We could, get flashdrive filled with a years worth of weather data each year from the future
We would know about tornados, hurricanes, droughts and be able to be prepared
Knowing the future of weather wouldn't cause issues like creating the events that we know about
Like say someone was assassinated, if that person knew it will happen, they couldn't do anything about it. Even then knowing could have some metatekepathy connection that could possibly have given the assassinator the thought to do so.
We know the weather in the future now without time travel and it does change things. For instance, if there is bad weather they cancel flights, etc.
That's based on prediction, we are never 100% certain, this also applies to any instance of time travel which is also based on models of prediction without certainty. In short we do not know, it's best guess.
it would also be a prediction to us if it hasn't happened. Unless you're saying it's some sort of predetermined future, in which case we couldn't change it no matter what we did.
What im saying is that if you could see the future your only observing a prediction about it even if you had visited it and returned to the current tense. Determination is a local phenomena however with greater distance it becomes unstable, a classic example is our perspective of the singularity where our current models no longer work.
wait...did you downvote my response?
Not at all
Naw. The problem with weather patterns is this.
Planet Earth isn't separate and distinct from humans. The belief that is is nothing more than a self-deprecating belief that tries to diminish you as an individual and you as a species and your relationship to the material reality you inhabit.
Now. If you had a time machine AND observed a history of possibilities, you're not the same person you WERE when you return back in time, are you? There's a butterfly effect going on here with your own return that alters things - first - at a quantum, subatomic level, then - that propagates up to a molecular level that in a literal sense alters weather patterns VERY quickly.
So much so - it's actually the big issue with meteorology. In a perfectly contained system that you've modeled - let's say 3, up to 7 days out - the next day observer influences can and do influence the prediction in unpredictable ways which is what makes weather so impossibly difficult to predict.
Similarly. You going to the future, then returning with 'what happened' - that weather didn't account for 'you, the butterfly' coming back and sharing your findings, flapping your wings, and literally altering the course of weather in the immediate and long term future.
Knowing about a specific future has a tendency to influence decision making by the population around you to change that future. Whether that's the prediction of a dystopia, or it's the prediction of a weather pattern. Time traveling wouldn't change this.
It would simply reinforce the change to something not predicted.
Let’s play this out. We get a flash drive with exact specifications on “act of god” weather events, like tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, etc.
We use this information to proactively prevent property damage and human suffering. People who would have died, live. Areas that would’ve been destroyed weather the storm just fine. Gradually, this causes the butterfly effect. The CEO of a major company continues to contribute to pollution, altering climate change. The millions of individuals saved keep driving cars and riding in airplanes. Climate change continues, the weather becomes less predictable without constant updating, and the whole world descends into complete nuclear annihilation.
Nah none of that is the butterfly effect
Pollution and climate charge are being fixed anyway. It gets fixed faster with global communism and a tighter control with limits. Then we have everyone in the world move to a smaller more specific location, greatly lowering the energy needed for transportation
"Always changing is the future" - Yoda
Just people changing their behavior would impact the weather. Every time we "know" tge future, it'd no longer be the exact future.
This only works if you assume the future already exists as a fixed place you can peek into. That assumption is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Weather is not a static file sitting in the future waiting to be downloaded. It is an evolving system that depends on present conditions. If you introduce future data into the present, you change the present conditions, which means the future you pulled from is no longer the same future. Congrats, you just invalidated your own flash drive.
We already see a softer version of this. Forecasts change behavior. Flights get canceled, evacuations happen, infrastructure gets reinforced. Those actions literally alter outcomes. The moment knowledge enters the system, the system updates.
There is also a deeper issue if time is not something we move through but something consciousness organizes. Past and future are not places. They are interpretations of energy patterns happening now. The past exists as memory. The future exists as projection. Neither is independently real in the way the present state is.
So asking for future weather data assumes there is a single correct future weather to retrieve. But weather depends on countless microvariables, including human response. The act of knowing is part of the system. You cannot observe without participating.
This is why time travel stories keep breaking causality. They treat time like a road instead of a process. But time is more like a dashboard your brain uses to track change, not a highway you can drive backward on.
In short, a time machine would not give you a clean forecast. It would give you a moving target that shifts the moment you look at it.
The future is not waiting to be known. It is being generated in real time, partly by how we respond to uncertainty.
Which is annoying, because a flash drive from the future would be incredibly convenient.
What if I now know it’s gonna rain so I don’t leave the house today and oops now I don’t meet my future wife we don’t have our kids etc.?