Just Some Standard Time Travel Questions

[missing]

Let's say you're in your mid-40s and your entire life has been affected by your mother's exposure to German Measles when she was pregnant with you. You invent a time travel machine and go back in time to keep your mother from that exposure, working on the correct assumption that your life will be better.

The time travel machine returns you to the proper time. You have all your memories of the life as you had led it but now there are 40+ years of different life experiences. The world itself is unchanged (because, really, how many of us would affect actual world history if our lives were changed) but you don't know the minutiae of your everyday life. What kind of work do you do? What is your home address? What are your passwords and pin numbers? Which car is yours in the parking garage?

Don't think of it as amnesia. You know exactly who you are. Instead think of a TV series where a character moves from one show to another- Lou Grant from the Mary Tyler Moore Show or Frasier from Cheers. The character is the same but the situation is totally different.

What kinds of things would you have to figure out about this different version of your life and how would you do it? What information can you glean about yourself without letting the people around you know that you're ignorant of these basic facts?

I'm currently browsing my way through a time travel anthology and really, everything is so Dramatic. I'm always more intrigued by the mundane.

 

[skategal]

Not time travel but similarly here is a documentary about a man who lost his memory in a motorcycle accident and the only one he remembers is his twin brother who had to help him relearn everything but won’t share past dark family secrets with him.

Very dystopian even though it’s real life.

Dark but excellent.

“Tell Me Who I Am.”

Tell Me Who I Am - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[mjb52]

Don't ask what year it is. Dead giveaway that you're a time traveler. Total newbie mistake. (this just applies to the time travel part, not the return to your own time part, although don't ask what year it is to confirm you've made it back to the right time either. Also a dead giveaway).

 

[Buzz]

I work with Alzheimer’s patients who can’t remember much of their past lives. Something like that would make me understand what they must feel like. There are certain decisions I’ve made in my life I would love to know if I still made the same choices.

 

[PeterG]

I would disappear for a few days and turn up in a nearby city staying at a homeless shelter. I would pretend I had no idea who I was and let people think I was in an accident and now have amnesia. So friends, family and co-workers would help me fill in all the missing pieces.

 

[Vagabond]

Let's say you're in your mid-40s and your entire life has been affected by your mother's exposure to German Measles when she was pregnant with you. You invent a time travel machine and go back in time to keep your mother from that exposure, working on the correct assumption that your life will be better.

The time travel machine returns you to the proper time. You have all your memories of the life as you had led it but now there are 40+ years of different life experiences.

If I understand correctly, the protagonist ends up in the present with memories of a previous life but no memories of the "better" life he or she has lived in this new time line and no knowledge gained thereby. I think that realizing this could be devastating and tragic, perhaps more so than growing up with the consequences of the exposure to German measles in utero.

 

[PeterG]

If I understand correctly, the protagonist ends up in the present with memories of a previous life but no memories of the "better" life he or she has lived in this new time line and no knowledge gained thereby. I think that realizing this could be devastating and tragic, perhaps more so than growing up with the consequences of the exposure to German measles in utero.

You're fun.

 

[Vagabond]

You're fun.

I am afraid so.

 

[MacMadame]

standard... time travel. standard... time travel. Isn't that an oxymoron?

 

[missing]

Well, I could have meant Eastern Standard time travel, but obviously I meant standard ordinary questions concerning time travel. So no, I was neither an oxy nor a moron to word it that way.

 

[Yehudi]

I’d open up my phone and look up my posting history on social, my LinkedIn, and also my email and text history. Unless in the new timeline I’m paranoid and don’t save passwords and have no social accounts.

ETA: I always did wonder how Marty Mcfly got on with the new timeline where his dad wasn’t a wimp.

 

[missing]

Thank you.

I always have to put in my pin number with my cellphone but that's because it refuses to accept my fingerprint as proof. I have very dry skin and before DNA became available to law enforcement I could have committed lots and lots of evil crimes without worrying about leaving my prints behind. But for the vast majority of humanity, a fingerprint ID would suffice for the cellphone, and I'm willing not to worry that changing the fetus would change the fingerprints.

I also have to put in my pin number with my computer, which doesn't have the finger identification option. That's what concerns me, since my pin is based on an old phone number and with a different life the odds are I'd have a different pin.