#19 Time Travel

My thoughts on time travel are here: http://nerdhurdles.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/episode-19-porn-time and not really in the podcast so much.

Now, I'm sure some of you have some (counter) opinions on the ever-popular time travel genre. Also we missed out on a lot of classic time travel stories. What are some important ones we missed?

I like the view that Lost seems to be taking with time travel. "What ever happened, happened!" It seems that whatever the characters try to do in the 'past', all they do is confirm events that they know occurred in the present/future.

I love all the fun ways TV and Cinema have looked into time travel, but, in reality, I don't buy into the whole 'parrellel universe' or 'alternate timelines'. As for whether it would ever be possible to time travel. I doubt it, but maybe one day. I heard a physicist a few weeks ago tackle the question "Where are all the time travellers that are coming back to our time?". His answer was that a time tunnel/path/gateway(....whatever) would need an entry point and an exit point. And so time travel will only occur to and from times of the existence of time machines. Thats why there aren't any yet. I can't see the logic in it myself, but he sounded smarter than me and so is probably in a better position to form an opinion than I...

Right, so he's saying that there'll be no time travel to dates earlier than the date of the creation of the first time machine. Where's the fun in that?

Boo!!! That's not going to take me back to 1815.

Duuuuuuuuuude! You missed out the rock Gods that are Bill and Ted. George Carlin has to be my favourite time traveller of all time. I haven't seen the movie in ages though, I may watch it tomorrow.

There's always the Superman solution too. Just fly round the world REALLY fast, then you can go save your girlfriend. Job's a goodun.

From the fake title, I did begin to wonder what nerd tasks you were gonna set, but thankfully, your future selves saved the day. Phew.

Well, I don't think that I can properly express my deep sadness at having omitted Bill and Ted. Damn, it could have been excellent. If only I could go back in time. If only.

JonnyBoy wrote:There's always the Superman solution too. Just fly round the world REALLY fast, then you can go save your girlfriend. Job's a goodun.

Or the time travel explanation from TOS's "Tomorrow Is Yesterday": "Whiplash propeled us into time warp!"

Time warp, you say?

What a tease those first few minutes turned out to be . Unbelievable. Great piece of production work though.

There was one non time travel tangent hurdle you guys brought up that struck a chord with me, the old handsfree bluetooth cellphone getup. Something about seeing people talking on the phone while they drive has always struck me as ridiculous, even beyond the obvious increased dangerousness of it. It carries a real bimbo vibe for me, like someone is too stupid to work out a simple piece of equipment that would make their life so much better and easier*. The hurdle even carries over into non-automotive life, when I see someone doing that awkward tilt-head-raise-shoulder-cradle-phone-in-the-neck maneuver while they use their hands for some other task. Fairly or unfairly, it's always looked so dumb to me, even when performed by otherwise smart and attractive women.

That hurdle also has an opposite, in that people who talk on handsfree headsets while doing nothing useful with their hands just look like wankers to me. Maybe I'm a bastard for thinking that, but if that's the case, then bastard I am.

*Not to be confused with my own ridiculousness regarding Twitter, where I'm too stupid to work out a simple piece of technology that would make my life more complicated and less easy.

Time travel stories are a mixed bag for me. Terminator did it great, and seems to key into the 'you can't really change the future, just tweak it a bit' belief. Star Trek, up til now, fell firmly into the butterfly effect camp, but also allowed for repairs to the time line. I don't think I care for the parallel universe theory because it is taking a real theory from quantum mechanics and taking it too far. Quantum Leap was ok because Sam wasn't physically traveling, or am I remembering wrong. His consciousness was inhabiting other bodies, and when you get matter out of the equation a lot more things are possible. There was an old, old show from my childhood called The Time Tunnel, but I don't remember much about it. Back to the Future doesn't really count as it was silly, and The Time Machine only dealt with the future, so the paradoxes weren't evident. Stargate SG-1 came very close to jumping the shark when they dabbled in time travel. I think my favorite use of non-linear time is from the Watchmen comic. Dr. Manhattan's ability to experience all time simultaneously was really cool.

In any case, this show was yet more time well spent. (hee hee, get it?)

Dr. Manhattan's time jumping I enjoyed. And being a comic book, I had no trouble just accepting it. Star Trek time travel always bothered me. I realized a while ago I just pretended those episodes and movies never happened.

Extra special thanks to JaKob for the extended NH theme song outro on the latest show! I enjoyed it quite a lot. Happy Happy Joy Joy...

Let's hope for a "mp3 single" release at some future date, no time travel involved.

What you hear there is about the extent of the recording.

Jakob wrote:What you hear there is about the extent of the recording.

OK, fair enough. But you know, to me that's just a challenge to loop it and see what else I can add to it...no worries, I'll just give the standard answer of, "OK, but I've got a lot of projects ahead of that one to do first." That's the sort of thing to do someday when I can think of nothing else to do...no offense. I've been thinking a lot about some podcasting and journaling ("blogging", I hate that word) I want to do.

Tony wrote:... "blogging", I hate that word ...

You and me both Tony. Not because of the connotations it's picked up, just because the word sounds like it belongs in a kids' book, not in the adult world or anywhere near technology.

"Journaling" makes me think of LiveJournal though. Also a bad connotation.

Great episode! The false intro was fantastic.

But I can't believe your talk about Poland! Poland is east of Germany. I thought it was the yanks that had no idea about world geography. Poland was liberated by the Soviets in WWII, who then promptly brought it under the embrace of Uncle Joe Stalin.

My own time travel/the nature of time travel theory:

Every event, every molecular interaction, absolutely everything you can imagine, from the start of the universe to the end, has a probability of happening or not. Any time an event takes place, every outcome happens in separate universe. Every combination and variation exists - IDIC. The fun of life comes from not knowing which combination exists.

You can't travel in forward or back in time, but you could travel between these universes, one of which would exactly our universe, but at a different point in history.

Hey, we knew the location of Poland, didn't we? It was everything else about Poland that we (ahem, Jakob) got wrong. Americans don't know geography and Canadians don't know history. Perhaps?

In my defence, the movies make it seems like the Americans liberated everything, everywhere in Europe. With a bandaged arm and bayonet clenched between their teeth.

Yeah, that's what happened. Isn't it?

*facepalm*

I guess I know where to send my high school history books now.

I used to know my WWII history like the back of my hand when I was a military obsessed nerdling. But when I got older it disippated in relation to my growing pacifist tendencies. To be further confused by my highschool history teacher grading us on being able to pick out his lies more than actually knowing history. All I remember are the lies. Like the covert actions of the German Schweinhund battalions.

What do you guys think of alternate history? I have a hard time getting into most of it. It feels cheesy to me.

Do you mean like "'What if Hitler had won" alternate history?

I like the idea of those kinds of stories, but I thyink they work better as a short story than a feature length film (or novel). I'm not sure I've really ever seen/read any that had a story to tell outside of the "what if..." gimmick.

yohan wrote:What do you guys think of alternate history? I have a hard time getting into most of it. It feels cheesy to me.

There is a good chance that this will feel cheesy.
I believe there are an infinite number of possible worlds. Everything that ever could have happened has happened in some "history" but only one of those is our actual "history." The fact that we live in something we so brazenly call the "actual world" is just an incidence (co- or otherwise). There are an infinite other you's and me's -- not to mention the absence of you's and me's -- that would consider their experience "the actual world" and the very idea of us to be, well, cheesy.

I also believe that all of these events in all of these worlds are happening instantaneously. It's just our perceptions that are linear.

That pretty much kills my open-ness toward the kind of time travel depicted in science fiction ... and romance (Somewhere In Time, The Lake House, etc.).
It does open many avenues for examining much of the so-called paranormal: deja vu, clairvoyance, past life memories, telepathy, etc.
This is not to say that I believe in any of those things. Instead, I'd suggest that what some people confuse with "extra" sensory perception is merely "supra" sensory perception. It could be either an enhanced knowledge that goes beyond time or a severely damaged perception that, on the other extreme, is deficient of the perception of time that we all seem to have "naturally."

Of course, that's just an idea
and perhaps a highly suspect one
(from a creature from another planet?)

Jakob wrote:Do you mean like "'What if Hitler had won" alternate history?

I like the idea of those kinds of stories, but I thyink they work better as a short story than a feature length film (or novel). I'm not sure I've really ever seen/read any that had a story to tell outside of the "what if..." gimmick.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. I just can't get into it at all. On the flip side, I don't think what GAB is talking about is cheesy. I enjoy that. It's counterfactual stories and scholarship that I find uninteresting.