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maybe a bit bored here
I just had a confluence of several (silly) chains of thought.
For a long time, I've wondered how one could recognize if one's reality had been altered by time travel. I've also, occasionally, worked on a mental list of revenue streams I could easily take advantage of should I find myself marooned in the recent past, particularly the early 90s. (Domain names to buy, technologies to invent, etc.) Finally, Google has struck me for a long time as being something out of an SF novel. They do too much that is absolutely central to modern life, and they're just too good at it. Monopolies of talent and quality shouldn't exist in real life.
I assume you can see where I'm going with this: Larry Page and Sergey Brin are anachronisms, or have had access to non-causal information.
Well, more power to them. Having settled this, though, what does it tell us? When did they originally come from? (From before YouTube_prime became popular, otherwise Google Video would have been better. But when was that?) What can we deduce about the original timeline? I'm starting to find their increasing interest in space travel somewhat ominous...
For a long time, I've wondered how one could recognize if one's reality had been altered by time travel. I've also, occasionally, worked on a mental list of revenue streams I could easily take advantage of should I find myself marooned in the recent past, particularly the early 90s. (Domain names to buy, technologies to invent, etc.) Finally, Google has struck me for a long time as being something out of an SF novel. They do too much that is absolutely central to modern life, and they're just too good at it. Monopolies of talent and quality shouldn't exist in real life.
I assume you can see where I'm going with this: Larry Page and Sergey Brin are anachronisms, or have had access to non-causal information.
Well, more power to them. Having settled this, though, what does it tell us? When did they originally come from? (From before YouTube_prime became popular, otherwise Google Video would have been better. But when was that?) What can we deduce about the original timeline? I'm starting to find their increasing interest in space travel somewhat ominous...
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If we accept your premises, I'd say less than 20 years in the future, because given the rate of technological change, any further out than that and the relevant ideas for now would be too subsumed under other technologies to seem reasonable -- like trying to introduce automated loom equipment before the wide acceptance of prime movers to run the machinery.
By the way, I've gotten interested in way scraping. Do I remember correctly that you took a course in scraping at one point?
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Surely in the parent time-line YouTube became popular before any space travel shenanigans?
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If you haven't read A Deepness in the Sky, then you really need to. (I have a spare copy and will be in your area tomorrow, so, let me know.) If you have, then my conspiracy theory has long been that Google is Prosperity Software.
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In retrospect, I don't know what's so hard about that phrase, but it's exactly what I need to describe tampering with history in a way that's indistinguishable from time travel, yet violates no laws of cause and effect.
The idea (borrowing from BSG) is that all this has happened before, and will happen again. If you grok correctly how this moment fits into the fabric of history, you can write your own ticket locally, while totally ruining someone else's day.