Post by danr on May 11, 2007 11:04:23 GMT -5
hecscrivener said:
Suppose a man, let us call him H.G., invented a time machine. Let us consider the powers at his disposal. If anything at all is technologically possible, he has it; it isn't even required that anything like, say, the elixir of life actually be invented, only that it be possible, because if he'll just have received the recipe from himself, to give to himself. There's no way to create an "elixir of life" that will make you inmortal in every sense of the word. The closest would be something that could allow your cells to regenerate without a loss of DNA therefore making you inmortal (i.e: un-killable by growing old). Even so, there's no way to prevent your death in a explosion, by a bullet to your brain, burnt alive instantly or whatever.
Let's say you want to go one week ahead in the future to see if you've died: You find out that you are indeed going to die in a train accident, so therefore when you go back to your time you "feel like" travelling by car.
Then there's a car accident and you die. Well, once you've died in an unexpected manner, it's too bad, you can't go back to the past and warn yourself about it. You couldn't know the outcomes of the infinity of elections you'd be able to choose from.
Then again, if you go to the past and change some stuff, you might automatically disappear because you saved the life to this idiot who later killed one of your ancestors. It's IMPOSSIBLE to know all of the outcomes to your actions.
A superior being should actually know all that stuff and not be limited to a mortal body that could disappear. So no, your time traveller is not god.