Lethal Interjection wrote:I had a conversation about Time Travel popculture the other day. And how I like watching them because I'm always able to find problems/faults.
Two exceptions are Twelve Monkeys and Rant (by Chuck Palahniuk).
The former has nothing change.
Personally, I found that to be a fault, because there's no causality. The catastrophe always happened because Bruce Willis travelled back in time, but the only reason Bruce Willis travelled in time was to investigate what caused the catastrophe. There was nothing that independently should have caused either event to occur.
It's kind of like an apocalyptic version of the Shakespeare time travel paradox, where a time traveller goes back in time and gives Shakespeare a copy of his collected works, and then Shakespeare just copies them down instead of actually having to write them. Shakespeare has the plays because of the copy he was given, and the time traveller has the plays because they've been preserved through the generations from the copy he gave Shakespeare, so who actually wrote the plays? No one, apparently — they just winked into existence in the space-time continuum. Twelve Monkeys does the same thing with the apocalypse; it just happens for no reason.
Did you watch the same movie I did? The catastrophe did happen independently. The perpetrator (Dr. Peters) was involved tangentially, at best, to anything Cole was investigating. It wasn't until the end that Cole realizes that he'd been chasing red herrings (Goines and the 12 Monkeys), and is able to do nothing about it at all. This is the entire point of the movie. The movie does nothing to indicate that Dr. Peters was spurred to action by any of the goings-on.
Which makes it nothing like the Shakespeare scenario, as there is no 'source' being removed. Now, source-deletion, that's what Rant is all about.
And this makes it nothing like the Shakespeare scenario. In that the origin of some major event was essentially erased (this is the end-game of Rant, by the way, and is resolved quite well). In 12 Monkeys the origin is maintained despite every attempt to change it.
Time travel is logically, if not physically, impossible.
Suppose that you do have a time machine, having just crafted it deep in the bowels of your mad scientist laboratory. What do you do with it? Do you try and change anything? Even a casual glance at history would seem to imply you have a moral obligation to do so(at least to my eye). But let us say that you have uncommon restraint and decide to go look at stuff.
You flip the switch on your Time Belt and are instantly(insofar as words implying the passage of time are relevant to time travel) transported to dallas 1963 to watch your favorite president die(you're the morbid sort. also your taste in presidents is suspect). As you stand on the street a man steps around you, creating a divergence. as he walks down the street he jostles people he would have missed and misses people he would have jostled. They all go on jostling or not jostling a different set of random strangers. By the time the shooting starts hundreds and hundreds of people are standing inches away from where they did "before". Some perhaps even whole feet away. By the end of the day it will be tens of thousands.
Now, that might seem important. Bunch of random nobodies randomly sorting themselves on the left side of the room instead of the right, so what? Well, we can assume that they mostly make all their important life decisions the same way. Being pushed around a bit won't change your mind much. But the difference in space also causes a displacement of time. These decisions will happen faster or slower(perhaps only a few seconds off) in many cases only because people are a little farther away from things. Crucially this means every sex act any of those people ever have will happen at a different time. Pregnancies that never would have happened happen. Ones that would have happened are missed. In a colossal number of cases the changes in initial conditions are enough to ensure that a different sperm wins. A wave of entirely different people being born spreads out from Texas in all directions. The genetic makeup of the planet changes slightly. Now, you might already have been born at that point and you haven't erased yourself completely. But a bunch of people you would have encountered will never be and a bunch of strangers appeared in their place. The you who fired up the time belt never exists.
I suspect this wouldn't explode the universe in a paradox. As far as the universe is concerned you came into existence when you ripped it a new timehole and stepped onto the sidewalk. However, you may shortly find yourself joined by the new "you" your alterations created as he comes back with his time watch(yes, his is a watch. what a berk). Now there's two of you and it all happens again. More and more yous appear on the sidewalk until you create a future where you go somewhere else. The further back they go the more you vary until either theres no "you" ever born at all or someone else beats you to time machines and does the same thing. Eventually people more proactive get time machines and start T-mailing hand grenades to caligula or what have you and the timeline really starts to broil. It wont stop until the universe reaches a stable state where timetravel was never invented at all and all the time machines have been destroyed.
