Time Travel in the Palladium Megaverse

[necraphis]

There are various books that touch on the subject of time travel some instances, like Dinosaur Swamp where Ley Line time travel is can be either move forward or back through time. While respecting that each DM can approach the question and either allow or not-allow time travel to the past. I am curious what a cannon answer would be? There was a pretty enthusiastic debate on a discord and the debate was like 60/40. Where the majority was inclined to say time travel to the past is a possibility, the minority perspective is that time travel can only be accomplished moving forward in time.

What is the RAW time travel capabilities?

Thank you.

[Killer Cyborg]

Palladium's rules for time travel are covered in Transdimensional Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

They're pretty good too, although the Rifts setting doesn't necessarily abide by them.
Still, an excess of temporal energy could explain why Rifts dinosaurs are mega-damage.

[MadGreenSon]

Palladium's rules for time travel are covered in Transdimensional Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

They're pretty good too, although the Rifts setting doesn't necessarily abide by them.
Still, an excess of temporal energy could explain why Rifts dinosaurs are mega-damage.

Yeah, other than that one book, I can't recall anything else that covers time travel except in the vaguest of terms.

[ShadowLogan]

Time Travel to the past is possible w/n the Megaverse. In Fleets of the 3 Galaxies one of the races is in communication with itself from the future and seems to be of a changing nature (ie they've changed something in the past which impacted the future that they are in contact with).

[Library Ogre]

Travelling forward in time is relatively well-explored... Temporal Magic has a spell that will send you X number of years forward. You just can't come back.

But I do kind of love throwing TMNT into the mix. And we might decide that TMNT's "Third Millenial Barrier" is the Coming of the Rifts.

[Killer Cyborg]

Travelling forward in time is relatively well-explored... Temporal Magic has a spell that will send you X number of years forward. You just can't come back.

But I do kind of love throwing TMNT into the mix. And we might decide that TMNT's "Third Millenial Barrier" is the Coming of the Rifts.

Ooh!
I like that!!

[MadGreenSon]

Travelling forward in time is relatively well-explored... Temporal Magic has a spell that will send you X number of years forward. You just can't come back.

But I do kind of love throwing TMNT into the mix. And we might decide that TMNT's "Third Millenial Barrier" is the Coming of the Rifts.

So... would people who start on the other side of the barrier be unable to breach it from the future side? No going back before the Rifts?

[Killer Cyborg]

Travelling forward in time is relatively well-explored... Temporal Magic has a spell that will send you X number of years forward. You just can't come back.

But I do kind of love throwing TMNT into the mix. And we might decide that TMNT's "Third Millenial Barrier" is the Coming of the Rifts.

So... would people who start on the other side of the barrier be unable to breach it from the future side? No going back before the Rifts?

I don't remember them saying nobody could go BACK past the barrier, just that nobody knew what lay beyond the barrier because nobody could get past it from the past side, if you follow.

So Rifts characters could probably travel back to earlier times, but when they tried to travel forward they'd hit the barrier.
Getting past it would be an adventure.

[MadGreenSon]

Travelling forward in time is relatively well-explored... Temporal Magic has a spell that will send you X number of years forward. You just can't come back.

But I do kind of love throwing TMNT into the mix. And we might decide that TMNT's "Third Millenial Barrier" is the Coming of the Rifts.

So... would people who start on the other side of the barrier be unable to breach it from the future side? No going back before the Rifts?

I don't remember them saying nobody could go BACK past the barrier, just that nobody knew what lay beyond the barrier because nobody could get past it from the past side, if you follow.

So Rifts characters could probably travel back to earlier times, but when they tried to travel forward they'd hit the barrier.
Getting past it would be an adventure.

Fair enough. Can't make messing about with history easy. The Doctor Who RPG is a totally different system, after all.

[Library Ogre]

So Rifts characters could probably travel back to earlier times, but when they tried to travel forward they'd hit the barrier.
Getting past it would be an adventure.

So, a CS game idea I had, way back when, was the CS finding what appeared to be a semi-stable Rift to the past, and sending a team to destroy the St. Louis Arch before it was built. However, getting back to the past, they realize that all of their high-tech equipment is destroyed (shades of Terminator, I know), and that the Rift was one-way.

So, CS troopers stuck in the past... early to mid 1960s... trying to destroy the arch to protect the future CS from demons.

[Prince Artemis]

Well, paraphrasing Gavin Free of slow mo guys and achievement hunter fame, as he has a really good point: Any device that only sends you forward or backward in time is basically a death ray or form of execution. Unless the device or power also adjusts for space as well as time. Why? Well, while you might be sitting in your computer room for the last hour or so, you've actually traveled a ridiculous actual distance. Earth spins roughly 1000 miles an hour. It orbits the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. The Solar system orbits the center of the milky way galaxy roughly 500,000 miles per hour. So, even a spell like time skip is actually a teleportation spell of sorts, as in the 15 seconds it is active, you've moved ~4 miles by the earth rotation alone. ~279 miles from earths orbit alone. ~2083 miles from the solar system's rotation around the galactic central point. (Technically more, since all of these stack technically, but its frankly above my pay grade to figure out exactly how they stack, since its not simple addition or multiplication since all of them are actually moving in slightly different directions).

So yeah, time travel is very messy.

That being said, there are actually several different ways its already been used in Rifts in general. Beyond what was already mentioned, the golden age cities of japan were rifted through time as well. Some phase towns essentially time travel as time essentially stops for some of them when they're not in phase. The sparkling waters in underseas can actually lead to time travel (as well as a bunch of other random things happening), and heck, butch cassidy and the sundance kid were also rifted through time.

That being said, it did come up during one of my podcasts with kevin a long time ago, where he mentioned that he's not a fan of time travel in media. Particularly because it kind of deflates the stakes of a given situation, since time travelers can go back and just fix incidents that happened (he used Hiro from Heroes as an example of this, as it was current at the time), and it is true. It has to be done very carefully and uniform or it gets confusing and non-sensical. I would liken it to trying to use the deck of many things in a game. Sure, it could be fun for a few minutes, but just the appearance of it is usually the death knell of any campaign.

[Killer Cyborg]

Well, paraphrasing Gavin Free of slow mo guys and achievement hunter fame, as he has a really good point: Any device that only sends you forward or backward in time is basically a death ray or form of execution. Unless the device or power also adjusts for space as well as time. Why? Well, while you might be sitting in your computer room for the last hour or so, you've actually traveled a ridiculous actual distance. Earth spins roughly 1000 miles an hour....

You seem to be assuming that time travel devices necessarily use specific points in space itself as a targeting system, rather than specific points on a planet or other celestial body.
I don't think that's a warranted assumption.

[MadGreenSon]

Well, paraphrasing Gavin Free of slow mo guys and achievement hunter fame, as he has a really good point: Any device that only sends you forward or backward in time is basically a death ray or form of execution. Unless the device or power also adjusts for space as well as time. Why? Well, while you might be sitting in your computer room for the last hour or so, you've actually traveled a ridiculous actual distance. Earth spins roughly 1000 miles an hour....

You seem to be assuming that time travel devices necessarily use specific points in space itself as a targeting system, rather than specific points on a planet or other celestial body.
I don't think that's a warranted assumption.

More logical to assume that if time travel is actually being used as a story element it's not going to be the sort that just pointlessly kills everyone using it.

[The Beast]

Well, paraphrasing Gavin Free of slow mo guys and achievement hunter fame, as he has a really good point: Any device that only sends you forward or backward in time is basically a death ray or form of execution. Unless the device or power also adjusts for space as well as time. Why? Well, while you might be sitting in your computer room for the last hour or so, you've actually traveled a ridiculous actual distance. Earth spins roughly 1000 miles an hour....

You seem to be assuming that time travel devices necessarily use specific points in space itself as a targeting system, rather than specific points on a planet or other celestial body.
I don't think that's a warranted assumption.

More logical to assume that if time travel is actually being used as a story element it's not going to be the sort that just pointlessly kills everyone using it.

I read a fictional WW2 story where Hitler had discovered time travel first and was using it to win the war. The guy he sent through time ended up changing sides once he read up on our past and realized Hitler was Hitler. The book mentioned that Hitler's scientists had to calculate a bunch of crap to ensure that the protagonist ended up on Earth whenever he time traveled due to everything Artemis mentioned. The protagonist had the fortune of being in the future and being able to buy a laptop and use... NASA (I think) so he could make the calculations he needed to on his own. One such jump was made to hide the body of a SS officer he just killed to 5 million years into the future, when the sun completed it's current lifecycle and expanded to its red giant phase.

[Kovoston]

There are various books that touch on the subject of time travel some instances, like Dinosaur Swamp where Ley Line time travel is can be either move forward or back through time. While respecting that each DM can approach the question and either allow or not-allow time travel to the past. I am curious what a cannon answer would be? There was a pretty enthusiastic debate on a discord and the debate was like 60/40. Where the majority was inclined to say time travel to the past is a possibility, the minority perspective is that time travel can only be accomplished moving forward in time.

What is the RAW time travel capabilities?

Thank you.

For more inspiration try the Rifter #56 pg.37 for more Time Travel info.

[Wise_Owl]

Hmm, Time Travel you say, well let me dust myself off....


The short answer is this; Like most things in Rifts, concrete answers are not to be found. In this instance it is because 1)Rifts is Gonzo, and doesn't hold to anything resembling 'physics' or 'simulation of reality'. and 2)It doesn't want to close any narrative possibilities.

To be clear we aren't even 100% sure if time travel to the future is possible. We know that people can, through a rift, appear in a world that appears to be there future, but with the definite example of parallel dimensions to work on, it may be that all travel is 'cross-universe' travel. This would actually make alot of sense and work well in terms of answering the various paradox' that time travel presents(more of this anon.)

Though I did want to talk for a moment about the 'if you aren't moving through space you'd be flung millions of miles away!'. So the thing about modern physics is that one core key to it is there is no essentially 'true' reference frame for physics. To make this plain;

I am standing on the ground besides some tracks, you are on a train whizzing by me. Now in general we would say you are going 80 kmh, and I'm standing still. But that is because we, humans, tend to use the earth as a 'reference frame'. So it is true to say I am not moving... in relation to the surface of the earth, while the train is moving in relation to me and the surface of the earth. But of course we are both moving, at slightly different speeds, in relation to treating the sun stationary. Indeed, we could just as readily say that the train is stationary, and the earth, and me, are moving in relation to you. From the point of view of physics, all of those are equally true. We prefer reference frames that are useful.

Okay, now... a bit of a simplification; part of post-General Relativity is that time and space are not seperate entities. This is hard to understand, but moving through space and time ALWAYS occurs together. You cannot move through one and not the other because they are the same thing ,general space-time. There are instances where it makes sense to suggest you are moving through one and not the other for sake of mathematical simplicity, but yeah. So depending on how your time travel method 'works' it may just be that it defaults to th ereference frame of the closest large gravity field(in this case, the earth).

Okay that out of the way; So travelling to the future is easy. We all do it every day all the time, just the rate at which we do it changes. But here's the thing, if Relativity is true in Rifts, and you can open protals through space that are relatively stable, you can already make a time-machine.

You open a portal, one end on my rocket, one end with you. The rocket blasts off, and we key up to relativistic speeds through acceleration. I fly away for 4 years and then back, at lets say 0.9 c. Time Dilation means that according to clocks on earth I am gone for 8 years, but according to my clock on the ship I was away for 3.5 years. Here's the problem, I can observe what is occuring through my portal, so after 3.5 years, I open a door after landing, throw a ball out the door and then step through the portal, where according to earth, I haven't even turned around. I sit around on earth for 4.5 years and am then there to catch the ball I hurled out the door, to myself. We now have a permanent portal back and forth in time over a 4.5 year difference....

Okay, enough with weird physics, cause mostly you don't care; The answer is mostly a story one and will not be resolved 'canonically' because it either shuts down stories in a way that isn't that interesting, or causes more problems that also are kind of uninteresting. If you want to do a story about travelling into the past, go for it, though you uhave to answer 'can things be changed' and 'if so what happens, am I creating new universes, altering my universe, etc.'.

There have been a host of answers to this; multiple-universe causality as I outlined initially is probalby the 'best' answer for rifts, but some sort of temporal permanence also makes sense(I can't go back and kill hitler cause otherwise I would have killed hitler and since I know about hitler, I obviously didn't kill him.) The big quesiton you have to answer if you want to make changing the past possible in Rifts is this 'Why aren't the big magical boys like the Splugorth doing it'. My preffered answer to that would be 'they are, and you are a fool to think otherwise.'

[guardiandashi]

Hmm, Time Travel you say, well let me dust myself off....


The short answer is this; Like most things in Rifts, concrete answers are not to be found. In this instance it is because 1)Rifts is Gonzo, and doesn't hold to anything resembling 'physics' or 'simulation of reality'. and 2)It doesn't want to close any narrative possibilities.

To be clear we aren't even 100% sure if time travel to the future is possible. We know that people can, through a rift, appear in a world that appears to be there future, but with the definite example of parallel dimensions to work on, it may be that all travel is 'cross-universe' travel. This would actually make alot of sense and work well in terms of answering the various paradox' that time travel presents(more of this anon.)

Though I did want to talk for a moment about the 'if you aren't moving through space you'd be flung millions of miles away!'. So the thing about modern physics is that one core key to it is there is no essentially 'true' reference frame for physics. To make this plain;

I am standing on the ground besides some tracks, you are on a train whizzing by me. Now in general we would say you are going 80 kmh, and I'm standing still. But that is because we, humans, tend to use the earth as a 'reference frame'. So it is true to say I am not moving... in relation to the surface of the earth, while the train is moving in relation to me and the surface of the earth. But of course we are both moving, at slightly different speeds, in relation to treating the sun stationary. Indeed, we could just as readily say that the train is stationary, and the earth, and me, are moving in relation to you. From the point of view of physics, all of those are equally true. We prefer reference frames that are useful.

Okay, now... a bit of a simplification; part of post-General Relativity is that time and space are not seperate entities. This is hard to understand, but moving through space and time ALWAYS occurs together. You cannot move through one and not the other because they are the same thing ,general space-time. There are instances where it makes sense to suggest you are moving through one and not the other for sake of mathematical simplicity, but yeah. So depending on how your time travel method 'works' it may just be that it defaults to th ereference frame of the closest large gravity field(in this case, the earth).

Okay that out of the way; So travelling to the future is easy. We all do it every day all the time, just the rate at which we do it changes. But here's the thing, if Relativity is true in Rifts, and you can open protals through space that are relatively stable, you can already make a time-machine.

You open a portal, one end on my rocket, one end with you. The rocket blasts off, and we key up to relativistic speeds through acceleration. I fly away for 4 years and then back, at lets say 0.9 c. Time Dilation means that according to clocks on earth I am gone for 8 years, but according to my clock on the ship I was away for 3.5 years. Here's the problem, I can observe what is occuring through my portal, so after 3.5 years, I open a door after landing, throw a ball out the door and then step through the portal, where according to earth, I haven't even turned around. I sit around on earth for 4.5 years and am then there to catch the ball I hurled out the door, to myself. We now have a permanent portal back and forth in time over a 4.5 year difference....

Okay, enough with weird physics, cause mostly you don't care; The answer is mostly a story one and will not be resolved 'canonically' because it either shuts down stories in a way that isn't that interesting, or causes more problems that also are kind of uninteresting. If you want to do a story about travelling into the past, go for it, though you uhave to answer 'can things be changed' and 'if so what happens, am I creating new universes, altering my universe, etc.'.

There have been a host of answers to this; multiple-universe causality as I outlined initially is probalby the 'best' answer for rifts, but some sort of temporal permanence also makes sense(I can't go back and kill hitler cause otherwise I would have killed hitler and since I know about hitler, I obviously didn't kill him.) The big quesiton you have to answer if you want to make changing the past possible in Rifts is this 'Why aren't the big magical boys like the Splugorth doing it'. My preffered answer to that would be 'they are, and you are a fool to think otherwise.'

a couple issues, relativity does NOT work the way you described, but I don't blame you it is a very common misunderstanding of what Einstein said.

so you get in a rocket and head away from earth at lets say 90% of the speed of light (this gets you into a good relativity range)

if you have a big telescope watching a clock on earth the clock will appear to have slowed down 90% IE for every 9 seconds that pass only 1 will have passed for the clock (there WILL be some actual relativistic dilatation effects but they are miniscule in comparison) you fly away from earth for 5 years then miraculously you manage to flip around and start back to earth at the same 0.90 percent of light speed (for the sake of this thought exercise the turn around was instantaneous) as you move back towards earth the clock you are observing on earth will now be advancing about 1.9 seconds for every second that passes until you come back into the earth "reference frame" so your "portal" that you were dragging will actually have very little to NO temporal shift

[Borast]

Travelling forward in time is relatively well-explored... Temporal Magic has a spell that will send you X number of years forward. You just can't come back.

But I do kind of love throwing TMNT into the mix. And we might decide that TMNT's "Third Millenial Barrier" is the Coming of the Rifts.

So... would people who start on the other side of the barrier be unable to breach it from the future side? No going back before the Rifts?

I don't remember them saying nobody could go BACK past the barrier, just that nobody knew what lay beyond the barrier because nobody could get past it from the past side, if you follow.

So Rifts characters could probably travel back to earlier times, but when they tried to travel forward they'd hit the barrier.
Getting past it would be an adventure.

Just so long as no one stats-out the Trapper, we should be safe from DC!

[EltonRobb]

I am a Montauk Project survivor, so I can say with confidence that Time Travel is not only possible, but a reality.

[Wise_Owl]

a couple issues, relativity does NOT work the way you described, but I don't blame you it is a very common misunderstanding of what Einstein said.

so you get in a rocket and head away from earth at lets say 90% of the speed of light (this gets you into a good relativity range)

if you have a big telescope watching a clock on earth the clock will appear to have slowed down 90% IE for every 9 seconds that pass only 1 will have passed for the clock (there WILL be some actual relativistic dilatation effects but they are miniscule in comparison) you fly away from earth for 5 years then miraculously you manage to flip around and start back to earth at the same 0.90 percent of light speed (for the sake of this thought exercise the turn around was instantaneous) as you move back towards earth the clock you are observing on earth will now be advancing about 1.9 seconds for every second that passes until you come back into the earth "reference frame" so your "portal" that you were dragging will actually have very little to NO temporal shift

Well you're wrong for a few reasons. The first is that time dilation occurs via the factor of the Lorentz factor(square root of 1-v^2/C^2) and not by a direct factor.

Lets imagine your scenario though; Two Atomic clocks are created and synched. One on the ship, one on the ground. The Clock on the ground will send out laser pulses every 10 seconds once the ship hits 0.9 c. So every 6 pulses is a minute, every 360 an hour. When the ship hits 0.9 it starts receiving the pulses, but according to it's atomic clock, they are coming at interval of about 5 seconds. So on earth the 360th pulse is recorded after 1 hour on the atomic clock, and on the ship the 360th pulse is recorded after 30 minutes.

Now here's the problem; you have a portal through which both the clocks and people can travel. So after receiving pulse 360, the astronaut grabs his clock and steps through the portal. Both clocks still say 30 minutes have passed, but the clock on earth records it has sent out only 180 pulses. The astronaut walks over and turns off the pulses. How did he receive pulses after that point? We have induced a temporal paradox before lunch-time.

To whit this is the thing that precedes the famous 'twin paradox', which we wont' get into save to say that in actuality of course the relativistic effects would be impacted by the general relativistic acceleration as well. The ability to pass information instantly, FTL provides violation of causality and functional 'time-travel'.

Though this is a heavy conversation of Modern Physics for a game about shooting future nazi's as an interdimensional elf-cyborg.

[Killer Cyborg]

Can two atomic clocks be quantumly entangled?
If so, what happens when they move at vastly different speeds?

[Wise_Owl]

Can two atomic clocks be quantumly entangled?
If so, what happens when they move at vastly different speeds?

Two Quantumly entangled particles exist in a state of superposition until 'observed' in a quantum mechanical state, so I don't think they could be used to produce a clock, which is pretty much a device for creating simultaneous events at a 'steady' interval within an inertial reference frame.

I suppose, in the model we are using, you could transform an entangled particle, observe it on the space-ship, hop back through the portal and then observe the other one and some questions of causality would occur.