Time Travel and the Paradox of Leaving the Past where it Is

by Christopher Barr

“Only through time time is conquered.” 

 - T.S. Eliot, ‘Four Quartets’

“Man …can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turnabout and travel the other way.”

 - H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

Time travel is a 'flat' circle that has been part of my life since a time before I can remember that distant cognitive location, so far off and remote that my brain doesn’t see fit to reveal it to me.  The concept of time travel is absolutely fascinating; it’s also narcissistic and egotistical because it’s a concept that tries to help us realize the fantasy of the past.  That place that we all live in, in our heads but can’t change no matter what we might have done that warrants a rewrite.

Time travel is fascinating because of the possible paradoxes that could occur if one actually, time traveled.  These paradoxes could be minor ripples, Marty McFly fading from existence, a temporal paradox, or the butterfly effect where one goes back in time and kills a figure like Abraham Lincoln, before the Emancipation Proclamation, and alters the future existence of millions upon millions of lives.

These paradoxes could make a person go crazy if you thought about them too long but one I prefer to look at is the Grandfather Paradox, which goes something like this; the time traveler goes back in time to a point before his grandfather meets his grandmother.  The time traveler then kills his grandfather, therefore preventing the possibility of the time traveler ever being born when he was meant to be.  The problem here is; that if the time traveler was never born then he was unable to time travel back in time to kill his grandfather, hence the paradox.

"You have the sight now Neo, you are looking at the world without time."  

-The Oracle in The Matrix

Then there is Novikov’s Self-consistency principle which states that anything the time traveler does in the past must already be a part of history.  No paradox.  If the time traveler went back and killed someone, the person he killed was likely meant to be killed at that point in history.  All the events that transpired after that person’s death already happened that way.  For instance, the time traveler as a boy might have moved into a neighborhood where a family had just moved out, only to grow up there, and meet the offbeat Doc. Brown-type scientist who taught him about the possibilities of time travel, later inventing a machine that allows you to do it.  Then the young man uses the machine and goes back and kills a person.  Little does he know but the person he killed lived in the house he grew up in.  After the person's death, the rest of the family decided to move out of the neighborhood making a house available for the time traveler’s family to move into during that point in the timeline.  Like in the case of Reese in The Terminator going back in time to save Sarah Connor from the Terminator, only to sleep with her and conceiving John Connor, Reese going back was already a part of history, if only SkyNet tuned into that fact.

“Time has no independent existence apart from the order of events by which we measure it.”
—Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein’s concept of Time Dilation states that a person on a spaceship traveling at close to the speed of light could find themselves going back to Earth only to see that many years have past, not realizing they jumped into the future.  If Einstein is correct then the future of warp speed could be presented with a big problem to overcome, sorry Star Trek fans.

The Huggins Displacement Theory allows for backward time travel providing there is an equal space displacement.  The time traveler would be essentially prevented by the Theory of Relativity from doing anything that would affect his or her past.  In the parlance of Relativity, the time traveler could go back in time but could only remain on the edge of his own past.   Immanuel Kant said that ’we can only experience time through things in the world that move and change, such as the hands of a clock.  So time is only ever experienced by us indirectly.’  Like in the time travel in Scrooge; you can look but you can’t touch, you can’t change what can’t be changed.  Or, in the case of H.G.Wells’ The Time Machine, the time traveler was unable to alter the past, his wife was dead in the past and remained so no matter what he did to change it. 

“The Terminator's an infiltration unit, part man, part machine. Underneath, it's a hyper-alloy combat chassis - microprocessor-controlled, fully armored. Very tough. But outside, it's living human tissue - flesh, skin, hair, blood, grown for the cyborgs...The 600 series had rubber skin…. ….That Terminator is out there.  It can’t be bargained with.  It can’t be reasoned with.  It doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop.  Ever.  Until you are dead.” 

- Kyle Reese, The Terminator, 1984

One interesting thing about The Terminator that I found fascinating is that the machines thought to send someone through time.  These machines are task-based as most are, albeit self-aware, but they considered an abstract concept like time travel to solve a present-day problem, the resistance isn’t going away and this is largely to do with the leadership of John Connor, so they send a killing machine to the past and kill the problem before it’s even born.  It is odd that they thought to such technological lengths but didn’t consider; if they kill John before he’s even born thus solving their problem before they even have one, how do they send a machine back to solve their problem?  They have to calculate that the mission failed to justify them to even contemplate that they have a problem to solve in the first place.

Studying patterns in temporal anomalies, we discover a possible solution to Skynet’s time travel paradox in the form of a theorem known as a “N-Jump”.  This states that time extending from the past reaches point A, the point in time to which a traveler from the future will return, and beyond to point B, the point from which the traveler leaves for the past.  During this ‘segment’ of the timeline, no changes have been made; it is the original unaltered sequence of events.  When one traveler leaves point B, that timeline ends-history based on the A-B segment cannot progress, because the instant the traveler reaches point A, it is changed by his presence, and is re-named point C; this creates an alternate C-D timeline, with D being the same point in time as B.  If at point D, the traveler can and does return to point C with the same intentions, history is able to continue into the future.  In his crazed and frenetic way, Doc. Brown explained this problem in Back to the Future 2 on a chalkboard

So if Skynet were aware of this temporal anomaly, then they could theoretically send back a Terminator, knowing the result would change the very timeline they presently reside.  They are machines that just have an objective of winning but Marty is human and wants his old timeline back, which in itself is a bit odd, because he had no problem altering the timeline that resulted in his future being different, for his benefit at the end of the first film before the Doc arrived in the flying Delorean.  Speaking of the first film, let’s go back in time. 

Back to the Future is one of the greats, if not the greatest time travel movie of all time.  Teenager Marty McFly travels back in time from 1985 to 1955 in a silver DeLorean time machine built by Dr. Emmett Brown.  While in 1955, Marty accidentally disrupts the first meeting his parents have thus altering time and his own existence, his mission is to recreate that meeting so he has a future to go back to.  This movie is so well done, filled with charm and comedy as well as action.  Everybody wants, to this day, to own a DeLorean fitted with its own flux-capacitor.

The problem is that Marty travels back and screws up his parent’s first meeting thus erasing his existence in the process.  But if Marty never existed then he didn’t go back in time to prevent their meeting and if he didn’t prevent their meeting because he doesn’t exist then that allows him to exist.  So like with the Terminator, the original A-B segment was changed to a C-D segment in order for a paradox not to occur.

But what we really love about Back to the Future is the romance of time, and finding out who our parents really are and who we really are.  This journey for Marty was a form of enlightenment for him.  He learned about the frailty of existence and the power and repercussions of his own actions.  The sequel deals with a much broader view of the consequences of messing with time.

The third film is the most romantic of the three.  It takes place in the old west where problems were solved by Smith & Wesson.  This film backed off all the time travel stuff because of the topsy-turvy invasion in the second movie and told a story of a man out of time and a woman iconoclastic enough to fall for him.

Star Trek dived into concepts of time travel many times over its decades of film and television.  The Wrath of Khan is still my favorite Star Trek film but two very close second’s deal with time travel, The Voyage Home and First Contact, respectively.  In both films the crew of the USS Enterprise must travel back to the past to correct a problem in the present and save their futures. 

In Voyage Home, they go back to save the whales, a very 80’s consciously aware environmental statement, executed beautifully.  Their mission was to transport two humpback whales to their present so an unknown alien species is able to communicate with them, for reasons not explained.  In their present humpbacks are all gone, killed off by man, so it’s up to Kirk and crew to save the day.  In First Contact, Picard’s crew must travel back to stop the evil Borg from assimilating the population of Earth.  Because of recent events, the present day earth is a Borg world, so the Enterprise follows the Borg back in time to stop them. 

In J.J. Abrams’ reboot of Star Trek in 2009, it used time travel as a way to reintroduce old characters without needing to adhere to canon.  The film allowed the filmmakers the freedom to recreate a new future for the young crew of the USS Enterprise, which still makes me wonder, after launching off that platform, its sequel Star Trek into Darkness dug up old canon to exploit its new audience, in the form of arguably the most beloved villain in the Star Trek canon, Khan.

Star Trek presents the theory that if time travel exists and is possible, then multiple versions of the future exist in parallel universes.  In Quantum mechanics, the many-worlds interpretation suggests that every seemingly random quantum event with a non-zero probability actually occurs in all possible ways in different “worlds”, so that history is constantly branching into different alternatives.

String theory is a way we look at particle physics, such as electrons and protons.  These strings are like the strings on a guitar but exist in time and space as multi-dimensional.  These string theories require the existence of extra dimensions, a total of 10 or 26 dimensions are encapsulated by a single eleven-dimensional M-theory.  In the film Frequency, there are no people time traveling but rather objects are used.  What is doing the time-traveling in this film are voices through a ham radio, the same ham radio but in two points in time.  It’s important to understand that it is a temporal anomaly and that makes it time travel.

Frequency spews its pseudo-scientific explanation around the overlapping of time, using string theory and solar flare activity over a residential area in New York City during October of 1969.  The Aurora Borealis creates a time hole that allows communication to be transmitted and be received.  Frank and his son John communicate 30 years apart.  Taking information to the past is what creates the danger that the future will be altered, and that information is changed because the future has now been altered as a result of passing said information to the past, it runs the risk of changing key events in the future.  Son John saves his dad from dying in a fire 30 years ago by simply telling him about it over the ham radio, but changing that event creates a series of temporal anomalies, the most devastating is John’s mother, Frank’s wife, who has now been murdered.  So the time knots continue to build up as they change things in the past.

In Terry Gilliam’s trippy thriller 12 Monkeys, Bruce Willis plays a criminal who is transported back in time from a post-apocalyptic future in an attempt to prevent the outbreak of a virus, believed to have been caused by bioterrorism, that wipes out most of the world’s population.  On the surface there is clearly a struggle to isolate where the problem began and then what to proactively do to prevent it.  This film is about the train wreck that society is heading towards.  But truly the film is about redemption for James Cole and it’s about accepting the consequences of not only our own actions but also the actions of the society we reside in.  This film is the result of a population that has kept their heads in the sand while their leaders squandered and destroyed the planet for their own personal need for power.

Like in Bruce Willis’ Looper, most of these films use the concept of Time Travel as a way to explore redemption through transcendence, and through this transcendence one can reconcile with one’s own particular circumstances, which like in the Buddhist tradition, one affirming and acknowledging one’s own death.  By accepting death as a real thing then one frees their future as a possibility of choice, a possibility of hope.

The machines rose from the ashes of the nuclear fire. Their war to exterminate mankind has raged for decades, but the final battle would not be fought in the future. It would be fought here, in our present. Tonight.