I just want you to know this is one of the most beautiful comments I've ever read, and it came from a random comment section from an ok comic strip. So much so that I upvoted it once I saw it and came back hours later just to save it.
I forget where I heard it from, but somebody said that it's strange how we believe that if we go back in time and make a small change, it will have a huge effect on the future, but we also believe that making small changes today won't make any difference in the future.
If we follow the logic of the Loki series, they can do whatever. History might change up until the asteroid strikes but after that all dinosaurs are wiped out anyways and history will go on the same as it did before.
it would probably be paleontologists since no human existed at the time and dating just doesnt work like that, since the saddle fossil still aged millions of years
(also from stuff this old its hard to age things, so its more probable something around the same layer would be aged instead of the specific fossil)
I mean, in terms of preserving the timeline and not leaving the tiny chance of fossilised saddles. They brought it with them, why not just take it back too so it's not even there.
I feel like it's a lot more likely to be preserved than thin spongy dinoflesh. It's already somewhat preserved, actually, so when the layer of molten debris comes in from the direction of central America it's just going to get covered and leave a permanent imprint.
The main factor for preservation is a lack of biological activity to break down the creature's remains. If it's incased in anything hot that cools quickly, has any antibacterial qualities, or even just the right amount of soil alkalinity then it can be preserved. For hides, though, it's normally more of an imprint left behind than any recoverable bodymass.
In fact, some fossils found in swamps have been almost perfectly preserved due to the Saponification of the oils and lipids in the carcass.
In general, being covered by a wave of hot dirt like in my previous example would seal them up like a can of soup. All of the liquids and chunks would keep moving around until they settled, but any thick hides or bones might still leave recoverable fossils.
in the Pratchett novels he talks about a sort of 'rubber-band history' that tends to be self-healing. It's the entire plot of one of the novels, a political leader escapes an assassination that was 'meant' to happen, and it ends up in reality having some sort of weird split where the world gets torn between an attraction point where she lives and another where she dies.
I don't believe that kind of time travel is possible. But, if it were possible, the odds of finding that exact individual (who probably didn't actually exist) at that exact time are so minuscule that for all practical purposes, it may as well be impossible. But, if that were also possible, it did happen, and that was the only thing that happened differently, then I'm thinking the most likely outcome is that evolution would pretty much continue on the same course, probably even with humans eventually evolving.
It's common to think of the evolutionary process in a more or less linear fashion that could theoretically be traced back to a figurative Adam and Eve, but the reality is, it's so much more messy and convoluted than that. Evolution is a culmination of many factors such as the environmental conditions and populations that exist during a given time frame. So even if there was one specific common ancestral individual who happened to live at the exact time the dinosaurs were alive, which that individual is not a thing that existed, there would almost certainly still be a population of others of the same species living in the same conditions -- so theoretically would still ultimately lead to the same evolutionary outcomes in most instances.
So, I think it's very possible people would still exist. But, it wouldn't be the exact same people, living the exact same lives, at the exact same time as now.
On the other hand, who is to say that the common ancestor hadn't already produced the offspring that specifically lead to you and I being born before it was eaten? Who's to say that individual getting scared and eaten wouldn't have happened anyway, regardless of whether you were there or not? Who's to say that wasn't actually the defining moment that ultimately resulted in the evolution of people (and you and I specifically)?
I dunno, this is all getting a little too timey-wimey for me.
If you go that far back, every member of that species is either everyones' ancestor or their branch of the family tree died off at some point or developed into a different species. While I agree that evolution would progress roughly the same way, I don't think it would result in exactly the same people. With powerful people (like kings, emperors and their courts) being different, history would be different too
While I agree that evolution would progress roughly the same way, I don’t think it would result in exactly the same people.
This implies that you think I was saying it would be the same people, but I actually said the exact same thing as you, just in different words: "it wouldn’t be the exact same people, living the exact same lives, at the exact same time as now."
With powerful people (like kings, emperors and their courts) being different, history would be different too
For sure, but from the timescale we're discussing, the whole of human history is literally just a tiny fraction, a blip, at the very end. And until very recently, you could even argue the vast majority of human history was almost entirely inconsequential.
I mean, technically displacing the air with that time machine on such a massive time scale is just as likely to result in returning to a civilization of dolphin people as riding a dinosaur would.
Or you shedding some of your microbiome's bacteria and fungi into the environment and whoops: they outcompeted something "local" and now whole species change.
I honestly don't think there'd be any way to avoid doing something that could possibly change the future in a dramatic way, because that far back incredibly minute changes could possibly lead to huge differences (because chaos theory), to the level of "a butterfly didn't flap its wings because I accidentally squashed it with my time machine, and now humanity never happened. Oops." But any change that means you didn't ever go on your trip means you have some sort of paradox on your hands, and then it becomes a question of how timelines work
I think you could drastically minimize any impact by doing the time travel in space and merely observing from high orbit, assuming your time machine has no form of exhaust, which if you have a time machine seems like a relatively small engineering challenge by comparison.
You might displace a few atoms in the void, but it's the safest way one could go about it.
Oh yeah, like an observation platform. That's probably the only way you'd be doing time travel anyhow since it's also space travel because the Earth now isn't where the Earth was 200 million years ago; doing an atmospheric re-entry across time when you're not 100% sure where exactly everything will be sounds like an occupational health hazard and inadvisable at best. Gods fucking help you if anything goes wrong and you violently scatter pieces of your fancy time machine across a few square km of densely populated (by animals including genus Homo) area.
Well, I don't think time travel backwards in this manner is possible, but if it is, it would have to operate under the laws of thermodynamics which means the energy (and maybe even some of the atoms) that was "transported back in time" would represent a paradox.
The energy and/or some of the atoms in you and the time machine were already somewhere in the past when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Which presents a paradox (and this is probably not even the only paradox), so how does the universe conserve energy in that situation?
Somehow the "original" atoms and energy that became you and the machine would need to be reconciled with the duplicates that suddenly turned up.
So maybe there's a mysterious process that obliterates energy? What would it be and how would it work? Would that be equivalent to the false vacuum that could fundamentally destroy the universe as we currently know it?
Or maybe there's nothing to actually stop duplication of energy and atoms and it's entirely feasible to go back in time. You take the time machine back, see some dinos from space, and you managed to otherwise not change a thing. That means in some dozens of million years, you and that machine will be sent back to exactly the same time and location again because nothing has changed. Bam, now you and that time machine are in triplicate. But, with nothing really changing, the same process will occur again and again. Does it reach a point where there's so much duplicated energy / matter that something fundamentally different has to happen? Would all those duplicate yous and time machines coalesce into a giant cosmic object that comes crashing down to the Earth like a giant asteroid, thus killing off most dinosaurs and paving the way for human evolution? Hmmm.
Luckily, as far as we understand things, there's no way to go back in time (only less fast to the future, which isn't the same). For one thing, because there's no backup mechanism for reality to jump back to.
Timelines are fiction. They hurt some fundamental principles of how the universe works. Time isn't like a river or a line at all; better start thinking of time like the air around you: it's just there, can be formed, affects things but there can't be less than none.
Aww, it's ok. And it's good to point out that time travel to the past very likely isn't a thing, people sometimes assume it's something we'll eventually be able to do
