Howling:Humans are Timelords?

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Ok i was just thinking that with Jack and River's Regeneration abilities could the Human Race become Timelords? Cory Jaynes 01:14, August 20, 2011 (UTC)

jack can't regenerate, he used to be immortal because of the bad wolf (although now that's changed for some reason). but i have also wondered the same thing about that last point, and AGMGTW seems to strengthen that idea. this is my idea: the people at the end of the universe go through the crack the master opened to bring them to earth in SOD but because the paradox machine was broken they instead ended up in the earlier universe on an empty planet which they colonised and called gallifrey. then, because of the untempered shism, they evolved into timelords over billions of years. i don't know if this is consistent with the classic series gallifreyan history, but it makes sense to me. Imamadmad 03:22, August 20, 2011 (UTC)

It doesn't really fit with what happenned in The Last of the Timelords though. The Toclafane killed their human ancestors, which meant that they could never be born. Once the paradox machine was destroyed, the Toclafane never existed because their ancestors never existed. Once they never existed, they weren't around to kill their ancestors, and thus did exist, and are now back at the end of the universe. Besides, I don't know how floating metal balls would reproduce anyway.Icecreamdif 04:52, August 20, 2011 (UTC)

once the paradox machine was destroyed, the toclafane couldnt have killed their ancestors because the time they were on earth was then errased and that would have been the time that they would have had a chance to kill their ancestors. Imamadmad 05:02, August 20, 2011 (UTC)

The idea of humans evolving into Time Lords is a very popular one with some Doctor Who writers. It never made it onto TV (because the show as canceled before Andrew Cartmel could execute his Masterplan), but hints have come up repeatedly in novels (and in online discussions involving some of the authors). There are three main variations on the idea:

1. Humans will replace Gallifreyans as the Time Lords at some point in the future. This was Cartmel's idea, and there are hints of it in some of the NA novels, and some of the BFAs written after the new series started have revived it.
2. Gallifreyans are the descendants of humans in some timey-wimey way. This was Larry Miles' idea, and there are hints in some of the early EDA novels and a few BFAs.
3. After Gallifrey was removed from history (the first time, in the middle of the EDAs), the surviving Time Lords needs a new history that didn't involve Gallifrey, and that new history was that they were descended from humans. This was Justin Richards' idea, but he later decided he hated it, so there are hints in some of the later EDA novels, but then it's completely ruled out in Sometime Never….

Some of what's going on this season reminds me a lot of version 2, which is similar to Imamadmad's theory, but not involving the Toclafane. For example, the first hint, in Alien Bodies, was a human from the future scanning as "human+", and then a Time Lord scanning as "human++++". And we just saw Melody Pond scan as "human+". Maybe the Gallifreyans are ultimately descended from Melody.

However, this does leave a big problem. You'd need Melody's descendants to go back in time, but then forget all about time travel, so Rassilon and friends could reinvent it. That seems pretty contrived, and it doesn't seem likely that a good explanation would make for a good episode. Also, if Melody has descendants, it's a good bet that they'll be the Doctor's, which means they're already 1/4th Gallifreyan, so the Time Lords still don't descend from humans, they just descend from themselves in a big grandfather paradox, which means there was really no point to the whole "human+" thing in the first place. --173.228.85.35 06:28, August 20, 2011 (UTC)

On further thought, something more like #3 seems more in line with the Moff's "history can change" theme—and it could be used as a way to bring back the Time Lords. Some dramatic event in, say, the 2012 Christmas special drastically changes history in ways that we gradually learn about through the rest of series 7, and then in the finale we discover that in this new history, the Time Lords are now descendants of Melody Pond and the LGTW is in their far future, and the only Time Lord who remembers the old timeline besides the Doctor is the Master (because none of the rest of them lived through that timeline, of course). It still doesn't seem that likely, but at least I can imagine Moffat pulling it off, unlike the other two. --173.228.85.35 06:49, August 20, 2011 (UTC)

Actually i think what it maybe is that the doctor thru his travels has made the human race start to evolve into timelords thru his thousand of years of interference and that as our sun has aged it has become red and has made earth red or made earth inhabitable and made us move to mars making Earth or Mars Galifery and has changed our language and that the doctor's name is Rassilion! Cory Jaynes 23:47, August 20, 2011 (UTC)

well, they colonise new earth after leaving earth, not mars, especially after the events of water's of mars i don't think they would have wanted to return. and i doubt the doctor would ever start calling himself rassilon, as he seemed to hate rassilon for his ideas in the end of time. also, it's stated that it's because of the vortex energy comming through the untempered schism that the timelords evolved, and i don't think there's one of them on either earth or mars, meaning that it would have to have been another planet. also, gallifrey looked a lot bigger than earth in the end of time, meaning that it couldn't have been earth or mars (which is smaller than earth). Imamadmad 01:20, August 21, 2011 (UTC)

Neither Earth nor Mars could be Gallifrey. Gallifrey is substantially larger than Earth (let alone Mars) and is located 250 million light years away. That puts it outside the local cluster of galaxies. Gallifrey also has 2 suns. Admittedly, a TARDIS could have moved the planet but enlarging the thing whilst keeping the surface gravity about the same and avoiding killing everyone (and everything) off is a bit of a stretch.

As for the Doctor and Rassilon: Remember the scene in The Fires of Pompeii where the Doctor and Donna are inside Vesuvius and the Doctor says, "It's Pompeii or the world," (the "terrible choice" Caecilia Evelina foresaw him having to make). At the end of the Time War, as we learn from The End of Time, Rassilon put the Doctor in an analogous position but on an even more terrible scale: It was Gallifrey or the Universe. The Doctor has the best of reasons for hating what Rassilon tried to do. --89.242.76.93 15:35, August 21, 2011 (UTC)

Humans definitely did colonize Mars (e.g., The Sun Makers), and countless other planets (e.g., The Curse of Peladon, or A Good Man Goes to War), and that happened billions of years before humanity relocated from Earth to New Earth.

But the other objections are all sound. You could come up with counter-objections—the Doctor would never have believed himself capable of destroying Gallifrey, but he did; anyone who can put a supermassive black hole under the surface of a planet without destroying it could probably handle enlarging it without changing its surface gravity if he really wanted to; etc.—but really, there's so much evidence that Gallifrey is not the future Mars that it's hardly worth discussing.

On top of that, humans can't possibly be the ancestors of the Gallifreyan Time Lords without some kind of timey-wimey history changing going on. For example, we know that modern Time Lord society was created shortly after time travel was discovered, and yet nobody we've seen from the post-time-travel future (Jack, Lynda-with-a-y, etc.) thinks they're Time Lords or wears silly robes. So, if you want the Doctor to become Rassilon and lead humanity into becoming the (original) Time Lords, you need radical changes in history. --173.228.85.35 21:24, August 21, 2011 (UTC)

this may be stretching it a bit, but the people of jack's time (who had time travel) wouldn't have been time sensitive, which is something given by long exposior to the time vortex. therefore, people might have decided that time travel was too dangerous and made it illegal so eventual the general public forgot they had it. then the idea could still fit my original theory. Imamadmad 06:33, August 22, 2011 (UTC)

OK, I suppose it's just barely possible that humans discovered time travel, abandoned it, and forgot it, and then billions of years later the Doctor decided to change his name to Rassilon, pretend to be human, pretend to discover time travel even though he already knew all about it, and turn humanity into the Time Lords, and then they took the whole planet back in time (or do all the Gallifrey stories take place billions of years in the future?). And then you'd have your literal humans-become-Time-Lords without any timey-wimey (well, almost; the Doctor founding the society he grew up in is still a bootstrap paradox). But yes, it is stretching it. Also, once you think about it, it seems less interesting than the timey-wimey or history-changing ideas from a storytelling point of view. --173.228.85.35 06:58, August 22, 2011 (UTC)

Imamadmad: Since when has something being made illegal because of dangerousness (or for any other reason) ever actually stopped humans from doing it? --89.242.65.86 07:35, August 22, 2011 (UTC)

to 173: my theory wasn't the "the doctor is rassilon etc." one but the end of the universe humans coming back in time through the master's crack to what is now nowhere and restarting.

and to 89: notice how i said general public, not humans in general. there probably would have been vortex manipulators or whatever sold on the black market, but they couldn't make what they were doing public knowledge for the legal reasons. therefore, the lawabiding citizens that make up the majority of the human population would have forgotten about it. also, it explains why the huans at the end of the universe didn't just travel back in time of their own accord to restart earlier in history. Imamadmad 11:23, August 22, 2011 (UTC)

Walmart, surely. Boblipton 17:34, August 22, 2011 (UTC)

ummm, what about walmart?Imamadmad 09:11, August 23, 2011 (UTC)

First, the majority of people are _not_ law-abiding. According to the first polls that came up when I googled: 95% of car owners in California have broken the speed limit in the past year; 61% of Americans have used illegal drugs, 31% in the past 3 months; 81% of Americans drank alcohol before they were of age…You really think that banning vortex manipulators would work any better than banning speeding, pot, or underage drinking? Are you telling me that if you could visit ancient Rome, or watch Let's Kill Hitler five days early, you wouldn't?

Also, even if the vast majority of people did abide by that law, why would that mean they forget that time travel exists? Most people don't shoot heroin, put nitro kits on their car, etc., but they certainly know that those things exist.

PS, Boblipton, Walmart is not illegal; that's just wishful thinking on your part. :) --173.228.85.35 03:30, August 24, 2011 (UTC)

it wouldn't make people forget about it imediately, or even over a few decades. but over a few centuries, milenia, or even 100 trillion years (which is the timeframe we're talking about here), people will forget about illegal things like heroin and time travel. oh, and speeding isn't a valid example as people can do it accidentally and doesn't require any ajustments or additions to the car to do that illegal act. and as i stated above, if they did have time travel at the end of the universe, why didn't the use it to escape into an earlier time rather than trust the master. Imamadmad 06:31, August 24, 2011 (UTC)

OK, if you did a poll on how many people have _intentionally_ broken the speed limit; maybe it would only be 70% instead of 95%, but who cares? How many of the 61% who used illegal drugs did so accidentally? The simple fact is that the majority of humans are willing to break laws that they consider inconvenient and can rationalize away, and to take risks that they consider justified.

And really, where's the evidence that people are gradually forgetting about dangerous and illegal things? We've got over a century of bans in a wide variety of countries on drugs, guns, street racing, etc., and all the evidence is that people are far more aware of these things today than 100 years ago. The majority of people in the US, UK, and Europe in the 1910s had no idea what marijuana was; you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone over the age of 10 today who hadn't heard of it. For that matter, after millennia of banning pork products, most Jews and Muslims know exactly what bacon smells like, unlike their ancient ancestors. Is there even a single example of something being banned leading to it fading out of public consciousness?

In fact, it's very rare that anything is ever "undiscovered" for any reason, banning or danger or otherwise. Something as inherently tempting as time travel would only disappear if someone somehow made it stop working, changed history to erase its invention, or just exterminated humanity (all of which the Time Lords apparently did to some races, according to the EDAs and FPs, but who's around to do it in the post-LGTW Whoniverse?). ---173.228.85.35 08:21, August 24, 2011 (UTC)

ok then mr smarty-pants, but you still haven't given any other reason why the people at the end of the universe couldn't just travel back to an earlier period in history and continue living their lives without the threat of oblivion. if you can give me another reason, i will happily abbandon my "they made it illegal" theory, but as that is the only idea writen on here at present to explain the lack of time travel at the end of the universe, it is the idea that i stick to and is supported by the most evidence, even if there isn't much of that. Imamadmad 11:16, August 24, 2011 (UTC)

I can't recall where I read it -- it might have been a Larry Niven speculative piece about time travel, but he suggested several alternative types of universe and applied time travel to them, and they all moved to a 'rest state' in which there was no time travel. Posit that time travel is possible. Posit that going int the past will affect the universe. Then each example of time travel changes things. Eventually, after all these changes, a universe will exist in whicg time travel simply isn't invented. The DW Universe posits that there is a semi-stable state in which it is invented but doesn't exist except in the hands of a few responsible individuals and the Doctor.Boblipton 11:18, August 24, 2011 (UTC)

Imamadmad, that's "Dr Know-All, Adviser and Helper, Donor in Extremis" to you, not "Mr Smarty-Pants". :P Anyway, here's one good reason: time travel takes a lot of energy and resources, and the people at the end of the universe had barely enough to survive and build a single interstellar rocket.

Boblipton: I know the piece you're talking about, but I can't remember who wrote it. However, I'm pretty sure the conclusion was not that uninvention of time travel was guaranteed, but that it was the only plausible alternative to history immediately becoming nonsensical and discontinuous.

Anyway, there were lots of lively discussions about this idea on rec.arts.drwho. Lance Parkin argued that the Time Lords could stabilize a universe with time travel, and if anyone ever managed to depose them, it would only be to stabilize the universe with themselves in charge instead of the Time Lords. In other words, given that time travel exists and works the way it does in the Whoniverse, there must be Time Lords.

While Parkin didn't push this idea too far in radw, it ultimately ended up taking over Doctor Who. First, all of Larry Miles' novels were all about this question—starting with Christmas on a Rational Planet, which enshrined Parkin's idea as canon, and following with his EDAs, which gradually tore down the Time Lords to see what would happen. And then, even though most of the other writers hated Miles (and he hated the way they used his ideas), ultimately the EDAs were all about about exploring what happens without the Time Lords. And then, to a lesser extent, so did the new series. --173.228.85.35 06:15, August 25, 2011 (UTC)