Started as a shower thought (literally in the shower), but decided to make it more open-ended.
My answer to this would be “watch future seasons of anime that I am waiting on”.
I don’t see how that could cause a huge ripple through time.
Anthropology while cloaked, as the Temporal Prime Directive requires
Just send a GoPro disguised as something else to record history.
Bro, it’s a GoPro. You’ll get 20 minutes of 1080p footage and then the battery will die.
Going forward at all seems less harmful than going back, but perhaps more dangerous.
Agreed, but going forward would also then open the risk of trying to capitalise on/prevent what you saw, once you return to your present, which probably wouldn’t end well.
Safer way would probably be going forward and staying there, like another comment said. Maybe use it to skip boring stuff, like waiting in line at the DMV, or waiting for your food to be served, etc.
That’s the story of the movie “Click”
Going forward three days to when it’s $2 beer night at the bar.
He said unimportant not financially responsible. Either way be sure to fast and sell plasma, so you have the needed cash and get the most effect from the blue ribbons.
Go outside the cabin, jerk off, go back.
Well I travelled back in time and killed Hans-Johann Scherzlgruber-Vötzfenstein so the world wouldn’t have to suffer through his atrocities.
Going massive events that are either completely void of people or full of people.
Star exploding? No one around, nothing to change.
Parade for the astronauts coming back from the moon?
What’s another guy standing around, just minding my own business.
Until everybody throughout time, after the machine has been invented I gues, also wants to experience the same parade 🙃…… I mean not until…. It’ll just happen ?..… now my head hurts
Long, but relevant Douglas Adams quote:
One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can’t cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.
The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.
Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term “Future Perfect” has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.
There’s a ‘theory’ the Titanic really sunk under the weight of time travellers going to watch the sinking firsthand
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Parade for the astronauts coming back from the moon?
What’s another guy standing around, just minding my own business.
OR THE OPENING OF A BRIDGE IN BRITISH COLUMBIA IN 1941?! What are you, some sort of time-travelling bridge freak?
Depends on the type of “time travel”. Backwards time travel doesn’t seem plausible, so I guess we’re talking only about 1 way physical transport time travel. That kind of time travel is achieved either by traveling at speeds approaching the speed of light or via intense gravity, unless you consider something like being cryogenically frozen and then reanimated at some point in the future to be “time travel”.
As far as least amount of impact? I guess in terms of impact, its best to travel to the nearest point in the future that you possibly can, so that hopefully very little has changed and you’re still more or less the same person living the same life (with just a short gap from leaving the present and arriving in the future). Otherwise, you could take a huge risk and try to travel to the distant future to a time when all traces of your current life have disappeared and peoples’ memory of you has long been forgotten.
Depends on which model of time travel you subscribe to.
If you’re working under “Back to the Future” logic, then the best way is to not use time travel at all. Butterfly effect and all that.
If you’re working under “Avengers: Endgame” logic where you’re actually in an alternate reality, then you could muck around a bit without destroying your own “present” though you would be meddling with the destiny of that parallel universe (assuming you subscribe to the Prime Directive, that would be a bad thing).
Or the Bill & Ted’s time travel where any changes you make were supposed to be there in the first place so you didn’t really change anything.
Good catch. I forgot about the “closed, timelike curve” model
Totally bodacious dude!
Going back a few hours and getting some more sleep sounds nice
A full night’s sleep every night does sound good. I wonder what that’s like.
Adequate sleep and infinite gym time would make my life so much better.
Sounds like your looking for a hyperbolic time chamber
I have always argued that virtuous activities should give you more time, not less. So working out, sex, sleep, all should rewind time. When you get done it really ought to be the same time you started, or earlier, no matter how long you take.
At work we have a rule that whenever you come back from lunch, you left an hour before that. It doesn’t matter how long the lunch actually was. You could have a two hour lunch, that is a one hour clock out.
Yeah, instead of moving the alarm clock 15 minutes every time it rings, just jump back in time 15 minutes.
Travel forward in time to when the shower is warm.
If it were ever possible, I’d say, just as an observer. There are lots of things I’d love to experience for the first time again but I personally have little desire to change the past.
We are all travelling through time right now with very little impact.
Yes I know, I suck.
Go back in time and fill the lottery, but don’t check the winning numbers before going back.
Future time travellers going back in time to the moment the first time machine was invented to figure out how that one worked because in the future theirs suck and are locked down to prevent abuse.
