The Problem with Time Travel

*Originally published on 10/9/09


Time travel annoys me; it always has. There's a lot of great fiction that utilizes time travel, but there are very few stories that actually use it well.

When I say well, I mean in such a way that you don't get a headache trying to think about it. Seeing time as a straight line may be simplistic, but it's the best way it works. Once you go back, you start creating loops and divergent time lines and it all gets tangled up in itself.

Look at the Terminator series. That system was fairly simple, time travel was one-way and you couldn't bring anything back with you. Seems simple enough, but then Terminator 2 came along and informed us that the man who developed Skynet used the remains of the first terminator to develop the technology that would later create the terminators.

12 Monkeys makes a valiant effort, saying that the past can't change because it already happened. From our perspective it makes sense, but it makes you wonder about the future. Watchmen touched on this with Dr. Manhattan (who still sucks) who perceived time in a very strange way.

Even Back to the Future gets headache-inducing once in a while.

There are a few instances of time travel that actually work. One notable example is in Gargoyles. One episode has Xanatos, as well as others go back 1,000 years. Xanatos receives a coin and sets it up so that he would receive the coin in the future, thus starting his fortune.

This acts in a similar capacity to Terminator, but somehow it works better. I think the fact that it's alluded to early on shows that it had already happened, where it was revealed as a plot twist in the sequel film. Look at Army of Darkness. You'd think that Ash's involvement would muck up the past, and in reality, given the extent to which he impacted society, it would, but his presence there was mentioned in Evil Dead 2 setting up the time loop ahead of time.

Time travel also causes predestination worries. Often in fiction, people from the future will come back to warn a character of some great disaster, only to leave them in a state of self doubt. The idea of us not being in control of our own actions is an unsettling one to say the least. This idea is alluded to in Donnie Darko, as the main character sees odd shapes that determine where people will go or what they will do. The odd nature of the time loop leads to this becoming an odd, albeit very enjoyable, movie that leaves a lot open for discussion.

Scientists have often speculated about time travel. The difficulty depends on which direction you want to go. Going to the future is relatively easy. You have one method, which would require cryogenic technology. You could freeze yourself and wake up there. The more scientific route would be to achieve near light speed. At that velocity, relativity would kick in and you could slow time down for yourself while time moves on around you.

Going backwards is another matter entirely. I don't know how you'd go about doing that. I don't know why you'd want to. Going back in time and trying to change things usually ends up with you making things worse. Most are convinced that going back and killing Hitler wouldn't accomplish much and some say that we'd be even worse off were we to do that.

There is also the grander ramifications. A lot of times, heavy time travel will start to degrade the space/time continuum itself. In the DC Universe, an alien tried to view the beginning of time and ended up splitting the universe into a multiverse. Clearly, this is not the sort of stuff people should be messing with.

If quantum physics is any indicator, the only way to travel to "the past" would be to find a parallel earth where the past is still the present and go there. This eliminates all the paradoxes as your time stream is still intact, you're only impacting the future of another earth entirely. Mucking with other dimensions usually ends badly as well.

Whatever setting you choose, you should stay there. In that vein, people should remain in whatever time they already exist. There's no sense in mucking up the time stream.