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[PTTG??]

Suppose that someone was spelunking in a French cave when a small earthquake caused a passage to open. That passage leads through a narrow constriction and emerges in a different part of the cave complex... ten years in the past. Each... let's say counter-clockwise trip through the loop takes one back what is apparently ten years. Each clockwise trip brings you ten years forward up until the present, at which point, if you go to the other side and walk clockwise, you'll eventually hit a wall of gravel and stone that is not present going the other way through the tunnel. It's so unstable that digging it away seems like a sure way to destabilize the entire area and possibly destroy the time hole itself; in short, there's a latest date, and it's the one that happened across the passage first.

In fact, this is not a purely time-travel related phenomenon. Rather, it's more like a series of parallel worlds, each with an internal date ten years earlier than the last, all linked by a series of portals in a French cave. If some outside force created the portals, it very likely happened at the "same time" across all of these worlds. Changes to a past world do not propagate to any later worlds, but they do persist in the world that the change was made in. If you go back to 1982 and chop down a tree, then wait six years, 1988 will have a chopped-down tree, but 1998, 2008, and 1018 will NOT have a chopped down tree.

It takes about two hours for an experienced caver to make the loop, meaning that with the eight hours of solid travel one would reasonably expect to achieve in a cave, one could move 40 years into the past. Geologically speaking, the cave extends backwards in time at least a million years in something much like its current state. It's probably still passable for ten or twenty million years back, although traveling far enough to reach that point would take 6,800 years of travel time!

Now, remember this is all hypothetical. I haven't even been to France, as far as you know. With that in mind, what would you do if you happened to be one of the first people to find out about the time hole? And what do you think would happen in general?

[ChairmanPoo]

Given that you cant really affect the future its pretty limited. Maybe you could exploit it to cheat on the lottery.  Or, given that the worlds are parallel, retrieve something precious and irreplaceable  and bring it back to your world.

[misko27]

I like the retrieval idea. Go back in time and raid the past for lost items. "Sorry, we lost ours,  and you will too eventually, so you might as well give it to us right?" The looting will be massive early on, at least until the French government secures the site.

I expect eventually historians will cordon off the closest extent that they believe has been raided (so like if I raid the 40s for WW2 memorabiliia, they'll set up a checkpoint somewhere between the 30s and 40s), and then open the pasts which were already touched (and thus irrevocably changed and useless for researching the past), and just use what remains to research historical events. The stuff that has been "ruined" becomes open to the public (although I expect the 1937 entrance to be blocked, for people's own safety, as after two years the cave exit there will be in Occupied France). I expect the cave system will rather quickly develop infrastructure to reduce travel time (and increase security), which will lead to significant travel-speed gains as the area near the 2017 entrance becomes more well-trodden (I expect the infrastructure will extend at least past 2007 and 1997 France, as cooperation will be high between the most modern governments, and they will have better infrastructure for this sort of business than, say, 1967-era France.

I also expect that there will be a massive amount of philosophizing by magazines and opinion articles in Newspapers, top-tier insane ranting by conspiracy theorists ("We aren't getting the whole story" ---> "THIS IS HOW THE JEWLLUMINATI LIZARDS ARE INFILTRATING US"), and general dicking around by the government of France; I expect an attempt at the establishment of some hilarious inter-temporal French government council, representing various French Governments over the decades, that (if it is successful) will eventually come to arguments about how far to go back; if those in favor of more inclusion succeeed, the French Intertemporal Cooperation Council (or FICC) eventually breaks down due to massive fighting between the First, Third, and Fifth Republics, both Empires, and Bourbon France )I'm sure the council won't manage to get back as far as Charlemagne before it breaks down, so no need to worry about what he thinks).

[Avarice]

What stone is the cave made of.
Does anything live in it

[wierd]

If one can continually keep going backwards in time 10 years for each rotation of the complex, it would be very useful for anthropological, and even biological research, perhaps even meteorological.

EG:  After an initial observation period, reproduction clothing and studious training on dialects used could allow anthropologists to study the past cultures of europe, and if they don't mind leaving close proximity of the time hole, other parts of the world. They could collect first hand data about ancient cultures that we only have bits and pieces of-- say for instance, traveling to the ancient city of Alexandria before the city was burned, and making copies of all the ancient books there. (Sneak in something like a cellphone, and image the scrolls in a private reading room, while pretending to be just another academic. Leave the city with the whole library in your pocket.)  In more recent history: One could collect the actual practices of the various "pagan religions" in Euroope, prior to their being cleansed/destroyed by the rise of catholicism.  In terms of biology, teams could go back thousands, even millions of years, if it was permitted to install technology inside the cave complex that could rapidly whirl the research team around and around a few thousand times so that they emerge in the appropriate epoch. Collection of live trilobites, ancient chrinoids, and even samples of the earliest lifeforms on the planet would become possible. Extinct species could have living biological specimens collected for possible reintroduction to restore destroyed biospheres in the future. The scientific possibilities would be enormous.

Sadly, I very much doubt that the site would be open for that kind of thing once ANY world government found out about it. It would immediately be used for espionage and intelligence gathering purposes, because the boogey man of the month is out there plotting things and whatnot. (insert absurdity d'jour here)

[FallacyofUrist]

But we already have a hypothetical questions thread!

As for what might happen... I expect sooner or later somebody's going to try to retrieve the lost works of Shakespeare.

[Bumber]

Bring computers to each loop, run calculations.

Start technological revolutions early and reap the benefits in the present.
Hope it doesn't backfire and result in a great time war, where one world begins conquering all others.
Misunderstand the premise.

I guess you could exploit resources or solve mysteries lost to time. Einstein might have a chat with Archimedes.
Parallel research of technologies once everyone's up to speed. (Make sure to stop Genghis Khan, Hitler, et al. in the given timelines first.)

A drone could speed up the traversal time. Could one run network cables through the time holes?

[Madman198237]

Can you go back only...5 years, instead?
However, the real interesting component comes from Who discovered it? and How granular is it?

Is there a different universe for every minute? Every second? Every microsecond?


If the person who discovered it has the means, it'll likely stay secret. If it's a government agent? A research scientist?

[PTTG??]

Can you go back only...5 years, instead?
However, the real interesting component comes from Who discovered it? and How granular is it?

Is there a different universe for every minute? Every second? Every microsecond?


If the person who discovered it has the means, it'll likely stay secret. If it's a government agent? A research scientist?

It is discrete units of a decade at a time. The person who discovered it is a caver with no government connections.

[Reelya]

What if I travel back in time 2017 - 2007, wait 5 years and travel back in time from 2012-2002, is that the same world as traveling back in time 2017-2007-1997 and waiting 5 years, or is it completely different?

If it's different then there are in fact an infinite multitude of worlds, and any two people will end up in different worlds because they entered even a split second different.

That seems to be an unanswered issue in the hypothetical, can two people travel back to the same world or not.

Also, when you travel forward again, do you travel forward to the original world, or the world you altered? What if you wait 10 years then travel forward again?

[PTTG??]

Reelya: yes. No new portals are being created. Think of each decade as a car on a long train. All of them are moving forward, and yet they remain linked. Passing through the time hole one way moves you backwards along the train, and moving the other way moves you forward. In this hypothetical, each parallel world is moving forward at its own rate.

One important point is that from the moment the portals were created, chaos theory leads us to understand that microscopic changes are propagating through the time hole, causing unpredictable changes even without people stepping on butterflies. It will take at least a little while for the changes to become massive, however.