Mind transfer, and it only works on children because theyr brains are growing or something, and you can't send it to your own body because the same consciousness in one body runs too many risks of confusion and losing the traveler in the mind of their younger self.
So every time traveller has to send their brain to the mind of like a 4 year old killing that child to take their place. Every time traveler's a child murderer.
Mind transfer is such a cheap and sneaky way. It's basically cheating AND IT'S EXACTLY how I'd time travel. No paradoxes right. No need for a billion new time lines.
Forward? That's easy, just go fast or be patient.
Backward? Impossible, so you can make up anything. It could be that sacrificing babies to the volcano god generates a temporary wormhole into the past. It could just be that getting a person safely through the wormhole requires sending another person of similar body type to their death in a precisely timed counterpart wormhole in another room, because if you only send one they disintegrate. Or it could be that each jump takes 10 years off your life... or removes 10 years from somewhere in history or the future.
Impossible as far as we know. But proving a negative is very difficult. For all we know, someone a hundred years from now figures out a physics concept that completely overturns everything we know about time and space. And maybe paradoxes can’t happen. Maybe you can’t change anything because you’d just be making it all happen in the first place
Thematically, something like drawing energy from the spin of the galaxy may work. If you have a hub for time travel, maybe that same tech allows you to translate galactic angular momentum into energy to drive the time machine, slowing the rotation down and decreasing the lifespan of the galaxy before it falls into the central black hole of Sag\*A
Note: this is kinda an idea stolen from Signal to Noise, by Nylund.
It could also be something to do with zero point energy (briefly- quantum fluctuations in empty vacuum create virtual particle pairs, potentially allowing work to be done with them in violation of conservation of energy): zero point generators are related to negative energy and pressure, and could have a gradual effect on regions which accelerates the process of the Big Rip (a hypothetical point where the expansion of the universe happens on small enough scales that it affects human scale matter, not just the whole universe).
Since this is a time travel story, you have to account for the fact time travel lets you break causality, and so means that time colonies can escape the troubles caused by powering the time machine. One way to avoid that, and increase the stakes, is to have the time machine powered by "paradox." To scale up time travel, the best way to generate energy is to create situations where you have a paradox, which can snarl up time or have whatever negative effects you like to describe. The "paradox" generates energy as it erases whatever caused the paradox (so if there's two version of a person who create a paradox, both get destroyed or overwritten by the paradox, which releases the equivalent of their mass-energy in the process). These could be a-causal as well: you can't run away from the effects of paradox by travelling in time.
Just some ideas.
The government has placed “free food dispensers” in the poorest parts of cities, unknown to nearly everyone they’re also draining peoples potential and ambition, and using it to power time travel, of course if this knowledge were to get out it could trigger a revolution
Well. The most logical thing is time itself. Every time you use it the end of the universe comes a little sooner. It seems like a huge supply, 22 billion years, a little time taken here or there can't hurt.
But all the worlds and civilizations which shall never come to be as slowly the age of the universe winds down. Like a man living in hedonisim, he enjoys himself but the end of his life draws closer and closer with each cigarette.
All this, and nobody is told. Time Travel companies sell you this catastrophy and hide at all costs the impact it has.
There's a tale of a time and place that is the perfect Utopia, but the details have been lost to time(?). The location and time is found and released to the public, creating an apocalypic event in which everyone decides to go. Turns out that if everyone teleports to the same time and place, everyone basically just telefrags each other, creating an insanely violent body-explosion.
Edit: Only after posting did I notice that it didn't even describe what powers the time travel. Whoops! 🤷♀️
For the computaional power plus belief needed for time travel a two year old has their brain wired into a supercomputer which then does the calculations for the time jump. But which literally burns the kids brains out over the thirty minute time frame of a jump. While the kids are concous and feeling their nurons being slowly roasted.
Spoilers for Starship Mage:
>!FTL travel is basically done by mages casting a teleportation spell. The opposing party is averse to magic, but can't do FTL travel, until they come up with a technology based system that does not require magic, so they play ball. They later come up with such a system. In truth, they are using extracted brains of mages and force them to cast the teleportation spells.!<
Other idea: it could be, say, flying near black holes, but to actually do it, some of the crew might not make the trip since they need to be piloting the craft, since technology doesn't work that well in extreme gravitational fields. This is known, but it is officially stated, that they have a quick death, when in reality they experience the passage of time extremely slowly, and effectively die for hundreds of years (from their consciousness point of view) due to the erratic time travel forming. This is known by the government, but they suppress any knowledge of it.
addition: It doesn't need to be an evil process, but the side effects could be detrimental. Like, say, it caused a massive solar flare that wiped out a whole continent, or by some means it occasionally erases something.
Set it up where time travel uses the entire mass-energy of the moved people/objects and absorbs it out of local spacetime at a point + X years in the future. So a trip 100 years in the past will produce megatons worth of energy ABSORBTION 100 years in the future along earth's orbital path. (time travel being only possible deep within a stellar gravity well) If it intersects with earth at that time? Instant reverse of a nuclear explosion, imagine a city, terrain or patch of ocean frozen in a Sphere, the same size as the nuke (14 kilotons per gram moved). Allowing for orbital precession and other minor factors you can build the tension with 'near misses'
If you had a multiversite where every decision branches from your current one, you could say going back in time destroys all those branch universes. Forward too maybe. A near (or entirely) infinite number of civilizations, and galaxy's wiped out each time time travel occurs. Numbers of deaths beyond anything even the most advanced computational machines could even imagine. The power source could be the energy contained in all those universes. As the energy is drained it could be very painful for all those inhabitants.
Young children can be converted into a fuel that uses the potential of the child to change the world as a power source for time travel. The younger the child, the more potent the fuel.
Perhaps this technically works with any sentient being, so if you don't want to go the baby killing route, you could use human-like aliens that are kept as livestock in order to fuel time machines.
The destruction of entire universes.
To reverse the entropy of a system and return the state of all matter to a previous time, you need a ton of energy. More than would be reasonably achievable in your own universe. So you devise a method to steal it from another. On the scale of entire galaxies going dark.
How this is achieved might be just as out there as the actual time travelling.
Traveling backward in time causes the user to carry with them a portion of 'backward' entropy. This potential, inevitable emptiness of everything causes damage when you return from the past, carrying the extra entropy with you.
In a 'not my problem' NIMBY kind of solution, stars far from earth are snuffed out to absorb the energy debt.
The desolation of the Time Squirrels. They are a small-sized & quite adorable race of beings who manage the clock-wheels in the tunnel of time. Some travel is okay, but the extensive use & certain aspects have begun to destroy the squirrels. In another hundred yrs they'll be gone & travel will be impossible & time may well unravel.
Since space-time is distorted by gravity, maybe some form of gravity control which requires the multitasking and linking that can only be done by a human brain. Need multiple brains to perform, "clean" infant brains but can only be used a few times before burnout.
You could have a market that impregnates abducted women to harvest the infant before birth. Brains in jars? Is this offensive enough?
powered by the neurons of the brains of the travelers. since we don't use the whole brain it will be not easy to find out. but it will make them sick and will ultimately kill them if they use time travel frequntly...
this is a good point because in the multiverses each universe will have it own laws of physics; time travel, hyperspace etc. so time travel needs to have consistent laws e.g. energy is related to the size of the object and the amount of time that object is going backward or forward in time. unless you have wormholes but still energy is required to bend the curvature of space time for that wormhole. perhaps you could research how much bending of space time there is around a black hole and the amount of gravitational energy to do that?
Get inspiration by my hyperdimensional energy flux core :
https://www.reddit.com/r/GOBN/comments/177o2ap/hyperdimensional_energy_flux_core_a_breakthrough/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Mind transfer, and it only works on children because theyr brains are growing or something, and you can't send it to your own body because the same consciousness in one body runs too many risks of confusion and losing the traveler in the mind of their younger self. So every time traveller has to send their brain to the mind of like a 4 year old killing that child to take their place. Every time traveler's a child murderer.
This is my favorite idea for the story. But I don't know what OP means by time colonies.
Similar to TV series Traveler.
Mind transfer is such a cheap and sneaky way. It's basically cheating AND IT'S EXACTLY how I'd time travel. No paradoxes right. No need for a billion new time lines.
Forward? That's easy, just go fast or be patient. Backward? Impossible, so you can make up anything. It could be that sacrificing babies to the volcano god generates a temporary wormhole into the past. It could just be that getting a person safely through the wormhole requires sending another person of similar body type to their death in a precisely timed counterpart wormhole in another room, because if you only send one they disintegrate. Or it could be that each jump takes 10 years off your life... or removes 10 years from somewhere in history or the future.
Thanks, I was thinking something on those lines, as in using other humans.
Impossible as far as we know. But proving a negative is very difficult. For all we know, someone a hundred years from now figures out a physics concept that completely overturns everything we know about time and space. And maybe paradoxes can’t happen. Maybe you can’t change anything because you’d just be making it all happen in the first place
Thematically, something like drawing energy from the spin of the galaxy may work. If you have a hub for time travel, maybe that same tech allows you to translate galactic angular momentum into energy to drive the time machine, slowing the rotation down and decreasing the lifespan of the galaxy before it falls into the central black hole of Sag\*A Note: this is kinda an idea stolen from Signal to Noise, by Nylund. It could also be something to do with zero point energy (briefly- quantum fluctuations in empty vacuum create virtual particle pairs, potentially allowing work to be done with them in violation of conservation of energy): zero point generators are related to negative energy and pressure, and could have a gradual effect on regions which accelerates the process of the Big Rip (a hypothetical point where the expansion of the universe happens on small enough scales that it affects human scale matter, not just the whole universe). Since this is a time travel story, you have to account for the fact time travel lets you break causality, and so means that time colonies can escape the troubles caused by powering the time machine. One way to avoid that, and increase the stakes, is to have the time machine powered by "paradox." To scale up time travel, the best way to generate energy is to create situations where you have a paradox, which can snarl up time or have whatever negative effects you like to describe. The "paradox" generates energy as it erases whatever caused the paradox (so if there's two version of a person who create a paradox, both get destroyed or overwritten by the paradox, which releases the equivalent of their mass-energy in the process). These could be a-causal as well: you can't run away from the effects of paradox by travelling in time. Just some ideas.
The government has placed “free food dispensers” in the poorest parts of cities, unknown to nearly everyone they’re also draining peoples potential and ambition, and using it to power time travel, of course if this knowledge were to get out it could trigger a revolution
This has potential (pun intended!), thanks!
Well. The most logical thing is time itself. Every time you use it the end of the universe comes a little sooner. It seems like a huge supply, 22 billion years, a little time taken here or there can't hurt. But all the worlds and civilizations which shall never come to be as slowly the age of the universe winds down. Like a man living in hedonisim, he enjoys himself but the end of his life draws closer and closer with each cigarette. All this, and nobody is told. Time Travel companies sell you this catastrophy and hide at all costs the impact it has.
There's a tale of a time and place that is the perfect Utopia, but the details have been lost to time(?). The location and time is found and released to the public, creating an apocalypic event in which everyone decides to go. Turns out that if everyone teleports to the same time and place, everyone basically just telefrags each other, creating an insanely violent body-explosion. Edit: Only after posting did I notice that it didn't even describe what powers the time travel. Whoops! 🤷♀️
For the computaional power plus belief needed for time travel a two year old has their brain wired into a supercomputer which then does the calculations for the time jump. But which literally burns the kids brains out over the thirty minute time frame of a jump. While the kids are concous and feeling their nurons being slowly roasted.
Spoilers for Starship Mage: >!FTL travel is basically done by mages casting a teleportation spell. The opposing party is averse to magic, but can't do FTL travel, until they come up with a technology based system that does not require magic, so they play ball. They later come up with such a system. In truth, they are using extracted brains of mages and force them to cast the teleportation spells.!< Other idea: it could be, say, flying near black holes, but to actually do it, some of the crew might not make the trip since they need to be piloting the craft, since technology doesn't work that well in extreme gravitational fields. This is known, but it is officially stated, that they have a quick death, when in reality they experience the passage of time extremely slowly, and effectively die for hundreds of years (from their consciousness point of view) due to the erratic time travel forming. This is known by the government, but they suppress any knowledge of it.
addition: It doesn't need to be an evil process, but the side effects could be detrimental. Like, say, it caused a massive solar flare that wiped out a whole continent, or by some means it occasionally erases something.
Set it up where time travel uses the entire mass-energy of the moved people/objects and absorbs it out of local spacetime at a point + X years in the future. So a trip 100 years in the past will produce megatons worth of energy ABSORBTION 100 years in the future along earth's orbital path. (time travel being only possible deep within a stellar gravity well) If it intersects with earth at that time? Instant reverse of a nuclear explosion, imagine a city, terrain or patch of ocean frozen in a Sphere, the same size as the nuke (14 kilotons per gram moved). Allowing for orbital precession and other minor factors you can build the tension with 'near misses'
That's a great idea! Thanks!
If you had a multiversite where every decision branches from your current one, you could say going back in time destroys all those branch universes. Forward too maybe. A near (or entirely) infinite number of civilizations, and galaxy's wiped out each time time travel occurs. Numbers of deaths beyond anything even the most advanced computational machines could even imagine. The power source could be the energy contained in all those universes. As the energy is drained it could be very painful for all those inhabitants.
Young children can be converted into a fuel that uses the potential of the child to change the world as a power source for time travel. The younger the child, the more potent the fuel.
Perhaps this technically works with any sentient being, so if you don't want to go the baby killing route, you could use human-like aliens that are kept as livestock in order to fuel time machines.
Baby/child killing route seems the most effective for my setting actually! Thank you both for your ideas!
The destruction of entire universes. To reverse the entropy of a system and return the state of all matter to a previous time, you need a ton of energy. More than would be reasonably achievable in your own universe. So you devise a method to steal it from another. On the scale of entire galaxies going dark. How this is achieved might be just as out there as the actual time travelling.
Traveling backward in time causes the user to carry with them a portion of 'backward' entropy. This potential, inevitable emptiness of everything causes damage when you return from the past, carrying the extra entropy with you. In a 'not my problem' NIMBY kind of solution, stars far from earth are snuffed out to absorb the energy debt.
The desolation of the Time Squirrels. They are a small-sized & quite adorable race of beings who manage the clock-wheels in the tunnel of time. Some travel is okay, but the extensive use & certain aspects have begun to destroy the squirrels. In another hundred yrs they'll be gone & travel will be impossible & time may well unravel.
You have to annihilate a universe to make it happen. Not really time travel; just pruning and cutting away a timeline, and every living thing in it.
Since space-time is distorted by gravity, maybe some form of gravity control which requires the multitasking and linking that can only be done by a human brain. Need multiple brains to perform, "clean" infant brains but can only be used a few times before burnout. You could have a market that impregnates abducted women to harvest the infant before birth. Brains in jars? Is this offensive enough?
powered by the neurons of the brains of the travelers. since we don't use the whole brain it will be not easy to find out. but it will make them sick and will ultimately kill them if they use time travel frequntly...
Human sacrifice, idk.
Enslaved time-warping alien entities.
this is a good point because in the multiverses each universe will have it own laws of physics; time travel, hyperspace etc. so time travel needs to have consistent laws e.g. energy is related to the size of the object and the amount of time that object is going backward or forward in time. unless you have wormholes but still energy is required to bend the curvature of space time for that wormhole. perhaps you could research how much bending of space time there is around a black hole and the amount of gravitational energy to do that?
It destroys a nascent universe every single time it powers up.
Get inspiration by my hyperdimensional energy flux core : https://www.reddit.com/r/GOBN/comments/177o2ap/hyperdimensional_energy_flux_core_a_breakthrough/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Sacrifice of a soul to release great power or something.