How to be God (abstract concept thread here)
 

Ok bear with me.

Let's assume that time travel is possible - it has been or will have been invented, it doesn't really matter which.

Let's also assume, as many scientists and fiction writers have, that there is a general interconnectedness of all things and actions from the past to the present.

That, for example, the proteins in a fly that was eaten by a small mammal 67 million years ago have, through natural cycles of life and death and decomposition have ended up in the bodies of animals and plants that ultimately produced the exact conditions of the world today. Had that fly not been eaten by that mouse, the proteins would not have been transferred and an exactly different series of events would then have occurred which would, theoretically, lead to an alternate present in which, say, Ralph Nader was elected president of the Vnited States of America (also in which the letter U was never invented).

So.

In theory it is possible, given an abundance of time (easy when one has a time machine) money (very easy when one has a time machine) and computing power (buy all your shit in the future) to trace back the major events of human history to a number of individual prehistoric flies.

One could control the destiny of the human race with a flyswatter.

And how would we know? We only know what's happened in our own personal perception of the past - it could be changing all the time, taking our old memories with it. It might even be taking us with it. Tomorrow morning, Viktor Von Russia might never have been born.

Think about it. What if?

Would you not have the same power as God?

You would, but not exactly to a point. Of course, having godlike powers is good enough, even if they aren't exactly the same, so who cares?

And on another note, this could explain why the dinosaurs became extinct. UFO's could also be the people from the future mocking us in their flying ships of technological wonder.

You wouldn't exactly have the power of God. You wouldn't be able to determine all of the effects of your actions.

You didn't read my whole post :mad:

That's it I'm changing the past :mad:

I think Viktor Von Russia means that even if you changed the past and used your time machine to be everywhere all the time (omnipresent), you still wouldn't know everything (be omniscient): you'd only know what was happening to you and around you in that moment of time. You wouldn't know the consequences of your actions until you traveled to the future.

So I disagree as well. If you don't know everything before it happens, then you don't have the power of God.

Hm. Maybe I should change the word "determine" to "control." Suppose you wanted to change the 5th letter of the alphabet to "7" and at the same time make Taco Bell serve Reese's Cups while keeping the name Taco Bell. You wouldn't be able to do all that with a fly swatter. You'd be able to change the world, yes, but not in extremely small ways.

I don't know... you wouldn't have all the power of god, but you would be more powerful than anything else ever. But I also have an abstract idea involving a time machine that this thread just made me think of.

Now, say you attach a time machine to a bomb. Then the bomb is programed that when it is activated, it will move one foot to the left, travel back to an earlier moment in time, and explode so that it destroyed its past self. What would happen?

I think there's to many risks in going back that far. What if you hit the fly that would later spawn the time-travel creating protein? You'd be stuck in the past, and no one would ever be able to enjoy time travel...Hmm, thats actually a plausible explanation of why time travel won't be invented.

You would've used your future computer to plot out every possible action killing that fly could effect. That's the point. Then, using that information, you can change the present, but no one would know because their memories would change too.

Being able to tell what killing the fly would do is different from being able to do anything you want. As I said before, there would be no way to make tiny changes.