Time travel in the Terminator/TSCC universe.

[intrepid01]

I have read many articles as to how time travel works in the Terminator universe, and most explanations focus on alternate or branching time lines to hold their arguments together, but I would say that ignores the most important fact about Terminator time travel, why it was created and used in the first place.

And in the Terminator universe that is

Comments

[intrepid01]

The sole purpose of a paradox is to give a reason why something isn’t possible by tying cause and effect into a loop which cancels itself out. The preverbal “grandfather effect,” kill your grandfather before your father is conceived then you won’t exist, if you don’t exist then you can’t go back in time and kill your grandfather.

This presupposes that time travels in two directions simultaneously, that the changes you make not only travel up the time stream, but also come back down the time stream to affect you.
Much like what happened to Marty McFly in Back to the Future, his intervention prevented his parents meeting, they don’t marry and have children, so Marty no longer exists and begins to fade away, he is tied to the future even while still in the past, and his changes are coming back down the time stream.

My argument is that time only ever flows in one direction, into the future, it cannot or ever will reverse itself, and it’s that simple principle that cancels out paradoxes ever happening.

If John exist at a time prior to any change in the time line, he would still exist if say Kyle was killed in the future even if it’s before Kyle is sent back, the past is fixed in stone, it’s only the future from the point of view of the observer that can be changed.
Derek’s (D1) future is changed by Derek’s actions in the past, it isn’t “destroyed” only rewritten to take into account of all the changes his being in the past has caused, such as killing Andy Goode, Jesse is a product of that changed time line, her memories have been altered by the changed time line yet she is still the same person, except her Derek(D2) had some different experiences but still was sent back at the same time the Derek(D1) that we know was.
The interesting question is what happened to her Derek (D2) then? The answer is nothing, he cessed to be the moment he entered the time stream because he was a product of (D1) Derek, and as such (D1) Derek’s existence take precedence. They both travelled into the past at the same time for the same reasons, the only difference is their memories of future events, but because (D2) is the product of (D1) meddling, his creator (D1) is primary in the timeline and both can’t coexist in this instance.

My main objection to the other theories of time travel is the disassociation of every traveller from their respective futures and every other traveller who didn’t travel with them. And because they are now in a different timeline or a branching timeline their actions have no relevance to the future they came from, so for whatever purpose they originally came back for is now null and void. There “has” to be correlation from past to future or time travel is a novelty of the traveller and of no benefit to those that sent them.

[roxybisquaint]

Oh I never got back to this because of my LJ lapse for the past few weeks. But I think I'd misunderstood the part about paradoxes in your original post. Now that you've explained that a bit differently, I'm in agreement. I think. There are no paradoxes because what would be a paradox can't happen because the future is changed. That's how I'm understanding your view on paradoxes now and I agree with that.

The changeable timeline is what I have a problem with and it's mainly because I can't stand the idea of people's realities being rewritten while they're experiencing them. That's not normally a problem because we only see one point in time as observers. But with TSCC setting up a split story at the end of BTR, I fear John's story be kind of silly. For example, Sarah blows up a tech company and in John's next scene, he's no longer talking to someone named Robert, he's now talking to some girl named Marsha. Or something like that.

I understand your problem with multiple timeslines, though. I don't like that aspect of it either - that backward time travelers would essentially be making changes for an entirely new timeline because no one from their future would ever be able to experience the changes. Its certainly a problem, but I don't think it's as different from the single timeline theory as you're viewing it.

Using Derek and Jesse as an example, Derek killed Andy and later realizes that Jesse isn't the same Jesse he once knew. She's from a different future and has some different experiences. Is she from a new timeline or a rewritten timeline? It doesn't actually matter because the result is the same: Different Jesse because she knew a different reality, one in which there never was a Billy Wisher.