Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for May 28, 2010

Very well done Wiley.

Also, this would be a very worthy candidate for next year’s Rueben. Good luck at the ceremonies.

Excellent gag - what’s the encore? Find out tomorrow, same time, same place.

Good luck Saturday Wiley. I know only one of the other two nominees, and think you are much better in many ways, not the least of which is the wide breadth of the topics you cover, and cover so well.

Wiley I loved this one, cool!

I had to read it twice to fully get it…..this reads like a classic Calvin and Hobbes……….well done, Wiley!

Ow! Ow! This makes my head hurt!

Danae is so smart. Tell her Harriet sends her love, Wiley. I worked with her in Monterey.

One of the many other problems is that it really doesn’t explain the origin of mankind, it just postpones the explanation. If Adam and Eve came from another planet, how did they come to exist on that planet?

Who said anything about another planet, Ira? The overpopulated world is this one in the future.

But the concept is like the sci-fi stories of the time traveler who is his own father, grandfather, whatever. Ain’t a-gonna happen. (Robert Heinlein in his later years got pre-occupied about time-travelling incest of this sort.)

If time travel were possible, time travellers would be all over the place, trying to stop 9/11, Pearl Harbor, the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations, the presidencies of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, etc. The fact that any of these have happened already is proof time-travel is impossible. QED.

Maybe these events you mentioned, Pschearer, is the lesser of two evils?

Q.E.D.

Or perhaps all of these events were caused by the time travelers with the single exclusion of Sarah Palin’s presidency, ; |

Excellent Wiley, as always!!! :) Good luck on Saturday!

Great story plot. Love it!

That short story was an EARLY Heinlein, PS.

Spam seems to exist in a universe all it own as well.

Idea is Twilight Zone 101 and one of the examples of a story John Campbell said he Would NEVER publish. Like the SF as Western, that later became Star Trek.

Perfect encore: we discover they are really Danae and Jeff of the future.

Did I mention time travel science is like a religion….:-)

Love it, Wiley.

Do people walk around naked in the future, or did they just loose their clothes?

We’re all traveling into the future right now…

For a minute I imagined Danae as Eve. It would explain getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden.

very good Wiley

good luck tomorrow. I think you’re a shoe-in

Well done & good luck!!

@freeholder1: Would Danae dye her hair blond?

Just flagged a spam.

@Pschearer:

The theory I buy into is that the overall course of history cannot be altered. Such as, one could go back and try to stop an event like the Lincoln assassination, but the most that would happen is perhaps a change of where it happens. In the end, Lincoln would still get shot.

Well, one flaw I see in this cartoon (oh noes) is: if their machine is broke, why didn’t the naked ones ask Danae for help (or a lift)?

Great strip, and it initiated an interesting bunch of comments - and good luck from me too!

Butterfly Effect. A successful time traveler generates a NEW universe; the old one never sees the changes caused by the event. Notice that SHE’S the one concerned about getting back… HE has no problem with being stuck. Even if it’s before the Yucatan Impact, there’s a better than even chance that those couple of pounds of nerve tissue between the ears could spell the difference between survival and extinction.

Nicely done Wiley, nicely done.

freeholder1,

Don’t forget the Lazurus Long stories. He went back in time and had an affair with his mother while he was a boy at that time.

I just went back in time to prevent myself from posting this comment and it didn’t work.

Should I try again?

W6BXQ, Loved the Lazarus Long saga, re-read it every few years.

Wiley, loved this & laughed loudly at the zinger! It explains it all so well! And I notice that the wife/husband driving/directions/fixing things narative marches on?

Good luck on the award I know you deserve to win!

MatureCanadian,

It’s been a while since I’ve read any of those stories. I can’t remember the name of the first book. The one where the people were long lived due to heredity and were being persecuted to learn their “secret”. They steal the first Star Ship and leave Earth and have adventures in other star systems. They return to Earth after 70(?) years Earth time and find that science has found out how to extend life. Lazarus Long lived on for a thousand(?) years in a later book or books. I believe he was the oldest of the original group.

Sorry to be long-winded!

My scenario (original to me, as far as I know) is that time travel will ultimately exist, but can only transport things to another era where a time portal exists, i.e., the earliest point in time you can visit is the invention of the first time machine.

Of course, the moment that first time pod is activated, someone from the future will hijack its programming and come back with the plans for a better time machine. Imagine Alexander Graham Bell calling Watson in the next room, but reaching a telemarketer from the future asking him if he’s happy with his long-distance carrier…

At that point, the future would collapse into the present (the past remains inaccessible), everything that would ever be invented is available now, every event of the future is known but none of it is alterable, up to the point (which will be known) when time travel is outlawed and the last machine is destroyed.

(Then 100 years later, some renegade builds another machine and starts the cycle over again.)

fritzoid,

Interesting idea. This occurred to me and may have come from a scifi story I read once. THE FUTURE IS FLUID AND THE PAST IS FIXED.

A WONDERFUL spoof of perhaps the most overused plotline in the history of sci-fi.

With Memorial Day coming up, modesty prevents me from demanding my just reward for my decisive role in winning World War II. Trust me, as bad as it was, it would have been MUCH worse otherwise (although, oddly enough, we’d now have the moving sidewalks and flying cars everybody was expecting).

In the first “Back to the Future” movie, I’ve always assumed Marty switched rails from one time continuum to another that had already existed in parallel. I want to see the movie about the other McFly, who’s born into privilege and goes back in time as well, but he returns to the family of losers that that McFly Prime escaped…

(In real life, I agree with pschearer; if time travel were ever going to be a reality, we would have always had it.)

As for the “Adam and Eve” in the last panel, I’d say they are nothing more than two temporarily-stranded-time-travelers who just happened think that whatever adults do in bushes - they could do undisturbed.

pschearer said, about 12 tales ago

But the concept is like the sci-fi stories of the time traveler who is his own father, grandfather, whatever. Ain’t a-gonna happen. (Robert Heinlein in his later years got pre-occupied about time-travelling incest of this sort.)

If time travel were possible, time travellers would be all over the place, trying to stop 9/11, Pearl Harbor, the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations, the presidencies of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, etc. The fact that any of these have happened already is proof time-travel is impossible. QED.

I read a science fiction tale years back that addressed that issue: There was a totalitarian government that wanted total stasis, since things were obviously perfect. But when their scientists proved that time travel was possible, they erected a barrier (for a short time) that stopped all the travelers and wrecked their equipment–except for one fellow who was traveling psionically. Made for quite some interesting times, until things were sorted out.

And then one character realized that the fact that there were no more time travelers meant one thing for sure: the barrier had been used at least once more. And he raises a toast to the moment after the next barrier…

Danae may be dying her hair black NOW, jhouck.

Bobby wrote great stuff in his “universe” , W6. The first Sf writer to lay out an entire future “history” and have events occur in it.

“The Door into Summer” was one of his first TT novels and was funny from the standpoint of the hero being so deeply in love with his heroine, yet you never really got a glimpse of her grown up.

The Short Story PS mentioned had the hero making love to himself as a woman since he was born a hermaphrodite. So he ended up being the mother, father, child, and time traveler who recruited himself into the time travel corps to “begin” with.

RH began his career by winning a SF short story contest. Alfred Bester who is testimony along with Phil Dick, that craziness was the foundation of a lot of SF, also entered that contest, lost and then sold his short story for more money than Heinlein got for winning the contest. To the same editor! Heinlein told the story of jovially cussing Bester out for making more money on the deal.

You want stories that touched every conceivable branch of love, get the Ted Sturgeon collections or Harlan’s Dangerous Visions collections.

Nice idea on the alternate U for Marty, Fritz. I was always going with the “branching off” concept. Though I suspect the writer was just having as much fun as possible with the notion.

pschearer said: “(…)the presidencies of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, etc.”

Wait! Did I miss something??? When did Sarah Palin get elected?! Did I sleep through her whole term? (God, I hope so!)

I’ve never been fond of “infinite branching” of universes because it requires the creation of so much new matter. A parallel universe or two, though, I don’t have a problem with.

It’s OK to branch and do new matter; it’s all illusion anyway! ;-)

It just shows that Adam & Eve were at it long before the snake showed up. Or was the snake really a dino and they really had no choice but to do as told or get eaten themselves?

Found this on a web search, it’s something (nothing?) to consider…

http://www.conservapedia.com/Out-of-place_artifact

I think Danae had ideas about her and Jeffrey becoming Adam and Eve. My. what a tragedy that would have been.

For a fascinating (but obscure) time travel story try isaac Asimov short novel “The End of Eternity”. It addresses some of the standard paradoxes in a most satisfying way.

Conservapedia is not a reliable source, IMO.