You will be tampering with tremendous natural forces, Don! It is dangerous! You may
unleash some awful catastrophe!
But the big puzzle: how had he—his earlier self—known that a
piece of wire and a bus token would save his life? He had known,
all right. Known in advance. But how? And the other five. Probably they were just as
precious, or would be.
Now! Now to make a halfway decent world! Max Alben pulled the little red switch toward
him.
“But wouldn’t our objective reality be affected?”
He nodded. “It could be,” he said, “since, in the absence of any real passage of
time, it would be in temporal ratio to our involvement in our pasts, which might force it
into a different time plane altogether.”
This 28-minute photo montage with about 1,200 words of narration has a nice seed of an idea, but I find it insulting to other talented filmmakers that Time magazine ranked this sketch of a film as #1 in their 2010 list of best time travel movies.
Tel était le but des expériences : projeter dans le Temps des émissaires, appeler le
passé et l’avenit au secours du présent.
English Nowadays, we all know that Doc Doom is far too smart to think the most profitable way to use his time platform is by sending three of the FF into the past with orders to bring back Blackbeard’s treasure (while keeping the fourth member of their team captive). And yet, the story has a charm that stems from the causal loop of Ben Grimm’s presence in the past actually causing the legend of Blackbeard, which in turn caused Doom to send the loveable lunk back.
And now I shall send you back. . . hundreds of years into the
past! You will have forty-eight hours to bring me Blackbeard’s treasure chest! Do not
fail!
The story has a classic self-defeating act: The Terminator goes back in time to kill Sara Connor, causing Kyle Reese to follow and become romantic with Sara Connor, causing John Connor to be born and eventually lead the revolution, causing the Terminator to go back in time to kill Sara Connor, . . .
Kyle: [to Sarah at the Tech-Noir Club]
Come with me if you want to live.
It should have ended there, Gordon knew, but it did not end. Where are
you, Anna? he thought at the world being swampted in cold rain. Why hadn’t
shecome forward, attended the funeral, turned in the papers?
One end of this string represents your birth, the other end your death. You tie the ends
together, and your life is a loop. Ball the loop, and the days of your life touch each
other out of sequence, therefore leaping to one point in the string to another
. . .
The T-800: [to Sarah at the Pescadero State
Hospital] Come with me if you want to live.
If you can’t change anything because it’s already happened, you may as well smell the
flowers.
“Slim, you should write your book,” said Annie.
“Yes! And you have to keep going for our sake,” said Annie.
“For the sake of the future children of America, sir.”
Despite the characters’ belief that they can change history, up in the ITTDB Citadel we all agreed that the characters are an unreliable source and this story actually lives in a carefully crafted single static timeline along with a nice bootstrap paradox.
I want you to bring someone from the past to the present—someone who would otherwise
die only a few hours afterward. Surely that’s possible.
Hang on! That’s not possible. Ancient Runes is at the same time as Divination. You’d
have to be in two classes at once.
Author Eoin Colfer does a masterful job presenting a single nonbranching, static timeline, complete with three consistent causal loops (further described in our tag notes for this story). But really, Eoin, you missed the shuttle on “the kiss”! With the help of N°1, Artemis can time travel, so if you're intent on his first romantic kiss coming from Holly Short, couldn’t N°1 have brought Holly’s actual fourteen-year-old self into the story? Might have even presented an opportunity for a fourth causal loop: Fourteen-year-old Holly kissees fourteen-year-old Artemis, but only because fifteen-year-old Artemis had already told thirteen-year-old Holly that they would enjoy it.
Oh, bless my bum-flap. You’re time travelers.
So if they had gotten home five minutes before they left, like
those ladies promised they would, then they would have seen
themselves get back. Before they left.
Rubinrot, Begabt mit der Magie des Raben, Schließt G-Dur den Kreis, Den zwölf gebildet
haben.
English
He looked at the sole red logo and decided it was the on button. He thought about where
he’d like to be, and pushed.
You get attacked, you have no backup, so you become your own.
I was tracing a design that was etched into the wall, and it started glowing and humming.
And then my whole body was being stretched and pulled, like I was a giant rubber band.
And there was a sound that vibrated through my skin and into my stomach, which is
probably what made me want to puke—er, vomit.
Think of History as a living organism, with its own defence mechanisms. History will not
permit anything to change events that have already taken place. If History thinks, even
for one moment, that that is about to occur, then it will, without hesitation, eliminate
the threatening virus. Or historian, as we like to call them.
Mr. B. invented a camera that takes pictures of the future.
It’s 1814: They’ve never seen fashion styles like ours before.
Wells: Yes, it’s possible, but problematic. Assuming you could
create the conditions necessary to take that journey, that journey would then be fraught
with potential pitfalls: the Novikov Principle of Self-Consistency, for example.
Joe: Wait—the what, now?
Barry: If you travel back in time to change something, then you end up being the causal factor of that event.
Cisco: Like . . . Terminator.
Joe: Ah!
Wells: Or is time plastic? Is it mutable, whereby any changes in the continuum could create an alternate timeline?
Cisco: Back to the Future.
Joe: Ah, saw that one, too.
By the end of the first season, one principal character has seemingly been trapped in the 2043, and Cole is stuck in 2015, having just gone against fate in a major way, but with a third principal character poised to spread the virus via a jet plane.
P.S. Whatever you do, whether in narrative time or elsewhen, don’t bring up this adaptation as dinnertime conversation with Terry Gilliam (but do watch it if you can set aside angst over a lack of a consistent model and just go with Cole’s flow).
About four years from now, most of the human race will be wiped out by a plague, a
virus. We know it’s because of a man named Leland Frost. I have to find him.
—from “Splinter” [s01e01]
No, that’s not how it works. In our timeline, Barry’s mother’s already dead, and
her death is a fixed point. And nothing can change that.
All of them except Luke Denton and around a thousand other souls who’d been left behind
whilst the rest of the human race were evolved against their will, by a force conspiracy
theorists around the world had put down to anything from governmental to extra
terrestrial tinkering.
* The other, of course, is Paul J. Nahin’s Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics and Science Fiction, Second Edition.
Each of the foregoing cases involves a self-defeating act—an act
such that, if it were performed, it wold not be. Self-defeating acts are obviously
impossible, since the performance of such an act would imply a contradiction. Yet time
travel seems to make such acts possible. This suggests the following line of argument
against backward time travel:
(P1) If backward time travel were possible, it would be possible to perform a self-defeating act.
(P2) It is impossible to perform a self-defeating act.
(C) Backward time travel is impossible.
You got me. I’m an android sent back from the future.
“What’s happening?” Benjamin cried. The dreidel spun faster and faster until the
whole room whirled with it. He grabbed onto Devorah and shut his eyes.
You were right—the photograph, it was me, it . .
. It will be. I don’t know how, but it will.
The notepaper was faded with age, and although I’d never seen it before, I knew he’d
hidden it there the night I met him again, so many, many years before.
You want to shoot me into oblivion with no way to get home.
Sadly, the story comes close to being a slick static timeline, but alas, the writers could not follow through.
The Downloader is a real piece of work. There’s only a ten percent chance of success,
eh? And even if they make it, half of them get caught by the Control Bureau.