The Long Road

Archives: April 2005

Saturday, April 30, 2005

18 Days later...

Well, that was fun...although it dragged on way too long. At least a few of you found it interesting. While others just kept complaining!! No more multi-part blogging. For a while.

Posted by Rayne @ 01:54 AM EST [Link] [5 comments]

Sliders was a show from the late 90s about a group of friends who became stuck travelling between parallel universes. They jumped from random world to random world hoping that the next jump would bring them home. Some worlds were vastly different from what they knew – Nazis won WWII, sentient fire ruled the earth, etc. Other worlds were identical except for a few minor changes – Elvis was alive, red meant go.

Time is widely considered to be the 4th dimension; but in a multiple timeline universe, time is two-dimensional. It is both the 4th and 5th dimensions. To travel along time’s second dimension is to step sideways through time, and reach parallel universes.

The most important question is what exactly determines that a parallel universe should exist. There are several possibilities; one is that all possible universes exist, the other being that actions create different universes. Do all actions result in a different universe? Do all possibilities exist? For example, is there a different universe in which I write “left” here instead of “right”? If not, then is there some kind of force that dictates which actions deserve their own universe and which don’t?

Also, imagine that there’s an alien civilization in some distant part of the galaxy. This civilization would also cause an infinite number of parallel universes on their own. Even if humans and these aliens never meet, there would be an infinite number of universes where Earth was identical but each had a slightly different version of the alien world. So we end up with X*Y universes where X is the infinite number of different Earths and Y is the infinite number of universes of different Planet of Aliens. We can see then that things get immensely complex really quickly; we have an infinite number of universes which are identical to each other, and an infinitely larger infinite number of universes which are different.

Posted by Rayne @ 01:45 AM EST [Link] [5 comments]

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

In some alternate universe, I am doing a double major in Psychology and Sociology. Psychology to study the inner workings of the human mind, to learn why we do the things we do and why we think the thoughts we think. Sociology to study human interactions and the environment we have built for ourselves.

What would I do with all this power? I would observe human life, distill it into words, and write about it in accessible forms and media. In the same vain as this particular entry, I would wish that my writings would help others understand their lives and interactions a little better so that they could gain more control over their daily existance.

Meanwhile, in this universe, I will be writing code...

Posted by Rayne @ 04:51 AM EST [Link] [13 comments]

Thursday, April 7, 2005

Star Trek employs several models for time travel. For the most part, it has the same mutable timeline as the “Back to the Future” movies. We can see that in several episodes. In Star Trek: The Next Generation’s episode entitled “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, a temporal distortion causes a ship from the past to emerge in the present preventing it from having been at a crucial moment in history and significantly changes the present. The characters come to understand that time has changed and are able to fix things so that the time line is set right. The variability is seen time and again in Star Trek most memorably in Star Trek: Voyager’s “Year of Hell” where time is altered hundreds of times. Unlike the previously listed examples, Star Trek does not allow its time travelers to escape changes done to the timeline, with a few exceptions, most characters never realize that time was altered.

However, even with a mutable timeline, Star Trek has a large number of alternate universes. One of the most popular ones is a universe in which all the characters are evil. This was first seen in the episode of the original series entitled “Mirror, Mirror”. That universe has been visited several times later on in episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It was also established that there are an almost limitless number of alternate realities when Lieutenant Worf visited a multitude of them in the episode “Parallels”.

The difference between the alternate realities of Star Trek and those explored in “The Time Ships” is that the latter are formed when someone explicitly changes events that were supposed to have happened while in the former alternate realities exist as random branches through time as the possibility of different outcomes emerge. The Star Trek model suggests that all possible timelines exist simultaneously, each in its own universe.

Posted by Rayne @ 04:55 PM EST [Link] [3 comments]

Monday, April 4, 2005

The first terminator movie worked on the assumption that time was unchanging. John Connor sent a soldier back through time to protect his mother; the soldier would impregnate Sarah Connor who would eventually give birth to John. The evil supercomputer, Skynet, similarly sends a cyborg terminator to the past; the terminator is destroyed and its pieces used to build Skynet.

The second terminator movie presents that time can be changed. The terminator gives John and Sarah Connor a detailed history on the rise of Skynet; they then proceed to alter things in such a way that everything the terminator has told them is no longer true. However, unlike Marty in “Back to the Future”, the terminator is immune to the changes they have created in the timeline - he still exists and all his memories are intact.

The third terminator movie presents a more interesting model. It proposes that time is only mutable in the short term. “Terminator 3” proposes that Skynet will rise and take over the world no matter what is done. The only thing that anyone can do is delay its ascension.

A similar model exists in the 2002 movie adaptation of Wells’ “The Time Machine”. In the movie, the time traveler goes into the past to prevent his fiancée from being killed. He manages to avert her death only to have her killed in a different manner. Like “Terminator 3”, there was a short term change in the timeline; but unlike “Terminator 3”’s 10 year latency, the timeline adjusted itself within a matter of minutes.

This model suggests that time has some tolerance for minor changes as long as the desired outcome is eventually reached. It also requires that there exists some form of unknown force in the universe which knows what the future should be like and can manipulate events so that the outcome is as expected despite any time traveler’s interference. In both movies, the characters were unaffected by the time travel, they remembered what was supposed to have happened.

Posted by Rayne @ 04:01 PM EST [Link] [3 comments]

Friday, April 1, 2005

A third model for time travel is one that was shown in the movie “Twelve Monkeys”. In this film, a character from a future where an apocalyptic plaque has wiped out a large portion of humanity is sent to the past to prevent the plague from being spread in the first place.

The character, James Cole, goes to the past and at the end of the movie is shot in an airport. As he lies dying, he sees in the crowd a young version of himself and remembers that when he was young witnessed a man being shot down in an airport. Upon his death, the old James Cole realizes to his horror that there is nothing that could have been done to prevent the plague and alter the time line.

“Twelve Monkeys” presents time as unbending, unalterable, and absolute. Any changes that could be perpetrated by a time traveler are meant to occur to create the period that the time traveler came from; there is nothing anyone can do or not do to change anyone’s fate.

If Marty McFly existed in the “Twelve Monkeys” time travel model, he could have never prevented his parents from meeting on that fateful day in 1955 because they did meet on that day.

James Cole travels to the past to find out that he cannot change the future; with this model, what does time travel to the future imply? Because the past is unchangeable, we can also assume that the future is unchangeable. If there is nothing one can do to change the present through actions in the past, then it stands to reason that there is nothing one can do to change the future through actions in the present.

This model has a couple of implications. First is that fate and destiny are determined; everything will turn out as it’s supposed to no matter what. Secondly, this implies that all of time exists at once and what we think of as the present is only relative. If the future is fixed, then it follows that it has already existed, for how else could it be determined?

Posted by Rayne @ 03:11 PM EST [Link] [13 comments]

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