vonnegution

Okay. So I don't expect any of you to read this. It's long, and it's not really a personal blog about my life. It's about time travel. Enjoy.


Thanks to my Xbox 360 and Netflixs View Instantly feature, Im on the fifth episode of Heroes Season 3 and I remember again why I stopped watching. Its not just that the characters are incredibly stupid, even the ones who supposedly know whats going on. And its not only that the writers seem to have no real creative bone in their. Its not even that some of the actors seem to have orange skin. Its that the show treats the audience like it is as ignorant as the characters and as incapable of original thought as the creators. Im not going to get into the specifics of how I came to this conclusion, the show isnt worth it. Besides, the specifics are innumerable.

Now, despite the show being terrible, or worse, since the end of Season 1, it has gotten me thinking about time travel. Well, it and Lost. Lost started it, and then Heroes helped clarify it for me. I would like to discuss those thoughts with you. Be warned, spoilers could be divulged though Im not going out of my way to ruin things. But time travel cant really be discussed without accepting some knowledge of each series storylines.

First, a little background on the use of time travel in each of the shows:

LOST: To understand the nature of temporal sliding in Lost, just consider the phrase, Whatever happens, happened. As in, the characters that traveled through time to the past can not affect the course of history and their original present will still be the one and only future. I should clarify that the characters still have free will; they are still able to make choices and act/react with the world around them. However, those choices, those actions, will have already been so. Whatever they do, in the past, was already done and what happens is always what happened. Meaning, basically, that the characters were always meant to travel back to the 1970s and to do what they do while theyre there.

For instance: Sayid always shot Little Ben. Jack always refused to save Little Bens life. Little Ben was always delivered to The Others by Kate and Sawyer, ne LaFleur. These actions did not change the future, these actions caused the future.

To be able to totally wrap ones mind around this, one must understand that in the world of Lost, the characters exist and can only exist in a single timeline. Therefore, whatever happens, happened. Naturally, this begs the question of alternate timelines. Theoretically, couldnt Sayid have gone back in time and not shot Little Ben? Or, shot Little Ben in the head to kill him instantly instead of mortally wound him with a gut blast? The short answer, on the Island, is No. If Sayid did travel back in time and shoot Little Ben in the head, then the sequence of events that led Little Ben to become Big Ben would never have happened, and Sayid and the other Oceanic 6 probably would not have traveled back in time to begin with. Which would cause a completely different past to have taken place, and who knows where wed be then. No, on Lost, there is only one timeline and you do in it what you will always do in it.

I hasten to add, I do not think this means the writers of Lost dont give the possibility of alternate timelines any credence. Simply, time travelers cannot change the course events. But the infinite possible outcomes of an infinite number of choices of the entirety of the human race since the beginning of mankind (not to mention the infinite possible circumstances that led to life on this planet or the creation of the Earth) certainly do create alternate timelines and even universes. So, none of us can ever go back in time and kill Hitler, but we could travel to a different timeline where Hitler never existed.

HEROES: If you grasp the single timeline theory, then understanding Heroes concept of time travel should be much easier. For starters, Heroes wears its multiple timelines on its sleeve. It is the only storytelling device the show ever uses. The first season was predicated on the characters discovering the nature of the future initially via Isaacs paintings of the destruction of New York, then Future Hiro traveling back in time to warn Present Peter of the impending doom (Why not warn Present Hiro? Fuck if I know! But probably because Future Hiro is as dumb as Present Hiro.), and then eventually just about Present Everyone goes into Future Future to see for themselves.

I know I just made it sound hokey as shit, but it really was an entertaining, if not thought provoking, season. And in case you missed it, I gave you another clue in that description to represent how different time travel is in Heroes from Lost. Future Hiro travels back in time to warn Present Peter. Clearly, in Heroes world, time travelers dont cause the future to happen, they change the future. This theory is crystallized in the Season 3 episode called The Butterfly Effect not to be confused with the movie The Butterfly Effect starring Amy Smart. Wikipedia explains it thusly: [The Butterfly Effect] is a common subject in fiction when presenting scenarios involving time travel and with what if scenarios where one storyline diverges at the moment of a seemingly minor event resulting in two significantly different outcomes.

Of course, in Heroes, the future as it happens is always the negative and the divergent storyline is the desired outcome despite no one never knowing what that divergent storyline might be. This is the reverse of most versions of this theory, wherein the divergent storyline, by its obvious definition, is the undesired outcome. See: Back to the Future part II, or The Simpsons Time and Punishment and Buffy the Vampire Slayers The Wish, both of which dealt with an alternate present instead of an alternate future, utilizing the same theory.

Ultimately, in Heroes, the characters as they are in the present are the ones that change the future, or cause it, I suppose. The characters who travel backward in time are merely the catalysts of those changes. So, in a sense, the idea that time travelers cant actively change the future is true in both shows, and the reasons why they diverge in timeline theory is mostly a function of narrative necessity. Though, it wouldnt surprise me if the writers of Lost had a higher median IQ than the writers of Heroes. Or, at least, theyve read and thought about these kinds of things more seriously.

And this is where I come down on a side. I firmly admit that being able to create alternate timelines via time travel is much more fun. But, Losts theory just makes more sense to me. Its something Ive been wrestling with for most of my life. Im sure that sounds bizarre. Why would I ever need to spend any amount of time thinking about the ramifications and possibilities of time travel? I honestly dont know, but I have. And for most of my life I fell into the Heroes bucket, because to an adolescent mind, it does make sense. Of course Marty McFly could go back in time and nearly cause himself and his family to not exist, and of course he could change things in such a way that his entire familys existence was better off then when he left. Duh. What person doesnt fantasize about righting a wrong in the past. We all say, from time to time, If Only

Then I saw Timecop.

You remember the scene where Past Ron Silver and Future Ron Silver are forced to touch? That whole, Same Matter Cant Occupy the Same Space at the Same Time? They touch and both Ron Silvers explode. Very messy. I watched that and immediately thought, Wait, that makes no sense. If Past Ron Silver dies right there in that moment, then theres no way Future Ron Silver could ever travel back in time and touch himself.* So, if Future Ron Silver never traveled back in time, then Past Ron Silver would not have died at that moment and instead lived on to become Future Ron Silver who traveled back in time. And they still would have touched, and nothing would have happened. I realized, in that moment, that all my previously held beliefs in time travel were wrong. They simply had to be.

Lets go back to Hitler. Weve all been posed some form of this question, havent we? If you could travel back in time, would you kill Hitler before he ever had a chance to influence anyone that might help affect the Holocaust? Its really more a question of your morality than anything else, but assuredly, most of us would answer emotionally in the affirmative. But play it out. You travel back in time and you kill an infant Adolf while hes still in the crib. Infanticide is a small price to pay to save the lives of millions of people, isnt it? Regardless, Baby Hitler dies. The Holocaust never happens or, if it does, Hitler certainly could not have initiated it. Take the first possibility, the Holocaust never was. If that happened, you would never have traveled back in time to kill Hitler. Since you never traveled back in time to kill Hitler, Hitler survives infancy and by 1945 he has already committed genocide. Now, take the second, there is no Hitler but, say, Adolf Eichmann becomes the architect of the Holocaust. World War II still occurs and 50 years later you still dont travel back in time to kill Hitler because you dont know who he is. You could go back in time to kill Eichmann, but then there would be two of you slaying babies in the past and eventually youd run out of crazy Germans to kill. Or, there would only be one of you in the past and so Hitler would still live because you killed Eichmann instead. Either way, you kill Hitler once and your future, and the you from the future who time traveled, never exist. Smarter people than me call this a paradox. It can keep twisting itself over and over and over, but history still cannot be changed. Thus, like I said earlier, you cant kill Hitler.

As it happens my Past/Future Ron Silver and Hitler scenarios, and the Whatever happens, happened concept on Lost, has a name. It is called the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle. And, again, as per Wikipedia: Stated simply, the Novikov consistency principle asserts that if an event exists that would give rise to a paradox, or to any change to the past whatsoever, then the probability of that event is zero. Naturally, all of this, every last bit of it, is conjecture and theory and navel-gazing at its best. Yet, when Ive tried to explain my theories on time travel in the past, or even to explain how I understand time travel on Lost, people either look at me funny or try to break it down with the alternate timelines theory. To say the least (get it?), its nice to know Im not insane or alone.

But I have to give credit where credit is due. It was because my friend Jordan brought up the alternate timeline theory several weeks ago, to dissuade me from my inability to see beyond the Whatever happens, happened idea. When he said, its possible that an alternate timeline could still be created within the show, I admit that I was more than slightly floored. Id never actually considered that. I had, certainly, thought about alternate timelines in the sense that of all the choices Ive made in life, there are other versions of me on subtly or vastly different Earths that made those choices differently from this me. Its those infinite infinites again. But the idea that a future me could change the past me in such a way that present me would never exist, after my Back to the Futue days anyway, seemed downright alien. Apocalyptic, even.

And then I started watching Heroes, again. And I remembered those alternate, divergent timelines. How can we travel through time and not change the future? It almost seemed inevitable, and I wondered how after so many years of ponderings I could be forced so violently back to what I held true as a child. And I was lying in bed last night and it struck me. Single timeline. Thats it, the only answer. We are, all of us, stuck in this timeline. We could move back and forth along it, but we can never move off of it. All of those infinite other Uses could move back and forth along their own infinitely numbered timelines, but they could never come to ours. Somewhen, an 11 year old me is loving the TV show Sliders and he will be very sad when he gets here.

But, inevitability is inevitability. Whatever happens, happened.

This should not alter your belief in your own free will. You still have it, as do I. It is simply that you cant change what will happen, because its already happened. The future will be new for us, and sometimes exciting and sometimes heartbreaking. It will never be anything other than what it already is. Yes, our futures are already made. But we make our futures.

In the end, philosophically, I think this is what Lost is about. There are countless allusions to mythologies, dozens of moral and ethical dilemmas, meanings and metaphors, poetry, science, the mysteries of life, the cyclical-yet-progressive nature of history, and more daddy-issues per capita than a day shift at The Clubhouse in Dallas. Those are all things the show utilizes to tell its tale, but they arent what the show is about. Just like the X-Files wasnt about aliens and conspiracies and two FBI agents. It was about the quest for truth, and the truth being real, and in the faith that its out there, waiting for us to find it. Lost is similar, but instead of truth, its about the quest for self. That the characters are quickly coming to terms with being in the past means that they will also come to terms, probably less quickly, with the fact that they are the cause of their own pasts which is the future. They will, quite literally, make their own futures.

This is what Ive been thinking about all day.

Before I go, I should also note that, outside of the single timeline/multiple timeline issue, Heroes and Lost differ in one other aspect. The characters in Lost, so far, are unable to return to the future, but the characters in Heroes come and go from the future like you and I go to the store. Need some milk? Let me travel back in time to when you went to the store yesterday and remind Past You to grab the moo juice, then.

I have not given this aspect of time travel nearly as much thought. Mainly because this is more of a practical question than a theoretical science question. I dont know how we would practically travel to a different time at all, much less travel back to our own time. When it comes to physics in practice, well, I failed that class in high school.

But, one more time, Wikipedia has some insight: According to the actual [butterfly effect] theory, if history could be changed at all (so that one is not invoking something like the Novikov self-consistency principle which would ensure a fixed self-consistent timeline), the mere presence of the time travelers in the past would be enough to change short-term events (such as the weather) and would also have an unpredictable impact on the distant future. Therefore, no one who travels into the past could ever return to the same version of reality he or she had come from and could have therefore not been able to travel back in time in the first place, which would create a phenomenon known as a time paradox.

Damn those alternate timelines. Such fucking nuisances.


* Thats what she said.