How does the future work?

Question

The whole world is a mystery. You never know what the future will be. But, there is only one way to change this. If there was a machine for the future, what would you name it and what would it do?

Answer 1

The future is assembled from the present..

Answer 2

It is an appealing idea, but  think I would call mine The Time Machine in honor of Jules Verne.  I would look further into the future in the hope of preventing catastrophes, as well as satisfying my curiosity about what things will be like, when we will be traveling to extrasolar planets, and what we will find.

If we had a time machine, we could look at future positions of asteroids.  This would give us enough advance warning to change the orbits of any that were going to hit us.

Hi Doug,  You are right of course.  We don't know how changing events now will affect the future.  It could result in events more disastrous than the disaster we were preventing.  This was a fun question until you had to go and inject reality into it.  :-)

Answer 3

The future actually works quite well as long as nobody tries to tinker with it.  But there are an infinite number of 'futures' which are affected by an infinite number of events of which you aren't even aware.  (In fact, you -can't- be aware of them because they are infinite in number)

After you spend a few years (at the post-Doctoral  level) with Chaos Theory, the modern (that is, non- Copenhagen) interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and the emerging science of 'Consciousness Research',  you just might begin to see the light ☺

HTH,

Doug

Answer 4

Even though the series of books wasn't all that great, I do recall one cool thing from Hubbard's 10 book "Mission Earth" series.  It was called the "will-be-was drive" Heller's ship used.  It moved so fast through space, it had to look into the future so that it could make sure it wasn't going to hit something and adjust course accordingly if it was about to do so.  Heller also uses at a casino to make some money on the Roulette wheel in one of the later books.

Oh, and the books really aren't that great, don't bother going to get them.  I was very bored when deployed and had nothing better to do when not on patrol. I borrowed, not purchased them.

Answer 5

I don't know this has always puzzled me as well as the meaning to life and such, being an atheist...I question everything and look at how everything works...but then I ask myself...if there's such thing as a theoretical future right now in existence, it would be hard to come by since it might even be in another plane or something...and if there was truly anything as time travel, wouldn't we see people from the future right now?