Sadly, the only viable timeline is the one without time travel because if time travel exists horrific things in our past would have been prevented.
I think time travel is possible, but you can only change things from the perspective of the person who travelled back. The original timeline just keeps on going.
Person (a) travels back in time to kill Hitler and succeeds. That new timeline exists now without Hitler, but in the original timeline is already written in stone. There is no changing it. The moment that person travels back, they've created a new timeline. It's both impossible for them to change the original timeline, and impossible to ever return to the original timeline because if they go back to the future they'll only be travelling along the new timeline.
Time travel could exist, but whatever a time traveler does, they were always going to do. If they didn't prevent a catastrophe, they couldn't have prevented the catastrophe. Something would always have prevented them.
Read Suter’s Two Journeys Series, you get a sniff their too :-(
Margaret Atwood used real life events and history in The Handmaid's Tale. She didn't invent it or make it up, she used inspiration from events that already happened or were happening while she wrote the book. You are just seeing what happened in history, in the past, happen again in the present.
Showerthoughts
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.