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A few nights ago, over a liberal quantity of beers, my friends and I came up with our latest nonsensical conspiracy theory. Google was started by some of a grou
by bane 10y ago
A few nights ago, over a liberal quantity of beers, my friends and I came up with our latest nonsensical conspiracy theory. Google was started by some of a group of time travelers who were sent back in time from an apocalyptic future bringing advanced technology with them. They would use just enough of the tech to make vast sums of money, then use that money to invest in the tech that destroyed their future world.
By investing in tech they already know would work, they would vacuum up all the resources and talent around that technology so that nobody else would bother (because who could come in cold and compete against a titan like google?) and then some time later kill all of the projects very publicly in order to make us all think that these technologies were nonviable.
Except instead with every piece of world changing technology they killed, they were buying their future Earths freedom from the apocalypse they were fleeing from, even if that future they were creating destroyed their own and left humanity in a just post-agrarian stage of development.
This group has been infiltrating our timeline for decades, first with blimps, then Atari, then Xerox, now Google.
Their motto is "save us before we destroy us"
- lps41 10y agoSounds vaguely like the plot to the show Continuum.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoOr, more recently, Netflix's Travelers. Continuum was a good show. I particularly liked the whole "Corporate Congress" motif - seems eerily realistic these days.
- muse900 10y agoOr sort of Fringe. (best series evah) One day we'll go off to find Walter.
- mgr86 10y agowatch travelers last week. Decent show. I also thought it sounded a lot like travelers.
- epimetheus 10y agoTravellers, as well as Continuum, makes me a bit nostalgic for the old show Time Trax.
- paublyrne 10y agoWell the obvious time paradox would prevent them from taking this approach. By destroying their own future they would never come back to save it. There must be another explanation.
- webmaven 10y agoIf you assume the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, no paradox would be created. Merely time-travelling at all forks off a brand new universe with it's own future from that point on. That said, you do lose the drama surrounding the possibility of "destroying the future" via making gross (killing Hitler) or subtle ("butterfly effect") changes, as none of the consequences ever affect the universe you travelled from (other than the fact that you've left, never to return).
- jraedisch 10y agoJust assume that every jump back in time is also a jump into a parallel universe and you don't have a paradox.
- arviewer 10y agoThen what would it help to do such a thing?
- aleeds 10y agoI dunno... maybe saving a whole worlds worth of lives...
- freehunter 10y agoExperience is subjective. If you teleport to another location you're not the same person you were before you left, you're a similar set of molecules reconstructed in the same fashion. In all actuality, "you" died and another "you" took your place. But to you and everyone around you, it seems like nothing has changed, so you carry on with your life. Likewise, if you travel back in time and change the future, you're not helping the people in the future you left, you're helping the people in the past avoid that future. But to you, it looks the same. It looks just like the past you're familiar with, and it develops into some semblance of the future you were expecting. So for all intents and purposes, from a subjective viewpoint you're avoiding the paradox and helping your ancestors. It doesn't matter if the people you left are still suffering, subjectively they don't exist anymore.
- UseStrict 10y agoI wonder what terrible things were averted by killing off Google Reader.
- archildress 10y agoThe well-informed masses. ;) Can you believe that people think Twitter is a real replacement for aggregating news? RIP in peace, Google Reader.
- notheguyouthink 10y agoOn a sidenote, what exactly did Google Reader do that was so great? I'm not knocking it, it's a real question. I ask because a lot of things Google has killed is hard for us to replace. Eg, i don't want to try and build Wave, or continue with Apache Wave, etc. It's a big, complex problem. But a personal content aggregator like what i thought Google Reader was seems quite easy to implement. In other words, why haven't we (public or startups) built the core functionality of Google Reader that so many appear to love? It seems like an eager and easy to reach market. What am i missing?
- iwintermute 10y ago1. Social aspect of it - I would find "human filters" that shared very high quality content on different topics - art, programming, medicine, architecture - and that was very transparent for them - they just kept interesting articles for themselves, but I also had access to them. 2. Search 3. Archives
- iwintermute 10y agoAs of now I think HN/reddit/twitter serve the same purpose (poorly - twitter more and more tailored for person with thousands of subscriptions and not for someone who's carefully organizes his "human filter" collection; and none of services provides subscription for content - hell, I have dilbert as email subscription now)
- freeone3000 10y ago
- IBM 10y agoI think my conspiracy theory is more likely to be true: >I've speculated for a long time that basically anything interesting Google says they're doing is essentially meant to be a jobs program to keep employees from leaving, PR for external stakeholders like investors, media, being attractive to potential employees, etc. They seem to have lots of formal ways to keep employees from leaving/close as well including investments off of Google's balance sheet (not GV or Google Capital) into ex-employee startups and just flat out paying people not to leave (which is the arrangement I'm guessing that Matt Cutts is under). It all seems very Microsoft of old. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12410662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12410662
- niels_olson 10y agoMatt Cutts now works for Defense Digital Service....
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoWhile on leave from Google. He's one of many Google employees working directly with our government. As Peter Thiel put it, Google has more power in the Obama administration than Exxon had under Bush.
- genericpseudo 10y agoQuestion the source.
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoI just liked his comparison. We have plenty of better sources than Peter Thiel though.
- niels_olson 10y agoThen please cite the better ones...
- stichers 10y agoGoogle Wave and Google Buzz - were they dangerous products or merely decoys?