Irrelevance Glorified

(note : originally written in 1999)

If you are a normal member of the masses, you have no doubt either seen a movie or a read a book which involved time travel as a main premise. Some notables that come to mind are H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine”, the unforgettable Terminator movies, and the somewhat confusing Back to the Future series. In all these movies, we find that things get pretty messed up in the future. A key plot element in these stories is that people are trying to change the present by affecting the past. But you know, things get pretty messed up whenever you start to think about things. If the directors of these movies ever sat down and thought about their plots before they decided to start filming, I’m sure that they’d sit down and go “Hmmmmmm….” And after that they’d probably blow their brains out, because it kinda makes your head hurt.

The foremost movie I have problems with is the Terminator series. The whole success of the plot hinges on how fast time travels. By that I mean how long it takes for a change in the past to propagate through time to the future. You see, there must be some finite time before changes in the past affect the future, or the human race is doomed. The computers of Skynet sent a cyborg back in time to kill Sarah Connors. The humans sent Kyle Reese back to save Sarah Connors. But I would expect that the second time traveler was a reactionary one. They wouldn’t have sent him back unless the computers sent the Terminator back. In this case, it is highly probably that the terminator was sent back first. In fact, the script shows that this is true. Now, if time “traveled” instantaneously, all is lost. The second the terminator goes back in time, kills Sarah and the future has changed, sans John Connor. However, if there is a slight delay before the future changes, the human side has a few moments to send back their own warrior, and combat the Terminator. Also, we are presented with the whole “chicken and the egg” deal, because John Connor sent his dad back in time to combat the Terminator, and while he was there, Kyle brought about John’s conception. John must precede his father in time. But at any rate, the plot hinges on the velocity of time. What kind of units is that?

In general, changing the past is a bad idea. You never know how things are going to end up, because a thousand permuatations are created for every second which passes. Back to the Future is an idealistic example of precision surgery on time. In real life, horrible changes would probably have ensued, and I get the feeling that Micheal J. Fox would never have been born in the altered future that Back to the Future ends on. And isn’t his Dad surprised that his son looks exactly like that dude from high school? I would wonder where his wife has been, if I were him. I can remember a science fiction story I once read a couple of years back. It was “The End of Eternity,” by Isaac Asimov, and it involved a group of people who’s job it was to change history. They lived in a quasi-real timespace, kinda outside mainstream time. They could travel to most every time period, except far in the future (for reasons unknown to them but revealed at the end of the story). The managers of this group decided what was best for mankind, and altered the past in very subtle ways to change it. For instance, one worker went back in time to a certain spaceship, and moved one tool from one place on the shelf to another. This small change caused gigantic ramifications. At any rate, I wouldn’t even doubt that such seemingly insignificant changes would greatly change the future.

Some people say that the best argument against the possibility of time travel yet is that we haven’t seen people zipping here from the 25th century. Since people haven’t come from the future, that probably means no one will ever have the means to do it. There are two other possibilities though. One is that the beings who possess time travel technology are so advanced that they can easily fool us. The other is that our present time is so uninteresting that future historians reallly don’t care. I can see the possibility of the second reason. However, I doubt the first one. I find it hard to believe that time-travelers can be so 100% diligent as to never make a mistake, or that idiots don’t sometime hijack the time machine and go into history to pull wacky pranks. But who knows, perhaps time-travelers regularly visited the Dark Ages. Arthur C. Clarke once said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic”, so perhaps all those miracles and witchings that have occurred in the past two millenia are the result of time editers! Well, I’m sure they meant well.

I end this thought on some advice. If you somehow come across a time machine in your daily travels, do not attempt to work it. Instead, make a more prudent choice and bash it into tiny tiny pieces with a big bat. You’ll be doing history a world of a favor.

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