Ask HN: Will YC ever fund a time travel startup? - baron816
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masonic
They already did, back in 2023.

[EDIT}: I meant they _will_ in 2023. Maybe. We can't possibly tell, of course.

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id122015
The problem with time travel is that when a single person can do it than we
can all do it. And none of us will get ahead.

Every time a startup tries to predict the stock market, they are investing in
a time travel startup. And that's why they say the market is efficient - no
one can predict when the next crash will come.

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urs2102
What would be the closest parallel to not just YC, but any venture backed idea
which you would you say is similar to 'chasing the impossible'?

I think that would expand the scope of a question like this. Functional
quantum computing comes to mind, but I can't think of too many examples...

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tedmiston
Funding a startup whose goal is to break out of, assuming we are in one, a
simulation.

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BorisMelnik
if that were the case, it would suck if we got rebooted or worse case had a
fatal kernel issue. Imagine its like that old device in the TV show "lost"
sitting in a tower for 20 years being played over and over again. It works
fine until someone touches it, then blam!

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DrNuke
Blue sky research may well be funded by govs for military purposes, other than
universities employing phd students.

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nostrademons
If they funded one, and it succeeded, it would've already happened, so no.

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stephancoral
Not true at all. It could very well be that when you time travel you go to
another version or branch of that space-time brane. Or perhaps the past you
visit is purely holographic and read-only in the causal sense.

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nostrademons
Out of all the branches of the space-time continuum, what's the chance that we
are on the original one? Either we are improbably exceptional, or time travel
is never invented. (This is the same argument as the "we are probably in a
simulation", BTW.)

And if the past you visit is read-only, then you've invented history, not
time-travel.

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Arizhel
>Out of all the branches of the space-time continuum, what's the chance that
we are on the original one?

None, because there's an infinite number of branches. And every time someone
travels back in time, it creates a new branch.

What'd be interesting is to do an experiment to disprove this: invent a time
machine that allows traveling both backwards and forwards in time. Use it to
send two people back in time. Person A goes first, and the person B warps back
to a time an hour later in the same place, and tells person A a secret. Then
person B comes back, then person A comes back an hour later. Have person A
repeat the secret, and see if they met each other in the past. With a new
universe created every time someone goes back in time, will person B go back
to the same new universe that was created when person A went back in time, or
will they go back to the original universe that person A tried to go back to,
and which still exists without person A which would change the course of
history there? Does person B create a new universe? Will person A have met
person B, and will they have seen person B go back to the future before them?

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joeclark77
IMHO if reverse time travel were possible, we'd be up to our ears in tourists
from the future already, so it's not.

However maybe forward time travel (faster than usual I mean) could be
possible. But... how would it make any money? As soon as you've delivered the
service, the deadbeat customer may not be back in town to pay his bill for
decades or centuries! And 30-day jumps just seems silly.

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gxespino
Not necessarily. Consider: [https://www.quora.com/Why-are-people-from-the-
future-not-tim...](https://www.quora.com/Why-are-people-from-the-future-not-
time-traveling-to-our-period/answer/Yishan-Wong?srid=3dKC)

