My Complaints About Time Travel in Popular Fiction
1. Time is NOT a single, solitary stream. It’s closer to an infinitely branching tree. Everything that could happen, has happened. Every individual decision, if gone another way, is represented in an alternate universe. In this universe, if someone, let’s call him Bob, travels back to the past, you will NEVER see him again, unless he has figured out how to travel between universes. His presence in the past is enough to divert the time line.
1.a. This explains why you will never see a time traveler. This also explains why, assuming time travel really is possible, paradoxes do not happen.
1.b. This also means that if you do go back in time, you do not have to worry about changing the past or erasing your own existence. So, it’s perfectly fine for you to use your technology or knowledge thereof to present yourself as a magician or some sort of messiah. Moral implications? What moral implications? Create your own!
2. Spatial correction is not as big of an issue as people seem to make it. Common theory is that, because the Earth moves 1/365.24th of its orbit every 24 hours, you might appear somewhere else, more likely the depths of space. You don’t have to worry about appearing in the depths of space, or somewhere in a mountain (assuming there was/will be no mountain at your location when you travel…). Everyone’s flown, right? When you’re on an air plane, and you jump, you land where you jumped on the plane, even though it’s going 500 MPH. Same thing for time travel. Granted, you’ll have to research the local terrain/buildings, just to be sure. I have no idea what would happen if you materialize inside a solid object. I suppose when you go on your trip, you try to jump from several feet in the air, and hope the parachute deploys.
3. Grammar seems to be a major headache. Mixing up past and future tenses in the same sentence make it confusing, seeing as we lack a common perspective. My proposal: the perspective is the writer/talker’s own timeline. If Bob goes back in time, and he talks about an event that happens in his past, but which is something in the far future, Bob would use past tense. Bob is visiting February 27th, 2004. “I was born on the 19th of April, 2076.” None of this “will have been born” or anything like that.
If you think I'm wrong, please let me know.
1.a. This explains why you will never see a time traveler. This also explains why, assuming time travel really is possible, paradoxes do not happen.
1.b. This also means that if you do go back in time, you do not have to worry about changing the past or erasing your own existence. So, it’s perfectly fine for you to use your technology or knowledge thereof to present yourself as a magician or some sort of messiah. Moral implications? What moral implications? Create your own!
2. Spatial correction is not as big of an issue as people seem to make it. Common theory is that, because the Earth moves 1/365.24th of its orbit every 24 hours, you might appear somewhere else, more likely the depths of space. You don’t have to worry about appearing in the depths of space, or somewhere in a mountain (assuming there was/will be no mountain at your location when you travel…). Everyone’s flown, right? When you’re on an air plane, and you jump, you land where you jumped on the plane, even though it’s going 500 MPH. Same thing for time travel. Granted, you’ll have to research the local terrain/buildings, just to be sure. I have no idea what would happen if you materialize inside a solid object. I suppose when you go on your trip, you try to jump from several feet in the air, and hope the parachute deploys.
3. Grammar seems to be a major headache. Mixing up past and future tenses in the same sentence make it confusing, seeing as we lack a common perspective. My proposal: the perspective is the writer/talker’s own timeline. If Bob goes back in time, and he talks about an event that happens in his past, but which is something in the far future, Bob would use past tense. Bob is visiting February 27th, 2004. “I was born on the 19th of April, 2076.” None of this “will have been born” or anything like that.
If you think I'm wrong, please let me know.