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The Creative Guide to Space and Time Travel – Post 8

Tags: travel

Time Travel. Choices, Choices, Choices …

So, you want your hero to go back in time and hunt dinosaurs (or more likely runaway). As you saw in the last post, allowing paradoxical time Travel creates a lot of problems to solve, and self-consistent time travel can be limiting. So, might I suggest for you parallel time travel? When your hero travels back, any butterflies he steps on don’t create paradoxes; they create another universe. All your problems are solved. Well, not quite.

(Of course, there are problems. Otherwise, why would I write this post?)

Parallel time travel works on the premise that certain actions, like interfering with the past, can create an entirely new universe. As strange as that sounds there is some basis in physics called the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. In this interpretation (from an ever-growing list of other interpretations), each time a quantum interaction resolves to a measurable state (called the collapse of the wavefunction) a new universe is created for each possible result. So, in the famous Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment, when we open the box, two universes are created, one where the cat is alive and the other where he is dead. (Actually, a near infinite amount are created, but then I have to start a deeper discussion than we need right now.)

The main appeal of the many-worlds interpretation is that, once you get over the idea of constants spontaneous universes, it has more similarities to classical mechanics and some see it as a simpler answer than other interpretations. For the cost of all the energy and matter of creation multiplied by near infinity, you get to think about particles like billiard balls again, which might be the most expensive way, ever, to avoid an uncomfortable question.

One suggestion has been that the wave function never collapses. The universe is just a massive set of possible outcomes, and quantum interactions determine what outcome we experience. We could think of the universe as oscillating like a wave among all the possible ways it can be arranged. Either the “wave” constantly increases in complexity as the possibilities increase, or at creation, the “wave’ starts with all possibilities that will ever happen. In both, only our consciousness travels through time, moving through the multiverse of possibilities.

In this view of reality, we can kill our grandfather without threatening our existence because we kill his duplicate. Our “real” grandfather lived never having met his ungrateful grandson. No paradox, no problem.

However, we don’t have to go to the full crazy extent of the many-worlds interpretation. We only require a new universe to be created when a paradox occurs. But, then what would constitute a paradox? Is it just stepping on a butterfly or does it require premeditated murder? We think of paradoxes as what changes human history, but from nature’s perspective, that first step or breath of air can create as much of a paradox as a bullet in grandad’s head. The problem with trying to use physics to reconcile the actions of human beings is that you are saying physical laws respond to psychology. Basically magic. (Though that can be a problem with time travel in general.) In fact, since time travel by definitions is interacting with the past, a new universe is created by just the act of time traveling.

The question we now need to ask is that once we have two universes can our hero travel between them by other means than time travel. If so, we can treat our time travel as traveling between universes, instead of time, which we can call multiverse travel. Then parallel time travel becomes our definition of teleportation. Furthermore, if we work from the idea that parallel universes are part of creation, as previously discuss, time travel and multiverse travel are not just treated the same. They are the same.

If we can only get to the other universe by time travel, our parallel time travel is practically indistinguishable from paradoxical time travel. Going back to the questions proposed about paradoxical time travel, the paradox does not become reversed if the future time traveler stays home, and the time traveler remembers the original timeline. Each universe has an independent timeline, so there is no feedback loop as I described in the previous post. We only need to care if history is deterministic or random if the hero is trying to “restore” the past. The cost of creating a paradox is not that you slowly fade from your photo album or get eaten by time demons. Instead, the cost would be that you become stranded from you home universe. And, if your time machine is what creates the parallel universe, then time travel is a kind of one-way trip.

At this point, I’m tempted to go into a rant voicing my philosophical objections to the many-worlds interpretation, but I decided to spare you (for now). Let me just ask, in a multiverse where every possibility happens whatever actions your hero take, do your hero’s actions ever matter? I’ll let you ponder that for a while. We’ll talk later.

Instead, we’ll skip philosophy and talk practicalities. Does this solve our problem with faster-than-light travel, which introduces time travel whether you want it or not? As I pointed out from the beginning, the problem is not that faster-than-light makes time travel possible. It’s that it makes time travel common. Parallel time travel does not make it any less common than other forms, and in my humble opinion, you are better off with self-consistent time travel, which keeps you out of trouble. Parallel time travel makes your story about traveling to parallel timelines, not an interstellar space opera.

The strength of parallel time travel is that it avoids the problems of self-consistent and paradoxical time travel. But, that’s also its weakness. Problems are the lifeblood of stories, and what makes a story a time travel stories are those problems and how you solve them. If you don’t want to deal with the problems of time travel, then you didn’t want a time travel story. Multiverse travel can accomplish everything parallel time travel can. And with some creativity and cleverness, you might not even need that. After all, Crichton didn’t need time or multiverse travel to have his characters eaten by a Tyrannosaurus Rex.




This post first appeared on R. F. Errant, please read the originial post: here

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The Creative Guide to Space and Time Travel – Post 8

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