I didn’t have “time travel” anywhere near the top of my “next grift after AI” list. The chronomigration bubble came out of a confluence of developments; gamma ray telescopes sensitive to the 500 keV electron-positron annihilation energy allowed us to spot the inbound antimatter comet 67i/Fermi as soon as it began interacting with the solar wind. Gravity tugs brought 67i to lunar orbit, where laser ablation was used to direct a stream of antimatter dust onto fuel pellets (just moon rocks, in fact). The plume of energy liberated by quantum annihilation acted as a giant rocket motor, slightly perturbing the moon’s orbit in such a way to tug the earth farther enough away from the sun to cool the climate. It will take four hundred centuries, which is where the time travel (also facilitated by the matter/antimatter energy fountain) comes in. If you can afford the fare, you can deposit one dollar in a savings account, blip out of our climate ravaged world and arrive rich in the clean, comfortable future. No, you cannot deduct the cost from your future fortune, it doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t work at all. The kind of person who would take this offer can’t be expected to know the difference between a time portal and a disintegration field. And they just won’t believe you when you warn them.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

@Unixbigot That escalated quickly.
@futzle @Unixbigot ...in just the right way...
@Unixbigot this scam already exists in the form of cryopreservation
@aburka @Unixbigot I feel like that's one of those "probably won't work, but I'm about to die anyway, so worth a try" things. And sounds like it's more in the realm of the possible than what the OP is describing.
@Unixbigot jumps in the portal and waits for something to happen...

@Unixbigot Sounds like that planet in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where the people convinced all the useless idiots like hairdressers, marketing consultants and telephone sanitizers to jump into a spaceship to escape the giant space goat that was going to eat their planet.

After they left the entire population of the planet was destroyed by a deadly plague spread via dirty telephones.

@stgm ooh yes, i probably had the golgafrinchams in the back of my mind along with other inputs (the gamma ray telescope/antimatter thing is breaking news IRL). Definitely pisstaking “the door into summer”, “a world out of time”, and other skip-forward settings too.
@Unixbigot @stgm [skips forward] [deserted ice tundra, -40°C] "shit."
@Unixbigot Did somebody read The Wandering Earth then eat some strong cheese close to bedtime to come up with that one? Four hundred centuries to do it? So, like, plenty of time to deal with the issue in a less bonkers way?
@beecycling Haven’t read/seen TwE, but “A World out of Time” used a motorized Neptune as a gravity tug to pull the Earth out of range of the expanding sun, millions of years hence.
@Unixbigot Man just use a nuclear bomb to get us back to the stone age.

@Unixbigot

I love this one because the twist at the end is subtle and lots of people commenting clearly missed it.

Which means it's viable.

@Unixbigot
Erstens das. Zweitens ist es ja noch nicht mal ein Ende aller Verbrenner, das unsere Wirtschaftsspezialspezialisten da abgewendet haben, sondern nur ein Ende der Zulassung nicht-CO₂-neutraler Antriebe. Angemeldete Dreckschleudern hätten problemlos weiterfahren dürfen.

@Unixbigot You could achieve the same aim, reversibly, with a few hundred thousand 1km radius solar sails, cycling between Earth-Sun L1 and looping around Earth.
1% in-space reflection of sunlight would be about right for 2100.
Weighing order of 1tn each, a steering error would literally burn up.

Bonus - lots of predictable solar power (microwaved to ground.

@Unixbigot @tito_swineflu I think we really need to get people on board with this. Certainly the flat-earth people would buy into this, wholesale. And if, by chance, they do end up 400 years in the future, then at least they’re no longer here.