Oh, sure, I can do that. No problem.
You know what I’ve been thinking about re: time travel recently? Back to the Future. That was such a fun movie series, for something that made absolutely no sense. I mean, first off, there’s the patently absurd existence of ‘timelines’, which as everyone knows are mathematical models much like ‘alternate universes’ or ‘probability waves’. Absolutely nobody who knows anything about time travel would actually suggest that there are actually alternate timelines. We have a lot of funny jokes in the notes here about timelines, but they are of course just jokes; in reality, if you go back in time and change something, there’s no ‘original timeline’ that keeps existing without you. Those things are gone, those versions of those people do not exist and never existed; they exist only in the sense that they can be used as a model to explain the things protected by the temporal field during time travel (such as, for example, the time traveller).
Of course, in a fun movie franchise, we don’t expect accuracy on that. Genre conventions are genre conventions; the kids go through a portal to a fantasy world, the spaceship goes faster than the speed of light, Marty McFly can think of time travel in terms of timelines. No, what really makes no sense is the whole ’prevent your own birth and you slowly fade from existence’ conceit, which is just such a fundamentally bad understanding of the Grandfather Paradox that I simply can’t overlook it, no matter how many fun skateboard and car scenes the movie has. The problem with this – I mean, realistically, the problem is that it would never happen, because the Grandfather Paradox turned out to be bullshit since you cannot time travel at all without being protected by a temporal field, but genre conventions – the problem is the insane importance placed on the whole ‘parents getting together’ thing as the pivotal moment in creating this Marty McFly. His body fades if they don’t get together and build him a body, but his personality and memory doesn’t fade if they don’t perform the actions that created those things? That’s an absurd kind of inconsistency. But more importantly, do you know how absurdly unlikely it is for any specific human to be born? A human has SO MANY genes, and half of them are determined by one of SO MANY sperm. It’s not a matter of Marty getting his parents together. If they don’t have sex on the day they’d have conceived him, if they have sex with the lights on instead of off, if their position is different, if the air pressure is different, if Marty’s father wore tighter than average underpants the previous day… any change at all that influences them before his conception has a MASSIVE chance of ensuring he’s never born. Any change. Maybe they’ll have other kids, but not him. Getting them together doesn’t save him.
I mean, in reality, he doesn’t need saving. Because he’s protected by the temporal field. But his older brother and sister wouldn’t exist. He may or may not have siblings, but they’d be strangers, as different from Dave and Linda as they are from him.
It is a fun movie, though it doesn’t really address the ongoing effects of the other actions he takes – did changing the creation and introduction of Johnny Be Good affect anyone else’s lives? How many other people did he wipe from existence before birth, or conjure into existence with his actions? This potentiality exists for everyone in everything we do, of course, but only a time traveller needs to really think about it. After all, they carry the memories of a dead world with them, protected by a temporal field.
To use another example, let’s imagine that somebody went back to 1967 to integrate themselves into a space program in order to prevent the future sabotage of a shuttle and prevent a nuclear war. How quickly do you think the sphere of influence of their actions would spread? They rent a house, and the landlord is less stressed than he would otherwise be and nicer to his wife; they’ve influenced something on their very first night. They go out for beers with the engineers, changing their schedules, their moods, their relationships, their ideas and actions. Not making them necessarily better or worse, but different. Everything they do from now on, including reproduction, is just a little bit different than it would otherwise have been. The people they speak to are influenced by that change, too. How quickly does the influence spread?
How many years before every new baby born everywhere in the world is under the sphere of influence? What’s the specific date beyond which that traveller has wiped out everyone that would have otherwise been born? This example is probably a bit too easy, I guess – after all, there aren’t too many parts of the world that aren’t influenced in some tiny way by a successful first moon landing and the prevention of nuclear war. So, excepting some extraordinarily isolationist cultures, somewhere between 1967 and 1969. Everyone born after that would, hypothetically, be completely erased before they had a chance to live, replaced by strangers. Hypothetically.
Everyone except one person, anyway. After all, a time traveller is protected by a temporal field.
I guess, if you had a really good memory for names and faces and weren’t too distracted by the absence of any of the friends and family you knew, reminded of the change by every completely different pop song and unfamiliar soda brand and celebrity you’d never heard of before the trip, you could calculate – well, I guess you couldn’t calculate it, I guess, since you weren’t the time traveller. You were never protected by a temporal field.
Even for minor actions, these things do spread extraordinarily fast, though. You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to simply prevent an entire world and everyone in it from ever existing, just how close that cutoff birthdate is to the time of the time traveller’s influence.
Sorry, that was kind of a tangent. My mind’s all over the place today. What was it you wanted me to do? Go 228 years into the past to make sure a revolutionary dies in a funnier way?
Sure, I can do that. I’m a bit busy right now, but I’ll get right on it sometime later this month.
germansingergirl
theartofmadeline
prguitarman
jacobvanloon
kianamaiart
