So after watching yet another time travel movie where there's a stupid closed time loop plot -- e.g. someone invents time travel, goes back in time, and gives themselves the idea to invent time travel... a colleague was wondering if there was a practical way to prevent time loops from forming (if we hand-wave away the inherent silliness of traveling back in time). That gave them an idea for a hard-science-fiction story.

The key element is the construction of a device that will produce different outcome if you go back in time and run it again, e.g. via nondeterminism of quantum-scale events like tunneling, entanglement, and so on. You would need to then buy lottery tickets based on the output of the device, then if you win, buy more tickets the same way. If you win the lottery N times in a row, you assume you are in a time loop and devote the resources you have to subvert it (while also continually buying more tickets).

If you can force a new stable state, e.g. by allowing the traveler to form the loop as before, but creating a requirement for your input... or putting it within another loop, you are now a very wealthy and powerful person.

Then you would ask a few friends to log on to a social media platform where you are have some level of anonymity and disseminate the method in a subtle way, for example in a question asking for story ideas. That way the idea is present in other minds and a removal job becomes more difficult, as it's not clear where the idea originated.

If you were fulfilling this request on Lemmy, someone would be able to go to your home instance, and find plans for such a device. It would probably look a lot like a particle detector that you could build at a low cost. They would have published first light on the detector a few weeks from when you read about this story idea.

This is story about you, who will have participated in the history of the future.

Can you find us?