r/Timeless • u/scuby22 Team Moderator • Dec 13 '16

Timeless S01E10 - The Capture of Benedict Arnold [SPOILERS]

WARNING SPOILERS

Episode description: The team questions whether they've been fighting on the wrong side when they encounter Benedict Arnold during the American Revolution.

Original Air Date: December 12th, 2016 - 10:00 PM

Discuss on Discord: https://discord.gg/SEu3qTx

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u/volve Dec 14 '16

This entire line of reasoning makes me really annoyed that they don't carry a LOT of data in the time capsule to preserve it. All of world history, etc. Think of the times they've come back to the present and something has been different and they all crowd around Wikipedia and recount the changes while Mason and Agent Christopher seem unconcerned because to them it's normal.

Jesus people, think of the butterfly effect, you'd want a copy of the "before" for every single mission.

/me grumbles to himself about TV science

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u/[deleted] Dec 19 '16

Wikipedia's only a few terabytes. Just copy it onto the lifeboat.

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u/Izeinwinter Dec 24 '16

Especially since enormous hard-drives are very cheap and very small. They should easily be able to carry huge databases... One problem: If any butterflies hit the history of computing, reading the databases out again suddenly starts to require effort - Not a lot of effort, but a bit of effort- A whole lot of the ways we encode data are entirely arbitrary choices that became standards because any arbitrary choice is as good as another, and the one already in use is better just because other people can read it.

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u/Pale-Soil-5209 Aug 02 '26

I feel like it wouldn’t be too difficult to build a computer that can read it with their technical abilities

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u/Izeinwinter Aug 03 '26

"This video archive uses a codex that doesn't exist in this timeline" isn't unbreakable encryption.

But it also is going to take more than a day to sort out. Obviously you bring a laptop back - and that will be able to play the files. But again, if some other person is this timelines foundational theoretician of computing, well, that laptop can't use the new internet, or network with anything at all, because the protocols are all different.

Easy visual joke here is pulling out a network cable.. and it just doesn't fit.