This is legitimately a cool as fuck comic.
this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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Honestly one of my favorites.
seriously was coming in here to comment that this is one of the best comics I’ve seen here on lemmy
I've not seen it before, so not I've got 20 years worth of comics to read :)
Imagine the motivation you would get if people from the future suddenly started turning up trying to kill you.
"My god, I'm hot shit, I'd better get on with it."
Then you just start inventing stuff, writing music, starting a political career, and travelling the world desperately trying to figure out what it is that you're famous for. This results in international fame and fortune, and the attention of lots of women. But suddenly after sleeping around the time travelling assassin stopped coming. And it turns out that you're the grandfather and their trying to stop you much better protected grandchild.
Once the child is born then they are no longer interested in you.
Though by pushing grandpa to become hot shit, they make his family rich and thus give the grandkid the resources he needed to start WW3.
That this doesn't happen is proof that we never invent time travel.
I like the idea that time machines can only transport people within the time machines own timeline. You can go back in time and see yourself finish the time machine but you can't go back one second before that.
Like it's one end of wormhole that gets anchored at a particular point in time and the other end drifts forward through time, you can enter and exit the wormhole at any point in its worldline but only within that limit
It's still allows for time travel, and explains why no one has ever met a time traveller.
The concept of timelines (or that each decision creates a new dimension) ignores almost all of the fundamental laws of physics.
I mean, backwards time travel goes against our current understanding of physics. But multiple dimensions, or the many-worlds interpretation, etc, are not incompatible with our current understanding of physics, no, it's just presently an untestable hypothesis
It doesn't work with the law of conservation of energy for one. Except if you assume a framework of universes, in which anything goes but then you needn't bother with physics at all.
You know what's funny? Conservation of energy isn't true on a universal scale in our universe in the first place. The expansion of our universe over time actually breaks that symmetry. This is why light can get redshifted over travelling long distances. It loses energy into.. nothing
It doesn't work with the law of conservation of energy for one. Except if you assume a framework of universes in which anything goes but then you needn't bother with phisycs at all.
MWI can easily ignore conservation of energy either by only considering in-universe energy or otherwise putting all universes in the same configuration space (much like one of those matter phase graphs showing how possible states grow on one side)
This does still leave plenty of problems around stuff like branching triggers and much more, though
Woldlines are a part of physics. Look up light cones.
iT wOuLdn'T tHoUgH bEcAuSe cAuSaULitY
Side note i really love their time travel-diving gear
Forwards time travel is fairly "easy" to do. Backwards yeah that ain't happening.
This proves nothing, since having you in the know would alter the future.
Absence of evidence is not evidence.
Nah, this is just the glimpse before the time travel cleanup crew comes through and clears up all the evidence!
not proof.
people die everyday. who's to say they weren't assassinated.
Clearly this mad scientist handcuffed themselves, got into a duffel bag, and then shot themselves in the head twice. Classic suicide.
Well... It doesn't happen to you.
He looks like Charles Sanders Peirce, who proposed the implementation of logic via electrical circuits, and whose works provide the theoretical foundation for relational databases, computer science and AI.
Thank you. The comic was already funny before I knew this context, but it's extra funny now.
Whatever he does probably makes them all mute, so that's why they don't yell anything.
Could write/leave a note but any reasoning can be countered with arbitrary time travel "rules".
Thats what makes the multiverse theory so attractive. With infinite decision, you get infinite results. All equal, all valid, all allowed, and limited if any interference in them
You mean in the infinite universes there is a version of me that has a puppy? Sweet! I hope that person enjoys themselves.
If you stretch the rules enough, there's a version of you that is the puppy!
My favorite thought with infinite universes is the idea that there are infinitely many more of me doing the exact same thing as me, at the exact same time.
Which means that if I say something, like, "Hello other Whats_your_reasonings!" we're all on the receiving end of the same message, and in a way I'm talking to them (or they're talking to me) from across multiple universes. Which is a pretty cool idea.
Brilliant. How do you propose someone for the MacArthur Grant?
Think up a password and don't tell anyone or write it down. Now if you send someone from the future to protect you in the past, they can prove it.
Papa Smurf Red Lingerie
