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Context

The Helix Corporation is an evil mega-corporation where everything they make always has some sort of strange twist to it.

Their latest product was the Relativity Rocket Alarm Clock. It was supposed to be a normal alarm, but the device they created somehow ended up being a time machine. There's just one catch. It can only send people into the future, never into the past.

Here's how it works. There are four buttons on the machine, S for seconds, M for minutes, H for hours, and Snooze. There's no number pad so you have to manually press the buttons as many times as it takes to get to the number you want. If you want to go 5 seconds, 6 minutes, and 8 hours into the future, you have to press the S button 5 times, the M button 6 times, and the H button 8 times. There's no erase key either so there's no way to backpedal if you press the wrong pattern. Pressing Snooze activates the time travel, sending you forward in time, and only forward in time as far as was input.

When a person is time-traveling a 3-meter radius sphere of white light will erupt around the alarm clock and anything in that sphere will seem to disappear from the current timeline and reappear in the future at the input time. If the input was 5 seconds, 6 minutes, and 8 hours, then the person will travel exactly that far into the future and not a second later or sooner.

The biggest problem with the device is that you can only go forward, meaning that once you've used it there's really no way to go back. If you mistakenly type in the wrong time, you're particularly doomed because you might end up much farther in the future than you would want to be.

Also, they only have one machine and it disappears with the user until they reappear at their set time, so if they send a person 200 years into the future they will not be able to use the device until that person reappears in 200 years and someone hopefully recovers them.

Theoretically, there's no limit to how far into the future the device could send someone. It could send them to the end of time if they typed in the right number.

Geographical location does not change when the device is used. You will end up in the exact same latitudinal and longitudinal points before and after using the device.

The Question

What is one practical usage to being able to travel into the future without being able to travel back into the past?

As far as I can tell, the ability to only be able to go into the future would be an extremely useless ability, but there has to be a practical application for it that the main characters can take advantage of when they get in trouble.

Possible Solutions

1-It can be used as an emergency escape if the situation gets dire. If the main characters are cornered or the building is about to blow up, they can just go forward in time a day or two to avoid the brunt of the problem and appear fine a few days later.

2-Send a warning message into the future by sending an employee with the device to deliver the message. Seems like a waste of a perfectly good time machine but that's one way to do it.

Other than that I can see no practical uses for how a time machine with no backward direction would be useful. With no communication with the future then there is no way to coordinate a plan, which makes things difficult.

For all the person traveling into the future knows, they could be escaping one thing only to find out that the future is actually worse, which would defeat the purpose of going there in the first place. And a person delivering a message might find out that the future people already figured the problem out on their own so there was no point in warning them.

It just seems vastly impractical to have a time machine like this.

Final notes: -Time paradoxes are impossible with this type of machine because it's not making copies of anybody, just dropping an individual in the past into the future.

-There's no mass limit for what the time machine can bring but anything within the 3-meter radius will automatically be taken on the time trip. This includes inanimate objects and even the floor. If a person accidentally puts their arm outside the radius that arm will be neatly severed in half. The part that was inside the sphere will go to the future and the part outside stays in the past.

Edit:

-There is no cool-down period. -A human passenger is not required.

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    $\begingroup$ A few questions: Is a human passenger required? What happens when time-traveling matter materializes in a spot that is now occupied by something else? How far/long can one time-jump be? How often can a time machine be used before it breaks? $\endgroup$
    – user91641
    Apr 18, 2022 at 15:48
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    $\begingroup$ The question is clearly to broad and open to and endless number of opinion-based answers, but it is already too late to tighten it up into something better. Oh well. $\endgroup$ Apr 18, 2022 at 16:00
  • $\begingroup$ How can I make it less opinion-based? I want my question to work, but I genuinely do not know how to fix it. $\endgroup$ Apr 18, 2022 at 17:37

7 Answers 7

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There are quite a lot of possible uses

Replaces Time Release Vaults: Businesses today often use time-release vaults to store valuables, but even a time release vault can be broken into. With only minor modifications, this technology could be used to replace time-release vaults with something that completely removes the contents of your vault from reality until a pre-defined time making it 100% impossible to steal from.

Historical Data Preservation: How do you prevent a natural disaster or totalitarian government from destroying or otherwise re-writing history? You send copies of history to the future. Today, museums can only preserve heavily corrupted versions of the past, and only up until the present, but they cant not prevent the future form altering or destroying our historical knowledge. Now imagine if a museums started preserving records of the past and sending it straight to the future. No longer would historians in 5000CE be digging through badly damaged old files and trying to piece together info from incomplete sources. They could instead receive a complete copy of Wikipedia so that they can have a very complete and un-altered perspective of what life was like 3000 years ago.

Refugee Management: When you look at situations like the war in Ukraine or Hurricane Katrina, you can see circumstances where wars or natural disasters can displace millions of people into new regions that just don't have the infrastructure to take them. Instead of letting these regions be destabilized by massive population surges that require rapid, massive, and often unexpected allocations of relief aid, you have your NATO or FEMA type organizations send millions of these clocks to the disaster zones to simply remove the un-sustainable people temporarily from the timeline. By sending a few million people a year or two into the future, you have time to re-organize infrastructures to deal with the influx of refugees; so, when they get back into the timeline, they will arrive with a newly vamped up or rebuilt infrastructure that is able to take them.

Bulk Storage: A slight variation to Nuclear Hoagie's food preservation idea. Instead of just having the same load of goods being sent into the future on a repeating cycle, you could have a many set of goods being sent into the future all using up the same space. So, you could for example take a small grain hoper and 1440 of these clocks each set to go off at increments of 1 minute, but instead of going forward 1 minute, they go forward by a day allowing you to store 162,720 cubic meters of goods in a silo that only has an internal volume of 113 cubic meters.

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  • $\begingroup$ The disaster relief scenario reminds me a lot of South Park S8:E7, where people go back in time to find jobs to flee unemployment $\endgroup$
    – Atog
    Apr 18, 2022 at 16:09
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    $\begingroup$ Or send everyone to the future, so mother Gaia can take a breather and recuperate. $\endgroup$
    – Joachim
    Apr 18, 2022 at 16:17
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Food preservation.

You have invented a new kind of food storage that doesn't just slow the decay of food, but stops it entirely by making the food not experience time. You just need to build a machine that enters the time and presses snooze automatically, always sending food 1 minute into the future as long as the "refrigerator door" is closed. If the food arrives when the door is closed, the machine immediately sends itself 1 minute forward again. If the food arrives when the door is open, you grab what you want and go on your way, and never have to wait more than 1 minute to access anything stored this way. You sacrifice some availability of the food for a huge increase in shelf life. The rate of food decay will depend on how quickly the machine can reset itself, if the machine arrives every minute and leaves within 1 second, food will spoil at 1/60th the rate since it only experiences one second of every minute.

With a larger ratio of sent-forward time to turnaround time, you could keep even fast-spoiling foods fresh for years. This won't work for storage in transit because that naturally involves a changing location, but expect to see this in food warehouses worldwide.

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A few ideas:

  • Make dangerous waste literally the problem of future generations. Radioactive waste might the most interesting candidate.
  • Use the time machine for its cutting everything effect: for example, get close to a bank vault, time travel 1 second into the future and retrieve valuable items through the hole cut by the time-travel-bubble
  • get rid of people without any trace: simply send them a few 100 years into the future
  • put injured people in "stasis": sending the injured into the future (a few hours) gives medical help all the time needed to arrive
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The obvious answer is investing; I can invest in many startups, as a passive investor but with ironclad contracts, and skip a year forward to see how they've done, perhaps cash in my stakes, and do it again. These don't even have to be smart investments, in the very long run, the stock market always rises. It would be nice to not have to live through the depressions. If it doesn't look good in one year, keep skipping forward a year at a time until it does look good. Every ten years or so, trade your old cash for new bills. Do a little maintenance to keep all your accounts current.

On a shorter timespan, I can do scientific experiments that may take years (like genetic experiments in which things must grow) and see the results one year at at time, even if they take 1000 years to complete.

On the health front, if I have a fatal disease, I can jump forward, ten years at time, looking for a cure. If I combine this with that investing ability, I might be able to fund the research for the cure, and live to use it.

And a three meter radius is huge; I can take about 60 people with me, my whole extended family and more.

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Ideal tool for stealing works of art from museums

  1. Go into museum as ordinary visitor.
  2. Travel forward in time to night time.
  3. Pick up whatever work of art you fancy.
  4. Travel forward in time about two weeks to normal opening hours.
  5. Exit the museum with the loot like any regular visitor.
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Emergency care

This would be a huge benefit to a hospital emergency room, take a blood sample or make a diagnosis and essentially put the patient in stasis while you wait for test results and set up a the necessary surgery. Works even better when a large disaster occurs and a the emergency room is swamped by patients, just put half of them on hold until some surgeons are freed up.

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Restaurants

If your restaurant has one of these gizmos, you have instant access to meals "just out of the oven".

Rather than having your chefs on high alert until someone orders a medium rare ribeye steak with black pepper sauce and sauté potatoes, you prepare a few hundred medium rare ribeye steak with black pepper sauce and sauté potatoes before the customers arrive.

Put all the medium rare ribeye steak with black pepper sauce and sauté potatoes in the time time fridge and send it forward in time one minute. Then if the door is closed send them forward another minute. Repeat until the door is open. Someone has just taken a medium rare ribeye steak with black pepper sauce and sauté potatoes out of the time fridge.

The medium rare ribeye steak with black pepper sauce and sauté potatoes tastes like one prepared only moments ago. From its point of view it was prepared moments ago. But from the customer and chef's point of view it was prepared hours ago.

This means your restaurant needs to hire fewer chefs. The would-be chefs get to do something else with their time. For example

(a) building Dyson Swarms

(b) arguing online about why Dyson Swarms are a terrible idea

(c) modding Pokémon Red

(d) Judo contest

(e) give your family a hug

(f) learn a foreign language

(g) visit a new country

(h) wash your tea towels

(i) add numbers to other numbers

(j) invent a new religion

Feel free to add to the list.

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