this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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I mean, technically displacing the air with that time machine on such a massive time scale is just as likely to result in returning to a civilization of dolphin people as riding a dinosaur would.
Or you shedding some of your microbiome's bacteria and fungi into the environment and whoops: they outcompeted something "local" and now whole species change.
I honestly don't think there'd be any way to avoid doing something that could possibly change the future in a dramatic way, because that far back incredibly minute changes could possibly lead to huge differences (because chaos theory), to the level of "a butterfly didn't flap its wings because I accidentally squashed it with my time machine, and now humanity never happened. Oops." But any change that means you didn't ever go on your trip means you have some sort of paradox on your hands, and then it becomes a question of how timelines work
I think you could drastically minimize any impact by doing the time travel in space and merely observing from high orbit, assuming your time machine has no form of exhaust, which if you have a time machine seems like a relatively small engineering challenge by comparison.
You might displace a few atoms in the void, but it's the safest way one could go about it.
Oh yeah, like an observation platform. That's probably the only way you'd be doing time travel anyhow since it's also space travel because the Earth now isn't where the Earth was 200 million years ago; doing an atmospheric re-entry across time when you're not 100% sure where exactly everything will be sounds like an occupational health hazard and inadvisable at best. Gods fucking help you if anything goes wrong and you violently scatter pieces of your fancy time machine across a few square km of densely populated (by animals including genus Homo) area.
What do you think happened to the dinosaurs?
nothing, theyre still here
Just don't take any annoying mathematical prodigies with you.