Time Travel - The Unfortunate Impossibility

So time travel – and interesting concept, somewhat amazing idea, and all around badass idea to think of what the possibilities would be if only the technology were that far ahead. Unfortunately, it can never happen.

You make a mistake, sometimes you wish, "oh, if only I could go back in time and undo that." You miss an opportunity, you think "Oh, if only I could go back and time and change that decision." What if you could go back in time and buy the winning lottery ticket? Go buy stock in Apple before they built the iPod? First off, if the technology were to be invented, don't you think everybody would be doing that? If everybody won the lottery, then nobody wins.

Jim Carrey learned that playing God

Getting off topic here. Where was I? Oh yeah, time travel. Sounds like fun to play around with, if it were possible then everybody would do it, yeah, yeah. The truth behind it was actually answered in what I think was one of the most ingenious movies ever made. It didn't do too well in the box office, and it is a remake, something that Hollywood has done waaaay too much of, but this was one movie that improved over its predecessor in some ways. That movie… The Time Machine.

The movie based on the movie based on the book that popularized the idea of time travel, and yet from everything I have seen, it is the only movie that seems to put its finger directly on the reason behind why time travel is a flawed concept. In this movie, however, they answer a different question, which is essentially the same: Why can't I change the past?

The movie's not going to ask "Why is time travel impossible?" because then we'd have no movie. But the core concept behind the answer to its core question is an answer to why you can't time travel. For clarification, let me give a little background on the film – on this film, not the original story or the movie from 1960 with mutated smurfs.

They look hungry for Smurfberries.

The original story is about a time traveler, whose name isn't given in the book, who has adventures and gets to see the far, far future just because he thinks it's awesome. But like I mentioned in my earlier post, everybody has to have a damn back story, and this movie was no exception. They decided to give the time traveler a reason to go back in time, and what more of a reason than love, of course, because you can't even have a time traveling movie without a romance subplot.

Nothing but good old hard core sci-fi action.

In the new Time Machine, his fiancé is murdered, he goes back in time to save her, and the space/time continuum didn't like him doing that, and she's dies again a different way. He decides to go to the future to find out why he can't save her, why she would keep dying no matter how hard he tried to change it. Finally, he gets his answer from this movies version of the blue-smurf monster Morlocks.

"I killed Mufasa."

He gives the answer that the protagonist has been looking for, and the basis behind this article I am writing now. By going back in time to change the past, he changed the reason for going back in time in the first place. Her death was the motivation that caused him to build the time machine. If she had lived, he wouldn't have built it, and therefore couldn't have gone back to save her. BOOM! Paradoxes are an impossibility.

You can't just do something like they did in Back to the Future where he had to get his parents back together or he wouldn't exist, because what if he had failed, and his parents never got together? He disappears from existence then. So if he never existed, who the hell went back in time and screwed everything up in the first place? The whole premise behind the movie is impossible. Essentially, every movie with the exception of one that has to do with time travel is total bullshit. That one movie… none other than Terminator.

A movie that officially made Arnold the badass of the 80's.

In these movies, the machines were stupid enough to not realize that from doing what they are doing, they are actually causing events to happen in the first place. They didn't realize that by going back in time to eliminate John Conner, they would eliminate the reason to go back in time, therefore they would not have gone back in time in the first place. Paradox. But this movie fixes all that, because it essentially proves that you can't have a paradox. Things happen a certain way, and you can't change those events no matter how hard you want to. In Terminator, you have two things go back in time – the robot, and a human named Kyle Reese. Lets start with the first one.

The robot chases after Sarah Conner, giving her a heads up to what is coming in the future, and therefore telling her to be prepared. She passes this knowledge on to her son by training him his whole life to become the savior to mankind. If she hadn't done that, John Conner would have never become the threat to the robots, and if the terminator hadn't tried to kill Sarah, she never would have trained John. They ultimately created their enemy by trying to kill him. Not only is this, at the end of the first movie, the robot is crushed. You find out in the sequel that the robot arm that was not destroyed was used to create the technology that developed Skynet. So not only did they create their own worst enemy, but they created themselves (interesting detail, nobody actually developed the technology. It came from nowhere). So this movie is the exact opposite of a paradox. They do not cause things to not happen that would jeopardize their own future, but by their own actions, they create their exact future. And this is the only way that time travel would work or make sense.

And of course you have Kyle Reese, John's father. If he didn't go back in time to impregnate Sarah Conner, then there would be no John Conner.

If you're reading this and you want to argue about the rules of time travel established in that movie (the liquid metal terminators technically violate the rules established in the original film), that's not the point I'm trying to make. Everything after Terminator 2 goes against, this, because by altering the timeline, you alter the events that led to John Conner's conception and to Skynet's inception. The point I'm trying to get across is that time travel is impossible. There is no possibility that you could go back in time and change the events that led up to you going back in time in the first place. One event negates the other. It cancels itself out. Sure you could do something else that would not have that specific effect, but the very fact that time travel would make that action possible makes time travel impossible.

Anyways, does anybody actually read my blog? If you do, leave a comment, or comment on Facebook or Twitter and give me some feedback.