OK, my SWAG (scientific wild a$$ guess) is that the travelers have been coming back for some time from the future, lets say over a 20-30 year period. The thing is, they need to alter the course of mankind enough so that there is an infrastructure present in 2016 which is capable of blasting the asteroid, but they also have to pace it so that there isn't an overshoot and their meddling ends up destroying mankind in the process. They can only send knowledge back to the past, they can't send any material items so everything they work with has to be part of a natural progression of ideas. That is why I suggested James Burke's "Connections," because he explored how widely disparate fields and ideas come together in order to create the atom bomb, which is pretty similar to all the factors coming together to create the X-ray laser.
So lets look at our history on this planet. The people in the future know that an asteroid hits the planet and causes much upheaval, and as one of them says, they save 91M lives. Now, that seemed odd to me given the 7B people we have on the planet at the moment. 91M is like an average country in Europe, BFD. What this suggests is that the travelers have been mucking with humanity for many many centuries in their attempt to advance technology to the point where they need it in 2016. Along with those advances of course are improvements in many areas which leads to more food, better medicine, etc and that results in a population growth to where it is in our present. But when they started to send people back to alter history, the population of the earth may have only been 2-300 million in 2016, where a loss of 91M would be significant. From my college days I recall an estimate that without organized agriculture, a planet of hunter-gatherers would hover around 10 million max. So my guess is that the first traveler sent back was someone who got agriculture off the ground, except that I also realize that they do need an exact time and date of a person's death to do the mind meld, so perhaps the first mind-entities sent back had to wait for clocks to be invented. But if we look through history, we see periods where progress ceased and periods where it was rapid, dark-ages vs war-time. The travelers may have been mucking with the timeline so as to pace development so that it peaked in 2016. I have a feeling as the series progresses we will start to learn that many famous intellects and despots throughout history were in fact travelers whose mission was to advance and retard civilization. Einstein the lowly clerk falls down the back steps one day at the patent office, and the next day shows a Lorentzian transformation that explained relativity, courtesy of a future mind meld.
So back to 500 years in the future, you have the director who is sending people back to change something, and as he/she sees that effect, he/she sends someone else (or another team) back to alter the course again. Basically, they are trying to hit a moving target which they are constantly changing with their meddling, one in which their meddling has possibly increased the population 30 fold. They have an end game solution which is the x-ray laser, and McLaren's team is the one trained in isolation with this as their primary goal. But like terminator I and II, we have both the good guys and the bad guys having the ability to send people back. For all we know, the asteroid collision could have created a society of haves and have-nots, and the Director heads up the team of the have-nots so as to restore the planet to circumstances where the haves aren't in control. But there are also individuals or teams of haves sent back to muck up their attempts, hence episode 5 where they are being queried as to the nature of their mission and when were they sent back, eg 2520 or 2530, because altering this asteroid may have in fact altered the trajectory of an even bigger one which will now hit the planet in 2050.
OR
a really devious person in the distant future saw the near approach of the asteroid and sent teams back with the intent of blasting it such that it did hit the planet. Lots of money can be made suring times of upheaval. This would play in well with the last Stargate movie where aliens went back in time to destroy the stargate on earth.
The one thing I am sure of is that I have WAY too much time on my hands, and watching this and Planet Earth II at the same time causes me to come up with some strange connections.
My Chimp DNA seems to have lost its password temporarily. Sluggr-2
reply
share
Dejay
8 years ago
Haha nice, thanks for the crazy idea. I have a similar idea of how it worked, but on a less monumental scale. The first thing that I would wonder about though is, if the world was originally so underdeveloped with hunter-gatherers when it went to hell, how the hell did they ever invent time travel?
So I too imagine the time travel in this show to messy and be like hitting a moving target. A bit like twelve monkeys, stumbling in the dark. Like the first time travel experiment the director did was "ok I'll send you back, simply put this message behind this rock in the wall when you are there so we can see if it altered our timeline". And just when the director pulls back the rock that hasn't been moved for centuries, he finds the message already there! So they already did that in a previous experiment. Now they don't even have to send him back to that point because that still happened.
So basically the director lives in a universe where time travel seems to have always existed and he can check all the messages left on some old servers to see what changes he already made. The director sees evidence and information on lots of different already changed timelines that have (for him) never come to pass. So he could also for example copy back the mind of one person back multiple times into different bodies. Or just stop and never do any time travel and the effects would still be there. But overall it would be very messy because if a time traveler doesn't leave any notes and vanishes, the director doesn't know and teams might get lost or send back twice on similar missions.
So now after they deflect the asteroid (and yeah it's a curiously low number for a "world ending" event) the director never knew a past where the asteroid hit, but the travelers are still there. So now maybe they develop time travel much sooner. Maybe all the messages they left on that old rotten server that survived the upheaval in the other timeline maybe just got reformatted and recycled in the proper ecological way. So suddenly the director doesn't know what the heck happened in the alternative history.
So when the director (or whoever) develops time travel they find other, less conclusive evidence of time travel in the past, but since they don't have the complete picture, they only know about the anti matter explosion and asteroid deflection.
reply
share
Sluggr-3
8 years ago
My limited understanding of quantum mechanics predicts that the future will only end/change when the future becomes the present. What each change in the past does is create a ripple which then spreads out. By coming back, McClaren and his team have likely already killed themselves in the future, only the future hasn't gotten there yet. But that doesn't affect present time McClaren. Think of it like an earthquake tsunami on earth. Boom, it happens, and those with advanced telecommunication like us already know they are dead even though the event hasn't yet reached us so they have a chance to do something, as say compared to the people back when Krakatoa happened. Same event, same outcome, but those halfway around the world didn't know that things were going to get very very different. Now change the time scale from 12 hours to 500 years and toss in the ability to go back to before the event to change whether it happened or not. They go back and detonate an H-bomb under Krakaotoa to defuse it, except it now weakens the crust to create a different event when it does blow. Pretty much chicken-egg in complexity and 0.0000001% chance getting it right.
So what I think might be happening in the director's future is that their books are being re-written as the current events unfold. And again I am speculating here, but lets say they are working from a 2018 edition of encyclopedia brittanica. As they mess with the past, the content of the EB changes to reflect what happened, causing the director to issue new orders. I think McClaren had it wrong though as to what happens in the present, or maybe someone told them they would go "poof" if successful. This makes the near future a moving target to them. It was static when they started, and likely has now changed significantly as a result of the meddling. Seriously, one could have a lot of fun with this, much like all the times they tried to kill John Connor.
OR
Now the team is a problem. Having changed the past, the director now sees that their presence is creating new issues, sort of like the Prime Directive in Star Trek, where the goal was to not interfere in natural evolution. It comes down to not simply mucking with one thing. Change one, change them all.
of course, how they plan to handle all this is anyone's guess, but like StarGate, it is a good premise with lots of possibilities.
My Chimp DNA seems to have lost its password temporarily. Sluggr-2
reply
share
Sluggr-3
8 years ago
The first thing that I would wonder about though is, if the world was originally so underdeveloped with hunter-gatherers when it went to hell, how the hell did they ever invent time travel?
My thinking is that the future was a civilization that advanced at say a rate of 1.0 units a year. In 2520, though, it had advanced to the point where they could look back on a past event and do something about it, to correct a mistake. But, the only thing they could send back was conscious knowledge that could be inserted into a recently dead brain (old soul out, new soul in). In the unaltered future, the world may have been very similar to our planet say 400 years ago, 300 million people total and then the big event comes along to knock off 1/3 of them. Remember, this was a time when religions were in charge and science wasn't, so the wars would be horrendous and long lasting. But over time things evolved again but very very differently and into a world people didn't like. The mind-meld time travel thing eventually gets invented/discovered and a group decides to go back and change the past, but to do that they can only change knowledge and they have to do it in such a way to not attract attention (think witch burning). They insert some smart people and increase the rate of advancement to 1.2. So by starting to alter the past at some point, could have been 8000 BC at the advent of agriculture, 0 at the birth of Jesus, or the 1400's at the beginning of the rennaisance, they drastically change the makeup of the planet before it gets hit by the asteroid, who knows, they may or may not tell us. Lets say the irony of preventing the impact is that they change global temperatures and doom the planet another way (not that I don't believe we are still coming out of the last ice age). The planet in the present time of the show is likely very different from the same timer period had they not altered the past, so 2016 from the future's original perspective was somewhere between 10M (hunter-gatherers) and 7B (fully industrialized). Just think how much you could change our planet by sending back one person at the time of Jesus who knew how to make gunpowder! And very likely in the future there is a contingent of people who believe that going back to change things might in fact make things worse. Seriously, reading and/or watching Burke's "Connections" will dramatically add to this show, IMHO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) My Chimp DNA seems to have lost its password temporarily. Sluggr-2
reply
share
jgjordaan
8 years ago
The asteroid would have hit somewhere in the North Atlantic wiping out the eastern seaboard and parts of England, Ireland big parts of Europe and North Africa. Killing 91 million people. It would also have disrupted the balance of world power witch would lead to a bunch of wars an famine witch in turn would kill a lot more people. So the asteroid and the 91 million dead is a catalyst to the end of the world not final event. That's why they still have a lot to do. The reason for the wars and arms race have changed
I also got the empression that the The Director did his calcalations and came to the conclusion that this decade would be the best place to try and change the events. So he has most of his assets in this time period otherwise they might start to work against each other.
I am also of the impression that
reply
share