Totally mechanized infantry

[rah]

But will small changes affect the overall scheme of things. Just at what point does it tip the scales to something important?

[loinburger]

Terry Pratchett used the term "the trousers of time" - minor changes to the past will keep you in the same pants-leg and so ultimately everything will stay more or less the same, whereas major changes will switch you to another pants-leg and really alter things.

[rah]

That's more my thinking. But then I've always been a firm believer that if Time travel is ever invented that we would know it since eventually someone would slip and we would know.
Of course the proof could be sitting in an insane asylum for all we know.

[Aeson]

I'm travelling through time as we speak.

[ricketyclik]

In About Time, where this guy can go into the past to any point in his own past, he finds that if he goes back to before any of his children were born when he returns he has different children, because for the same sperm to fertilise his wife's egg everything in the past must be exactly the same, impossible after he's visited his own past.

Great movie, I really enjoyed it.

[giblets]

Something that I always wondered about the whole question of time travel: wouldn't the mere act of traveling back alter the past, whether you did anything or not? You're breathing the air, shedding skin, introducing different germs, your particles are interacting with everything around--the world is going to be subtly different. That in turn means that the you who traveled back in time will be subtly different, since the change is bound to affect at least one molecule that winds up in your body somehow (unless you traveled to a distant galaxy, or a very faraway place a very short time ago). That in turn modifies the body which goes back in time, which modifies its previous modification, and so on a potentially infinite number of times. So it doesn't matter how little difference you make by presence; the recursiveness of time travel will magnify all distinctions.

The recursiveness doesn't necessarily create a paradox if each cycle has smaller effects than the previous cycle.

[N35t0r]

But unless each cycle takes less time (and even then...), then stabilization requires infinte time...

[pchang]

Time travel wipes itself out of existence. If it exists, there will always be someone going back to try and change something until someone changes things so that time travel no longer exists.

[giblets]

But unless each cycle takes less time (and even then...), then stabilization requires infinte time...

It's an infinite loop in time, so it covers a finite amount of time.

[The Mad Monk]

Terry Pratchett used the term "the trousers of time" - minor changes to the past will keep you in the same pants-leg and so ultimately everything will stay more or less the same, whereas major changes will switch you to another pants-leg and really alter things.

Stein's Gate apparently uses a similar mechanism, though I'm only about a third of the way through at the moment.

[korn469]

I think that most works of fictions down play the changes that time travel could cause.

For example, lest say that a computer simulation determined that if you killed Adolf Hitler, Ernst Rohm, Hermann Goering, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky in 1916 it would prevent WWII because neither the Nazis nor the Bolsheviks would come to power after WWI resulting in no major wars occuring in Europe for the next 100 years. In the Pacific there would still be the Second Sino-Japanese War and Japan's resulting occupation of much of China for 20 years, which would eventually cause the fall of Imperial Japan.

In this scenario I think that by 1920 in Russia, 1935 in Germany, 1940 in the UK and France, and 1942 in the US that nearly everyone born would be different people than in our timeline. No Stalingrad, no holocaust, no Manhattan Project, no Beatles, no moon landing, no Prague Spring, no Berlin Wall, no Vietnam War, no Al Qaeda, no ISIS, maybe India stays under British rule, and almost everyone alive today would be different individuals. So no Jimi Hendrix, no Vladimir Putin, no Peter Jackson, no Prince Charles, no Yo-Yo Ma, no Michael Shumacher, etc., etc.

[korn469]

Back to the topic of totally mechanized infantry, as a current member of the U.S. Army (well for a few more weeks till I ETS ) I don't think that it will be possible to completely get rid of ground troops, at least with current doctrines. Despite what you may think or see in works of fiction there is a great amount of emphasis on trying to prevent civilian casualties and obey the laws of war. Without those considerations I think it would be easier to accomplish, and even then I think it would more resemble extremely light automated tanks (like a John Deere gator with a CROWS integrated into it) than T-800 endoskeletons.

I think that improvements in automation will result in autonomous supply vehicles along with infantry fighting vehicles that have manual, remote and autonomous modes. I think automated howitzers are a possibility too. Like either a M-777 in a box. You land it, in there general area, and activate it and it sets itself up and has a a system to load it by dropping in rounds and charges from the breech like a WWII bofors AA gun. Then maybe have an autonomous forklift to load it. Though it would probably be easier to just automate a PzH 2000, a HIMARS, or a 9A52-4, though. I think the future of ground war will see weapons like the smart guns from Aliens special edition, along with armored exoskeletons. I think one big problem with fully automated ground troops is fueling/powering them for long periods and maintaining them, along with making sure they can follow ROE. Better batteries/fuel cells could solve some problems. Maintenance is a much bigger issue. Not only is building something that won't break down hard, it also goes against the profit motives of the companies building the equipment. BAE, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman aren't going to automate themselves out of a job.

[pchang]

China will automate to ensure complete loyalty and they don't care about civilian casualties.

[Sava]

You'd need AI. Remote control has limitations.

With that, I tend to think AI is possible, just... probably more advanced than people think now. I bet it takes a lot longer than estimates say.

But then again, I know you are reading this now.

Last sentence meant for AI who is reading this

[loinburger]

The thing about AI is that humans are pretty good at pattern recognition, whereas computers kind of suck at it. However, warfare has turned into something where humans aren't very good at pattern recognition either - how do you distinguish between a civilian and a terrorist when the terrorists are acting like civilians? However, if you've got totally mechanized infantry then you might be able to get away with giving them very stupid AI: if somebody shoots at your or at another robot then you incapacitate them (shoot them, taze them, stab them with your T-1000 knife-fingers, whatever), otherwise you don't. With a passive stupid AI you'll wind up with a lot of robots with bullet holes in them, but ideally you also wind up with far fewer US soldiers and foreign civilians with bullet holes in them.