MovieChat Forums > Travelers (2016) Discussion > Wouldn't it have been simpler for the Di...

Wouldn't it have been simpler for the Directorate to...

posted 8 years ago by gswan
2 replies | jump to latest

In episode 1.6 we learn the Directorate's ultimate goal is to prevent undiscovered space rock Helios 685 from striking the Earth and almost completely wiping out civilization. That is a fine goal, but the Directorate's approach is so stupid!

In season one we see the Directorate send out hundreds of small teams of Travelers, each assigned dozens of small covert missions, all of which were to build towards the moment when the covertly hijacked an anti-matter facility, and harnessed the anti-matter to power an advanced x-ray laser that would divert the asteroid.

Hello! Surely, in the months before it hit, astronomers figured out the rock's orbit? Surely the Directorate could have picked an Astronomer, decades before the strike, one who was about to die, and projected a traveler into his or her body, and have them discover the space rock's orbit, and discover it was going to impact the Earth.

Surely, if the Travelers were going to manipulate history to ensure that humans diverted the asteroid, it would be easier to merely tweak an already existing space rock diversion program, than to covertly implement a hidden space rock diversion program?

Everyone remembers JFK's inspirational speech, where he announced that the USA would land a man on the moon, "within this decade". Imagine how inspirational the speech he would have given, if he knew that it wasn't a propaganda victory over the old USSR that hung in the balance, if it was something so devastating to civilization that it would dward the devastation of a full-out thermo-nuclear war?

If the USA and the USSR knew, without a doubt, that a civilization ending space rock would hit the Earth in 57 years, wouldn't they combine resources and lead a planet-wide space effort to divert that asteroid?

With decades to prepare, couldn't NASA, and the USSR space effort, have reached an incoming space rock using 1970s or 1980s technology? Yes, it would be hard, but preventing the end of civilization would be worth a monumental effort, the kind of all-out effort each warring power put out during World War Two.

Wouldn't that make more sense?

If that had been the Directorate's plan, they could have confined their tweaking to projecting Travelers who were brilliant Scientists from their own time into the brains of dying 20th century scientists, allowing them to introduce advanced technology, like how to build an x-ray laser. Wouldn't helping NASA invent a workable ion drive, in 1970, have enabled them to visit any main belt asteroid? Nuclear charges, in 1979, that tweaked the orbit just a little, would be much more useful than a much more massive push in 2016.

Although episode 1.6 strongly implies that previously undiscovered Helios 685 was an asteroid, that is a science goof on the part of the writers. Asteriods all have a name and a (sequential) number. The lower the number the earlier it was discovered. I don't know when the real asteroid 685 was discovered, but the real Helios 965 was discovered about 90 years ago. Over thirty thousand asteroids have been found, so an asteroid undiscovered in 2016 would eventually get a name with a number component in the thirty thousand range.

So, I think the stupid writers didn't realize the space rock would more believably be a comet. Massive comets, coming from deep space, can more credibly sneak up on us with only a short warning.

Is there any way the Directorate could manipulate the equipment of a Traveler enhanced 1960s Astronomy lab to detect incoming Asteroid 685 six decades early?

[–] abomination21 8 years ago

They are trying to manipulation history with the most amount of information they have and least amount of undesirable ripples. What you suggest will be problematic on both fronts.

Marcy & Philip is their perfect example of the first front... their system requires personal information about their host which is largely not available to the public in the time period you specified. Even at our period where social media made it more available, they made mistakes. You think it's just popping in and pretend you have amnesia?

The second front has already been discuss ad nauseum in other post.

[–] Sluggr-3 8 years ago

There is no time travel show which is 100%. But coming up with a consistent model and sticking to it will get them into the 90% believable zone, which is good enough for entertainment.

This show is hitting me like Vonnegut's "Sirens of Titan" which is a satirical view of our civilization and its accomplishments as being no more than a series of office memos between some advanced aliens. Given his history with Stargate, I think Brad Wright is having a whole bunch of stuff happen just outside the sphere of regular people's lives, those little things which don't make sense, but at the same time don't seem big enough to pursue. He had epic space battles which were explained off as meteor showers, or an exploding Alien spaceship at the bottom of the Pacific was just an earthquake. So lets take a bunch of historical non-sequitors and string them together into a show where these events were due to the influence of people from the future, but in a way a little more sophisticated than Miller's explanation in "Repoman." Heck, projecting even the most dimwitted 21st century occupant back to the 1700's would profoundly alter history, maybe not in deeds, but in ideas spawned by someone saying "yeah, we all talk to people all over the world on little boxes we carry in our pocket." A statement like that could speed up technology by decades, hence the need for the protocols so that someone doesn't muck around too much with natural evolution of ideas. perhaps everything revolutionary in our civilization was the result of travelers going back to rapidly accelerate the process.

Just last night I was trying to remember the process for sending emails on a unix box in the mid 80's. Was there a keystroke for deleting entire lines of text? Who knows, maybe it was someone from the future sitting in a cube at bell labs who said out loud, "why can't I just highlight and delete this block of text" and boom the guy next to him makes it happen. I sort of hope the show has some mistakes along the way which do affect the future, sort of like how in 12 monkeys and terminator the very act of going back in time made it worse.

My Chimp DNA seems to have lost its password temporarily. Sluggr-2