This is top-tier The Far Side content. Everybody seems to remember the stuff with animals acting like humans, but this is the sort of thing that I remember most fondly.
There are few theoretically possible technologies as overwhelmingly powerful as time machines. Even an extraordinarily weak time machine, for example, one that could only move you a few minutes back and forth, would be enough to make me insanely wealthy, assuming that it wasn’t cost prohibitive to run.
This one is easy. I would simply do what they tell me to do. After all, since they came back to see me, it’s certainly because the future me sent them back in time.
If it wasn’t me that sent them back in time, then it’s probably a set up, and I would be powerless to resist it.
If they insisted on my ordering them around, I’d have them bring back a copy of their Wikipedia from 50 years in the future, and then I’d try to use the rest of the time to figure out the physics behind time travel, and see if I can’t get plans for a time machine.
I forget where I heard it from, but somebody said that it’s strange how we believe that if we go back in time and make a small change, it will have a huge effect on the future, but we also believe that making small changes today won’t make any difference in the future.
This does look like it was printed on the kumquat. I don’t know whether it’s the case here, but this sort of thing sometimes happens when there is something printed on a bag or the plastic that food is wrapped in, and the ink can get transferred to the food.
I love character-driven narratives, so DS9 is easily the best Star Trek for me that I’ve seen. I think the only series that I haven’t seen is Lower Decks.
I would claim that Voyager is objectively worse than DS9, though. A big part of it is how many terrible episodes come from each series. With DS9, there are only a few episodes sprinkled here and there that are terrible. With Voyager, it had to be at least 1 out of every 3 episodes that were terrible.
Of course, these two series have completely different standards. Both standards are about whether they deliver an episode that is fulfilling and makes sense.
DS9 is completely serial. A good show has character development and progresses the main plot due to some event or other intrigue that happens. If you don’t like Star Treks where they “boldly stay home”, then all of the Vic Fontaine episodes would be terrible, but Vic was like this perfect tool to try to round out all of the character development at the series end.
On the other hand, a good Voyager episode is a sort of alien of the week. That’s what would make sense, because they were traveling in a straight line home. Yet they nonsensically had all sorts of recurring characters that they came across. Recurring races is fine. In fact, you’d almost expect to have like one or two major races that are the villains per season… but recurring characters? Really??
Voyager could have been the perfection of Roddenberry’s ideal Star Trek. Almost purely episodic. Heroic cast solving problems every episode. They even have the best excuse for taking the ship into the most stupidly dangerous situations. They were desperate for supplies to get home. I don’t know that any Star Trek had such an easy set up. How did they have so many bad episodes??
The reason you have a spare is because you might need it in the future.
People seem to think that “spare” means that it’s useless, but it’s exactly the opposite. It’s “spare” because it’s useful to you. So it’s strange that people think you would give something away just because it’s “spare,” because that just means you’d have to acquire another spare for yourself.
Would you give away the spare tire for your car just because somebody asked you for it?