About time #2
There’s so much fun fiction around time travel, that it’s easy to get swept in the internal logic of the stories, assuming there is some! There’s also been really interesting thinking around the paradoxes that travelling through time might bring such as the Grandfather Paradox; the question of whether if you went back in time and killed your ancestor, you’d no longer exist to be able to go back and commit the act.
That’s quite a fun, if not dark thought. It almost assumes that a timeline is a single path and so this creates the paradox. I’m not so sure this is the case. As we talked about in the last part, all possible outcomes exist; much as we looked at two objects in stasis with an actor/observer present and so introducing time, to the scene here we introduce a new factor — a traveller.
All of the outcomes of a given trigger have already occurred and so always will but with our added quantity, our new participant, which creates new branches of outcomes but this time from outcomes we haven’t experienced yet. No paradox exists — it just adds more branches to the potential outcomes forever. The presence of the traveller may not create any dramatic impact but it was a factor introduced into the original pattern and so is different because of it.
To return to the ‘grandfather paradox’, the traveller goes back to a point in time which in them being there forks it as there are now many more possibilities and it changes existing probabilities for outcomes. Their act of killing their ancestor changes none of their history because that has and will always have happened but in this new branch that is a catalyst for a hugely diverged set of actions and reactions. They aren’t born in this new set of branches but that doesn’t change that they exist because of outcomes before their time journey.
Time travel is a lot of fun to imagine but it’s that way because we conceive of it being a line that can be travelled, but I don’t think that’s how it is. In every second across the universe, there are untold numbers of actions and reactions, triggers and outcomes. In the unlikely chance we could go back through time, what would we be going back to? What set of outcomes and probabilities would we need to navigate to get to a specific point? Assuming such a journey becomes possible, I like to think it’d be random and that going backwards would be nothing more than an approximation. Where different triggers produce the same or similar outcomes, we end up in slightly different versions of the past.
Going forwards would be infinitely more random as it’s like throwing a grain of sand in the ocean. All possible actions and reactions are out there. How do you define time in order to navigate it…purely but how many times the Earth has gone around the sun? Your destination may be the result of an undefined set of outcomes. No two journeys may reach the same future. The further forward you aimed to go, the more variables and branches occur and so the likelihood of ‘landing’ in the same place for a second time would be near impossible.
In stories, there’s sometimes a part where the protagonist returns to their present time. That’s an impossibility; they may’ve successfully returned to a point they left from but they are not the same person they were and so much as our original concept for a time traveller creating a new branch, so does this traveller returning ‘home’. Their time in the past created new outcomes and so even being able to navigate their way to a point such as when they left, it’s not the same because they are not the same. The world hasn’t been saved as such, just a new branch of time in which their activity had some kind of impact.
