That time machine still works, to be fair, just at 1X.
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2026
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The movie Primer has a very limited time machine that works at -2X. You turn the machine on at, for instance, 2PM, and walk away, coming back in, say, eight hours. You then go into the machine, and you stay in there for eight hours. When you come out of the machine, it is now 2PM, the time when you first turned the machine on. It is a one-way machine; you can only ever use it to go backwards, and you have to go forwards in time the old-fashioned way.
It was made on a budget of $7000 and it's one of the best sci-fi movies ever made.
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How hard would it be to Dr stone a 120v live outlet?
the dinos would get you first so very.
not if I tell them that eating us will mess with history and cause unpredictable outcomes.
βWill it change the path of an asteroid?β
βWell, probably not.β
Chomp
maybe?
After learning of new technology and a warning, they developed a space program.
The present is no longer a primate civilizations fighting each other and destroying the planet, instead a saurian civilisation has spread through the galaxy.
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About half as difficult as it would be for the 220/240V one it needs.
Yay, finally an advantage of the US electric grid.
there was an episode where they created a dynamo generator and batteries.
that took them something like six months with many people helping.
unfortunately dynamos(like above) and batteries work on DC current. that time machine works on AC.
so you would need to do two things.
- create a mechanical DC>AC inverter that preferably is powered from the physical input of the dynamo
- create batteries in both series and parallel to ensure a 120v voltage is maintained at the required amperage.
also consider that north American standards require electricity to run at 60hz. this means the AC signal flips the DC signal 60 times per second. creating a mechanical inverter would need to take into account the size of the circle for a complete rotation in 1 second as well as the speed at which the dynamo must spin in order to get 60 alterations per second. the rough formula would look something like: frequency = speed/(diameter*3.14). speed can be variable depending on the size of the copper wheel used as well.
to sum everything up, for just the two people there, it's probably going to take them too long and they'll die from exposure or predators.
get excited
someone tried making one of those, barely got any voltage. not enough for a US socket. :(
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Assuming Dr. Stone is some kind of MacGyver regen:
Two obvious approaches to me that I'll run through in high level: build a wind/watermill generators or potato/lemon batteries
First thing you'll need to figure out for both is how to make some wire. That's going to require finding some metal ore and a hot furnace, and creating a few tools out of stone to work with it.
The biggest difficulty with the former two is going to be finding some ferrous metal to turn into magnets. You can make a magnet without electricity by smashing the shit out of some iron as it's aligned with the earth's magnetic field, and it'll become a weak magnet. From there with enough wire, you can build a generator. With the sails of the mill, you can build that out of wood and foliage.
For potato or lemon batteries, you're going to need a shitload, as they give you about a volt and a pretty tiny current, but theoretically you could figure something out that way with enough. I imagine some things may want to eat your batteries though
Dr. Stone is an anime about humanity being thrust back into the neolithic and a genius kid developing a nation of science to save the world by speedrunning the technology tree.
spoilers
They do exactly what what you mention!
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don't forget there are dinosaurs. use them for work, probably easier than a water wheel.
Your lemon batteries will be DC tho. I think step one would be to start carefully dismantling the Time Machine to see what it really needs and what parts might be unneeded and reusable in a generator.
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how to make some wire. [...] finding some ferrous metal to turn into magnets.
These two ingredients put our 120v dynamo really far up the tech tree from "make fire." Our intrepid time travelers are going to spend years trying to not be velocaraptor food and foraging for a meal themselves, all while making stupendous amounts of charcoal and prospecting for ore.
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No problem. The same people arrive from even later in the future with enough built-in power for both machines and rescue themselves. Everyone returns to their own times. When they arrive back in the earlier time, now they know they have to build another machine with spare power to go rescue themselves.
trash can. remember a trash can.
What I love about that scene is that Bill and Ted are too dumb to know what a paradox is, and how dangerous that can be for a stable timeline. Instead, they just intuit the most useful way to abuse time travel and everything just happens to work out.
It's the perfect culmination of how they solve all their problems: by being Bill and Ted!
I think my favorite example of this in the first film is when they unintentionally repeat So-crates' philosophy back to him by quoting Kansas.
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That's exactly why the movie was called "Back the the Future": they had to find a way to get ... "back the the future".
I don't know this movie called "Back the the Future"
Great Scott Scott
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1.21 GWβ½
That's heavy doc
There's that word again, "heavy", do people in the future measure electricity by weight?
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Travel million of years into the past, you show up in the opposite side of the galaxy were the solar system used to be
Pshaw, merely requires a minor positional adjustment, and of course the entire historical location of every planetary body in the galaxy.
Psssht. That just follows simple mechanics. Two orbiting bodies can be accurately modelled by a high schooler, how hard can a couple more be?
Maybe it's back in the same spot. I'm feeling lucky.
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The fact that it seems to be using a standard two prong plug outlet means it's incredibly power efficient just bring a jackery with you
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They can be glad they're still on earth not somewhere in empty space. What a lucky coincidence.
between the planet revolving around the sun, the solar system revolving around the galaxy, and space expanding, we're moving at hundreds of thousands of km/h. Good luck getting back to where you started.
Reminds me of my ole lady friend Marsha Worthsby used to live up top the hills back in days when we had to share the road with stegosaurus when we walked to school uphill both ways in waist-high snow. One day we was cold and decided to go into town to see if we could warm up at Bickett's hardware store because they was one of the first places to get power where I grew up. Marsha had the bright idea to buy a heater for a nickle and take it home. One problem, they had not run power up to the top of the hill in those days. She could not use it. Bickett's let her return the thing but only gave her 4 pennies back on account it was open.
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Damn, now they have to make an alternator to spec without any tools or even raw materials with the knowledge they have in their heads. Time to dig for copper I guess.. whoops no shovels either..
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Now it's time to search for some potatoes.
You'd probably need the entire planet covered in them to have enough power for that thing.
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Anyone have an Orbitz drink?
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