Good Idea, Bad Idea - Time Travel

Good Idea - Developing Time Travel


Wouldn't it be awesome to travel through time? Like, go back and fix something that shouldn't have happened? Make the world a better place for all of humanity (but mostly just for yourself)! It'd be cool. Go into the future and find out who wins major sporting events and then bet on them back in your own time. Continually write sentence fragments. With no coherent point.

Really though, think about all the cool things you could do. I would go into the past, change something, and then jump into the FUTURE instead of going back to my own time first. Think about it. I would make something better, and then my life would go on till the point I went back in time, and then when I get to the future, it will be like I didn't exist in the time period between my traveling backwards and where I arrive in the future. Then, you could watch videos (or holograms) of your funeral and see what everyone would have said if you had died, BUT you didn't actually have to DIE!! Big ups to that brilliant plan! Although, I guess you could skip the going backwards first thing. If you just jumped a few years into the future it would accomplish the same goal. Or maybe not. That kinda brings me to my next point:

Bad Idea - Thinking Too Much About Time Travel Paradoxes


See, this is where time travel just becomes a pain. There's physicists that say its possible because if you put a piece of string end to end it creates a circle, which is of course the start of a smiley face, which of course is the universal sign for running morons with leg braces, which makes time travel possible. Then there's the school of thought that says timelines can't overlap each other so we can't do it. Then there's the crazy-haired scientist theorem which states "using an old car and three pieces of fiberoptic cable, we can jump off the timeline, thereby making classic movies that do not hold up in modern times, but are no less entertaining to watch" (even that plan has a paradox).

So then if we assume some form of time travel is possible, we have to decide what kind. For example, there are some that argue we could go back in time, but not forward, since the future isn't set yet. If we can go forward in time, then that thereby proves that our lives are predestined to go a certain way, and this idea of "free choice" is actually a sham. There is the option of going back in time, but any changes to the time line would ruin the ever present "space/time continuum" which ruins the "very fabric of our universe." So that would be bad. There is the other option (often referred to as the "Futurama theorem") which says that any created paradoxes are doom to be destroyed, and typically in an absurd but highly amusing way.

What I think would be cool would be if you could travel back in time, but only as a third party observer, like some kind of creepy voyeur fetish gone out of control. See, the big benefit is the complete lack of paradoxes. You couldn't change anything as bodyless observer (unless you meet a creepy homeless looking guy outside of a subway who teaches you how to flick bottle caps) so you wouldn't be able to change anything. This concept would be great for science because we could see all the stuff that happened before for fact instead of trying to decipher crap that happened from the stuff we dig up (a topic on which I have lots of thoughts to be discussed at a later date). We wouldn't be able to record anything because we all know that only living tissue can travel through time, but we could come back and tell other people what happened. And that would be cool.

So the point I'm trying to make in this rambling, crazy post is that if you put too much thought into the complexities of time travel, you will either go completely insane, or make really cheesy movies (which of course requires a certain level of insanity).

Oh, also, check the labels for the specific movies I referenced above.