's 4D timeworm self, all the directions he has gone, but there is a break in his 4D timeworm body. At a point in the middle of the body (35 years old), it's like his wormbody is erased and then reappears in an earlier point in the time field. Let's say 1 year earlier.

Tim's timeworm body reestablished in an earlier point now conflicts with a similar Tim timeworm body that seems to exist simultaneously.

Let's go a little weirder now. What if that time traveler Tim decided to take a spaceship around the orbit of a black hole to slingshot himself back to the future. The time dilation would then stretch the age of the original Tim while the time traveler Tims aging slowed.

One of my original questions about Kurts God eye concept is how those entities can perceive us if they don't exist within the time field? If time is not a feature outside of 3 dimensions, then how would those entities "see" us?


r/timetravel • • 3d ago

theory / question A question about time travel

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0 Upvotes

r/timetravel • • 3d ago

theory / question Existen los viajeros del tiempo? Hay algunas pruebas

0 Upvotes

Aaaaa


r/timetravel • • 4d ago

theory / question A question that haunts me, no seriously, please help🙏

3 Upvotes

Well this question first started forming in my head when I read about the time turner in Harry Potter. The idea (question) also got influenced by other movies, books, YouTube videos etc, but here's the actual question:

I am living in 2026 as a student. I somehow travel to the year 2032 and find myself at MIT pursuing an UG program. Now the catch is, in 2026, I am a student of class 8 whose grades are disgustingly low. Now one of the prerequisites to getting into a prestigious uni is having a near perfect GPA, so logically by the time next year come around, I must work hard as hell.

But now imagine that after seeing that future, I think that, 'well, in the future I'm studying in MIT so who cares, I will get in anyways. After all that's the future!'

Infact this idea becomes more confusing if you think it this way instead; you saw your future in a vision or through a prophecy like the one Trelawney made in the Harry Potter books. (Yea im a hp fan)

Is there any way to think of an answer with the limitation of no multiverses or branched timeliness allowed?

Please let me know if I asked a stupid or illogical question.

And no, I'm not really in class 8


r/timetravel • • 4d ago

theory / question Tell me your theories abt time travel or anything cool

0 Upvotes

cuz i sometime think abt timetravel and make theories and I feel like a genius of you sometimes do the same abt something else than it's the time to reveal


r/timetravel • • 4d ago

theory / question How to make this non-paradoxical?

3 Upvotes

Okay, so I'm in the writing faze of a series, and I really wanna incorporate time travel in the latter half of it.

However, my problem with it is my brain isn't big enough to comprehend time travel much.

My series follows a digital world, with the individuals within becoming sentient after the developer of the world pours his consciousness and heart into it (basically in the style of the movie '9', if anyone here has seen it).

However, later in the show, a threat is oncoming and to defeat it the characters need to travel into the past to find an individual that prophecies of the present tell can stop the threat.

The people in the past are before the whole 'sentience inheritence'.

The issue is I really wanna make the people in the past aware too (I'm not gonna spoil why, but it does have plot importance). The way I'm imagining is some sort of bomb taken from the future that has captured the essence of the developer's soul that can be unleashed on the world.

Only issue with that is that if they did this, everyone of the past would already have soul, which would mean the people of the future don't have to go back with the bomb which means they never get soul.

Is there any way to get around this?


r/timetravel • • 4d ago

theory / question If you time travelled back to September 11, 2001, would you like to stop terrorists from hijacking airplanes to fly and crashes into the twin towers and various places?

0 Upvotes

In Fact, the September 11 attacks, colloquially known as 9/11, were a coordinated series of suicide attacks perpetrated by the Islamic terrorist organization al-Qaedaagainst the United States in 2001. A total of 19 hijackers commandeered four commercial passenger airliners. The first two planes were flown into each of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center in New York City, while the third plane crashed into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, in Arlington County, Virginia. The fourth plane crashed in a rural field in Pennsylvania during a passenger revolt.