I'm curious about your collective knowledge of time travel, enlighten me? 🌙
!!!!!!!!!!!Okay okay okay, so there are a bunch of different depictions of time travel in the media, right? But there are a few things to know that might make it easier.
You know how you’re three-dimensional, right? Everything around you is in the third dimension, even paper. So long as it has height, depth, and width, no matter how thin, it has three dimensions. A cube is an example of a 3D object. They can move over, beside, or under each other. That’s how your physical world works.
Now, the second dimension is way simpler. If something has a height and a width, but no depth, it’s two dimensional. A square is the 2D equivalent of a cube. It’s a bit difficult to explain what it is in a more… Kinetic sense? Imagine a flat table covered in flat paper shapes, and the shapes can only slide around each other, never above or behind. They can only go to the left or right. That’s 2D existence. It’s… Sort of how vision works.
The first dimension is just width. You could imagine it as a flat line, with just a point A and a point B. Practically, though, it’s… I guess kind of more like a point in space. If 2D is what you draw on a paper, then 1D is the place you choose to draw it, like a location. The difference between one point and another- the bit between A and B.
So, you know how you can draw a cube and make it look 3D, even though the picture is flat and 2D? That’s kind of how it is to describe the fourth dimension to someone existing in the third one. You can kind of sort of get the idea across, but it’s not something we’re designed to understand.
I like to think of it like a flipbook. You know how stop-frame animation works one frame at a time, and once you flip frame to frame really fast it looks like it’s moving? That’s my three-dimensional drawing of that four-dimensional cube. We experience our lives in moments that disappear behind us just as fast as they appear in front of us, and as we go from moment to moment we speed through each frozen frame of our lives so fast it looks like it’s moving forwards. We don’t get to see it all at once, the same way a drawing of a cube can’t be twirled around like it can be in real space, but it’s about as close as it can be represented.
To take it a step further, the fifth dimension could sort of be semi-explained as… As if you could see two different endings in the flipbook. Like if something different happened part way through where the path separated and became two different stories with the same beginning.
But anyways, taking it back.
A huge load of media treats time travel as a closed loop- one single reality, one single flipbook, where you can pull yourself out of one page and plop yourself down in an earlier one. The problem is, it’s only one reality, so if you took a time machine and went to the past, then destroyed the original time machine before you could get inside, how would you get to the future where you were able to go back in the first place?
This is a fun way to go about time travel stories because it gives the opportunity for unexpected twists, like in Harry Potter: The Prisoner Of Azkaban, where Hermoine realized she had to throw the rock that hit Harry in Hagrid’s cottage because that was what had happened to an earlier version of them. A circle is created where you are constantly both followed and following an endless line of yourself, always doing things and about to do things, and it must not be tampered with because the future might be horribly changed by your own small, nigh-unnoticeable desicions. You kill the mouse that was going to survive the death of the dinosaurs, and humans never evolve from it’s unconceived offspring. Fun times.
Now, I personally prefer the version that acknowledged the fifth dimension- that split-ending flipbook. This can be recognized in books and movies as a ‘paralell dimension’- a separate version of the reality you live in right now, except something small has changed that makes it different. Maybe you ate a sandwich at 3pm today, but the timeline split because there’s another possibility where you chose to save it for later. Here, when you travel to a different point in time, you don’t appear in your OWN past or future, because every opportunity for a new thing branches off into another parallel. When you get into your time machine and disappear, you create a reality where you never come back. When you appear again, you create a reality where you did come back. The place you arrive is defined as the reality where you didn’t vanish forever, but in the reality you left behind, your friends and family are mourning your loss. Even if you saw them five seconds ago, and the people cheerfully greeting you now are entirely identical in every conceivable way. EVERY way, except the ways you created from instant you reappeared on out.
You can see this version in Star Trek, the rebooted/continued new movies, where Old Spock from the earlier universe meets the Jim whose father died on the Kelvin. He tells him not to inform New Spock of his existence, because it could destroy the universe in an unstoppable paradox.
Which is kind of hilarious actually, since Old Spock knows DAMNED WELL that paradoxes can’t happen in the two-ended flipbook. Paradoxes aren’t possible because from the second something new appears, it becomes an integrated trait.
Here, if you go back in time and kill the mouse that was going to create human life, you haven’t doomed anything, because this is the universe where someone was going to spontaneously pop out of nowhere and prevent that. This is the universe where that wasn’t going to happen.
The cool thing about that is, everything you DO is a defining trait of your universe. This is the universe where you had meatloaf for dinner instead of spaghetti, so you didn’t get botulism from that bad can of tomato paste and end up in the hospital, sneezing loud enough to distract the doctor from her paperwork and accidentally write in the wrong date on a woman’s medical certificate of death, delaying the insurance claim her family needs and stressing out her son, which interferes with his relationship, which shuts down that two hour window at 8-10 PM where the inventor of the hovercar was going to be conceived.
Or you could order take-out instead, and John Smith shoots his fiancé six months early.
Men in Black 3 handled this concept extremely well, and from an angle that is rarely pointed out with such eloquence. I truly love how they portrayed 5-6th dimensional reality so beautifully.
Anyhow, I can go on and on. But if you REALLY want to get into parallel dimensions and the whole 'why does anything we do matter’, 'why do people matter if there are a million iterations of them’, 'what makes this version of us different from any other’, 'what is real’ type discussion…..
I’m sorry, but Rick and Morty is a fantastic series for that. Which is funny, since they had a whole episode making a point of WHY they never do time travel. It really does an excellent job of digging deep into the nitty-gritty of choice and ethics and apathy and purpose and I just. Really love that it seems to *get* that.
All being said, though, if you haven’t seen it, it can be a bit obnoxious and crude here and there. There’s also some pretty thick themes of self-hatred and depression. And I wouldn’t recommend getting too deep into the fandom, either.
But anyhow, thanks for asking!!!! I gotta cut myself off now or I’ll go on forever.
This made my WHOLE NIGHT!!! :D :D
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