Why Back to the Future teaches us that time travel is impossible
Much like vampires, virginity loss, gun shot wounds, every movie and every story has a different way of explaining its own unique universe. In movie (a), vampires are evil and sociopathic, in movie (b) they are sparkly and misunderstood. In movie (a) some character gets shot and immediately rendered unconscious until the paramedics arrive, in movie (b) a character is shot and just sort of grunts stoicly at the pain, like he's stubbed his toe.
While I wouldn't think guns were any longer in the realm of science-fiction (except for the ones Doom made up), it is sci-fi and fantasy where the most egregious examples of inconsistency will arise in film and literature.
"But Blogger Guy, it's just a story!" you might say, if you talked back to blogs, which is a weird thing for you to do. "The writer can make up anything he or she wants!"
Yes. Yes they pretty much can, and while even that still has some negative examples ("Twilight"), any author is free to create whatever they want within the realm of fantasy, be it bathroom graffiti, a blog, or a novel about dragons and elves. Have at it. Elves don't exist, so anyone who says "elves wouldn't do that," is just kind of being an asshole.
ALTERNATIVELY, from that, is science fiction. Not fiction: SCIENCE fiction. Existing science extrapolated with a little ingenuity, or a little imagination, into a fantastical tale of action and adventure and occasionally some naughty bits. But it's the science people forget, particularly people who don't give a good goddamn about science. And I know, I'm one of them-- even this blog post (recently reposted by geeksaresexy.net) points out the importance of science in our daily lives and musings:
Is this a dick move? Rachel probably thinks so.
Is it scientifically accurate? The internet tells us that it is.
Did I post this on Rachel's facebook page? No I did not, I don't know any Rachel, but GeeksAreSexy apparently does and I'd recommend them if my loyalties weren't already aligned with toplessrobot.com first and foremost.
So:
What my point is here, is even science fiction must have sort of an internal reality check, even if it's the most fantastical story or just a real-world story with science fiction elements. Something like, say, Star Trek, with its transporters and faster-than-light travel, uses concepts that are completely impossible for anything 2011 can imagine, BUT, they all do follow their own internal logic. What a transporter does one week, or in one movie, does not contradict what happens in the next episode, or sequel. Nerds have spent countless hours in forums and at conventions discussing the consistencies and hints given in the text as to all the things that a transporter can and can't do, and ditto with a holodeck, warp drive, light saber, or sex robot. Yes, I know these are different movies. No, it's not important if you didn't understand half those words.
But these are fantastical worlds of wall-to-wall sci-fi. What of the real-world stories with only minor science fiction elements?
As usual with me, it seems to take me quite a few paragraphs to get to my point:
One thing I've never really seen addressed in science fiction writing is the fact that time travel is impossible.
"Pshaw, Pope," you might snort, because again you're talking to your computer and that's not really healthy. "Duh it is. So is warp drive and midi-chloriants and rainbow-farting unicorns."
Not so. While certainly unicorns are just a flight of fancy, invented from thin-air, and midi-chloriants are at least as ridiculous, it is something like a warp drive, or a holodeck, or light saber, that scientists look at and begin to work out how to create it in the real world. Hell, the Star Trek communicator from the original 1960's TV show actually ALREADY exists, and has been rendred obsolete... it's a big, bulky flip-phone that went out of fashion in 2002. And with Wii and Kinect technology, can we really be very many decades away from a 3-d image we can kickbox with, or solve mysteries with, right there in our living room?
"You might not think so much of it now. But your KIDS are gonna LOVE it."
... That quote, while germaine to the previous paragraph, is also a quote from the original "Back to the Future." Which is why I've gathered you all here today.
Time Travel is impossible.
It's not something that's going to be invented down the line by some enterprising (no pun intended) scientist, it's not just around the corner, you can't orbit the edge of a black hole or go really fast around the sun or accidentally nuke your fridge and wake up in 1865. Let me clarify:
Time travel into the future is readily possible and easily done. You're doing it right now. You are travelling into the future, one second at a time. And while it is possible to accelerate this (orbiting the edge of a black hole), or manipulate this perception in relation to your own awareness (if you accelerated away from your living room, at the speed of light, for one year, you would see your cat remain completely still for the entire time, because the visual information carried in the light would remain the same in relation to your eyeballs. At the end of one year, if you accelerated back TO your living room at the speed of light, the cat would appear to move at double speed, so that when you arrived back on your couch, two years would have passed and your cat would be two years older)... that's all it is, is just parlor tricks or variations on your present acceleration into the future, one second at a time.
... All that assuming, of course, that you had called someone ahead of time to feed your cat.
And that you had a telescope that could see into your living room from one light-year away.
But the black hole thing is real, too, you can wiki it: But that's not my point. This is real science and sort of makes time travel boring. You could even put yourself in a coma for a year, and when you wake up, you've travelled a year into the future. Etc. Not so exciting.
TRAVELING TO THE PAST: Impossible. Let's look at the example of "Back to the Future," which of course you've seen, because if you haven't you're in Al Qaeda.
9/10ths of the movie deals pretty straightforward with time travel: Marty travels back in time, fucks up some shit, fixes some shit, then returns to his present day and things are different. Every movie deals with time travel like this. Most do it badly. There are never any ripple effects or consequences. Things you change remain changed, but miraculously, everything else in the entire universe remains exactly the same.
Standard sci-fi tropes withstanding, let's look at the final few minutes of the movie: Marty decides to return a few minutes BEFORE he left, but his car breaks down. He has to run, on foot, to the place where he originally departed for 1955. He gets to the parking lot just in time to see himself, shouting, then returning back to 1955.
The question we must ask ourselves is: What if the Elder Marty (as he is now one week older than the Marty in the parking lot) shouted out to Junior Marty? You know, stood up, waved his arms around, said, "Hey! Hey you! Watch out for the Photo-Mat!"
Well, in theory, Junior Marty (and the Libyan Terrorists) would then look up and be baffled by a second Marty standing on top of the hill.
This is, however, impossible.
Had Elder Marty shouted out, this means Junior Marty would not have gotten into the Delorean. If he doesn't get into the Delorean, he doesn't go back in time. If he doesn't go back in time, THERE IS NO ELDER MARTY TO SHOUT AT HIM, and thus, with no one to interrupt, he could not have NOT gotten in the Delorean.
Still with me?
I'll use another example, from another movie, before returning to the Back-to-the-Future example:
In "Terminator," a robot from the future returns to 1984 to kill the mother of the lead human resistance fighter. She succeeds in killing the robot, and survives. In "Terminator 2," it is revealed that parts of that robot survived, and were being held in a government lab where it was being reverse-engineered to find out how to build the technology, technology which will be used to build the very same Skynet that sends a robot back to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor. The future could not exist without the past, but the past in this case, was changed by a future it did not have the ability to create.
Therefore, logically, one possibility remains: as Yoda said, "Always in motion is the future." There are infinite possibilities for the future. In one, you went to work and got paid. You used that money to buy a new car. You drove to the mall and met an attractive member of whichever gender you're attracted to (for the sake of this example, we'll say it's the opposite sex). You have sex and make a baby. That baby grows up to be President of the United States. ... OR ... you don't go to work, stay home all day except to go to the 7-11 for cigarettes; while there you meet a member of whichever sex you're attracted to, go on a date, have sex, and make a baby that grows up to be a serial arsonist. YOU DON'T KNOW. And while I'm not knocking 7-11, these things are impossible to predict. But for whatever reason, in one possible future, Skynet exists and sent something back to 1984 (and something else to 1994). Had it not done that, it never would have existed. But it didn't know that. Going backwards, there's only one timeline. Going forwards, there are many, just like you can only decide which direction to go on a fork in the road, when you are at the fork, assuming your car didn't have the ability to reverse.
So: Back to "Back to the Future."
Had Marty shouted to Marty from outside the parking lot, he would cease to exist, because that means Junior Marty would take a different path and Elder Marty would never be outside the parking lot in the first place. Lazy sci-fi would have you believe that Elder Marty would just remain on the hilltop, cut off from the timeline which spawned him, except for the fact that he RETURNED TO IT. If his parents don't have sex, he doesn't exist at all; if himself doesn't get into the Delorean, he doesn't exist running sweatily to the parking lot.
So therefore he is UNABLE to shout to himself, because if he did, he never went back in time. This timeline can only exist in reality if he DOESN'T shout to himself. Anything else would erase a link in the chain of events, and create a new chain.
Meanwhle, Marty has just returned from 1955. His parents still hooked up, and had three kids, but when he returns to 1985, they're the EXACT SAME THREE KIDS (of which he is the third), just with more motivation. They all now work in an office, despite looking exactly the same. Marty is still a pot-smoking guitar-player, except now his parents suddenly approve of him having underage sex with his girlfriend. And he has an nicer truck.
So the movie expects us to believe that despite this MASSIVE change he has instigated in his parents past, that (1) they still conceived three different children on the exact same dates as in the old timeline, and (2) the exact same sperm reached that egg, three different times, as in the old timeline. Considering George is now a successful author, and they seem a LOT more sexually attracted to each other than previously, I find this hard to believe. Every bit of visual evidence supplied states that (a) They have sex more, and (b) They have a lot more money.
Plus, even though they remember this kid who helped them out back in high school, named Marty... who they never saw again... they wait until their THIRD kid to give him a tribute? Okay, not unreasonable: Maybe they had family obligations to name kids 1 and 2 after an uncle and aunt, or something. But still. Marty is 18 in 1985, which means he was born in 1967. His horny, randy, crazy-in-love parents in CALIFORNIA IN THE 1960'S only had three kids over twelve years? These are some incredibly responsible parents. Kudos to them.
Plus they moved into the same house, on the same street.
My point is, by doing all this shit, Marty of course negated his own existence. Even if his parents have sex ONE TIME on a day they didn't previously, then it's an entire different set of kids they end up with.
Therefore if Marty went back in time, and did anything that affected George or Lorraine in any way, he would cease to exist.
Therefore he couldn't have. The only time line that can move forward is the one in which he didn't affect anything about the past, whether it was days-younger Marty in the parking lot, or decades-younger George and Lorraine at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance.
Even just sitting in Doc's house, he'd be eating food, utilizing molecules, air, and food, that would have gone someplace else in 1955, and ended up somewhere entirely different in 1985. He's going to the bathroom, adding mass to the world in 1955 that wasn't there before. Matter can be neither created nor destroyed, but the atoms that make up Marty still existed in 1955, as something else. He has CREATED matter in 1955, which didn't exist before. What would happen, for example, if an atom ran into ITSELF?
"Time Cop" would have us believe that these two atoms would cancel each other out, and both cease to exist. But that's a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, and ridiculous. I don't even know why you brought it up.
More realisitically-- scientifically-- the atoms never co-existed at all. Because Doc struck his head, had the idea for the flux capacitor, stole some plutonium, put his dog in the Delorean, flipped the switch, accelerated the car to 88 mph........ and nothing happened.
Except, wait. That dog went one minute into the future. To his shock and delight, he succeeds.
Minutes later, Marty dives into the car, forgetting the controls are set to November 5, 1955. He accelerates to 70, 80, 88, punches the clutch.... and nothing happens.
The terrorists catch up with him.
Hill Valley news, 5 a.m., a teenage boy and a fifty-something doctor are found gunned down in a mall parking lot, the dog remains unharmed.
Film at eleven.
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