MovieChat Forums > Travelers (2016) Discussion > My take on time traveling.

My take on time traveling.


The premise of "traveling consciousness through time" is ridiculous as it as appear in this show. Don't know if "someday" it will be possible to travel back and forth in time (I doubt it) but here's my opinion on how it will possibly work.

First of all I don't believe that there are "parallel" or any other kind of "alternate" timelines, and there isn't a way to create such an alternate present (or future) by changing something in the past.

If some "technology" allows to a man to travel back in time, that man he can't go and kill an ancestor of his, and prevent his own birth and existence. The fact that he has been born means that he "never" did such action.

I searched the other day and and my opinion has been described as "Ontological paradox" and as a guy named Igor Dmitrievich Novikov stated: Any actions, taken by a time traveler or by an object that travels back in time, were part of history all along, and therefore it is impossible for the time traveler to "change" history in any way.

That's my take on Time traveling, and feel free to disagree.




Cosmos hates Google.

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The last bit is called the "Novikov self-consistency principle". According to that "principle" (actually a conjecture) the entire power of the Universe would stop you from going back in time to kill your grandfather or do any other variation of the Grandfather Paradox (such as what the time travelers in this show or in 12 Monkeys are trying to do). Novikov did not explain how exactly the universe would prevent the emergence of such paradoxes if time travel is possible.

There is yet another time travel conjecture, the "Chronology protection conjecture", by Stephen Hawking. This one states that laws of physics will always prevent time travel, on all but submicroscopic scales. Hawking proposed that conjecture due to some exact solutions to General Relativity, first discovered by Einstein's good friend Kurt Gödel. These solutions introduced the concept of closed timelike curves, which appear to permit time travel to the past (one way trip to the future was known to be already possible due to relativistic time dilation), at least mathematically.

So, according to Hawking, everything larger than an atom does not appear to be able to ride on a closed timelike curve, but it might be possible to observe particles of subatomic scale travel to the past in future (very large scale) experiments. Hawking humorously described the situation regarding macroscopic scales like this:

"It seems that there is a Chronology Protection Agency which prevents the appearance of closed timelike curves and so makes the universe safe for historians."

Fanboy : a person who does not think while watching.

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Electrons, or some such (smaller!) particles may be able to (or, already do so - iRL) and, so, some anti-matter (such as "consciousness") could be able to visit all of these (infinite) realities; which are created (or "brought into existence"), as observed (perhaps not unlike Schrodinger's cat, but that's a different topic. :))

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I totally dislike time travel theories that expect some kind of "magic" at work to correct paradoxes, like the "events would still happen in different ways" etc.

Another interesting theory is the one from Primer - you build a box and you can only travel back to when you first activated that box. It's still "magic" in the way that matter is spontaneously created and paradoxes can happen but at least it doesn't require some kind of unseen conscious force moving things secretly.

My favourite for fiction is that paradoxes are just allowed. So you just magically appeared in the past and killed your grandfather. You are still magically there (in prison lol), and it's an effect without cause.

This is kind of what I think how this show works. The director sends someone back and unintended consequences constantly change the future and the director suddenly doesn't know why a mission happened or who send the consciousness back. That can create a huge mess like the director doesn't even remember that there is a team active and it's "lost" and forgotten. It's messy time travel.

Or some team never got send back but is still in the past, so someone from the future could be send back multiple times into different bodies. That is why they only have numbers. So from the perspective of the past the director (a benevolent AI?) constantly has to adjust plans, but form the perspective of the future the entire history got overwritten and it appears to have already happened that way and he can only assume that probably he cause it. Or travelers leave data dumps in the deep web or some server that survives into the future.

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while I agree Time travel is probably not possible or else we would be living the consequences of it as we speak. However its always wise to ask 'what if' questions about past choices we and others have made.

there is a funny time travel cartoon of this....

http://www.neverenoughworlds.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/obersalzberg.jpg

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Who is to say that what we are living right now isn't the product of time travel. Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack, rather, it is still open until closed. I touched on this in more detail in the E5 ... thread.

To me this show is a bit like Forrest Gump, which made itself real by inserting Gump into a whole bunch of historical scenarios. But instead, we set up a system where a future entity, the Director, is able to manipulate the past in a limited way to try and prevent a future calamity. This manipulation though drastically changes the evolution of human civilization on Earth in order to have the infrastructure in place in 2016 to blast the asteroid and save the planet, except, the process of doing so may in fact make it worse on Earth through unintended consequences.



My Chimp DNA seems to have lost its password temporarily. Sluggr-2

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[deleted]

The remake of the Time Machine movie explained this perfectly.

The Traveler was trying to build a time machine so that he could go back in time an save his fiance from dying. But if he saved her then he would have never built the Time Machine to save her in the first place. So it never happened and she had to die.

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That's a shame, because Carl Sagan was very open minded about the idea of time travel.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/Sagan-Time-Travel.html


Could be that it's impossible to transfer matter back in time, but rather send back information in the form of neural patterns.
I don't see what's ridiculous about it. Care to explain?

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I like the idea of time travel, but that's all it is: an idea.
Nobody's done it, as far as we know.
If you did, would you tell anybody?

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Travelers is one of those stories that assumes physical time travel to be impossible, but some mode of transmission (like tachyons) can be used to send a data stream into the past. In this case the complete contents of a person's mind. Whether or not you could actually overwrite the information in a human brain would depend on the properties of the tachyons, and how they interacted with ordinary matter. Right now such particles are theoretical and their existence has neither been proven nor ruled out. So I think we can give them our suspension of disbelief in that regard.

Quantum theory in its most basic form predicts that all possible outcomes of a sequence of events are real, each part of the solution to the Schrödinger wave equation for that system. The physics of lasers don't make sense unless you assume these multiple states are real and not just some mathematical gimmick. In all likelihood multiple timelines do indeed exist. They're not so much parallel realities as they are facets of a single more complicated reality, but the branching timeline picture is still a useful visualization.

So if you followed the famous "grandfather paradox" and killed your own grandfather before he met your grandmother, you wouldn't fade away or anything like that. Going forward you'd simply find yourself in a world where you (and probably everyone else you know) are never born. You would be this off-the-grid individual whom the authorities would assume was using an alias. The timeline you experienced the "first time around" is still there, you've just switched tracks so to speak, and your old life is now forever inaccessible. This picture of time travel is especially elegant because no matter how many time travelers there are, or what they do, it's impossible to generate a paradox.

I've never been able to swallow the idea that you could travel into the past, but no matter how you attempt to intervene the universe always conspires to frustrate you and make everything happen exactly the way it did before. Too contrived. You can easily come up with scenarios where a ridiculous chain of events would be required for that. Time travel being impossible is far more likely. Suppose you wanted to kill Julius Caesar as a teenager so he never becomes Emperor. You send one hundred special forces soldiers in full body armor, with automatic weapons, to a place and time where you know he'll be. What happens - every last one of them has their gun jam? Or each one suffers a completely different random misfortune? That strikes me as ludicrous. Either they're able to take out their target, or you can't send them there in the first place.

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