Ask A Genius 796: Time Travel is Impossible
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/09/28
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We don’t need any preface for this one I think. So you actually, in old issues of Noesis, when you did some writing and others didn’t spring there was a lot of talk about physics naturally. There was a talk about time travel too. What are the boundaries here between the possibility and impossibility regarding time travel?
Rick Rosner: Well, I don’t think it’s possible at all. I mean there are some relativistic scenarios that if you could collapse space in certain ways. I came up with a way to do time travel according to the terms of general relativity; if you basically had unlimited power to create mass and black holes and all this shit but really I think that’s an artifact of the math of general relativity and that a future version of general relativity won’t allow that. I just don’t think time travel is possible.
Jacobsen: To be strict and sorry to interrupt, we do not mean psychological senses of kind of contracting and expanding individual sense of time. What’s the natural arrow of time, travelling forward?
Rosner: I mean we’re all time travelers; we all travel into the future at a rate of one second per second.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] that’s funny. True!
Rosner: Now, I think it’s possible to have kind of practical stuff that approaches time travel via big data, that in the future we’ll have immersive simulated worlds where you can go to any place that the economics, the market for this kind of shit supports. It’s like I assume that in the future if you want to go back to World War II and kill Hitler you probably will be able to do that. You want to go hang out with Jesus, yes, there will be various versions of that that obviously can’t replicate, we don’t know enough about historical Jesus to replicate him but we can simulate the world of zero A.D and you can go back and have adventures there. You’ll be able to have adventures in a number of different times and places; both based on fact and made up shit.
I mean people already do that in video games except that your latitude, the things you can do it’s quite limited you’ve got to pretty much conform to the situations of the game. In the future if you like a world you’ll have freedom to run around in that world and many of the popular virtual worlds of the future will be based on history and some will sell themselves on their authenticity. That’s not too far from time travel. But no real freaking nothing, where you warp space and go really fast and you zip around the sun a few dozen times and when you come back it’s 10 years before you left; that’s not doable.
On the other hand, according to the precepts of amazingly huge data in the future beyond the future, there’s the future where you can go back and hang out with Jesus and the disciples or kill Hitler and then 50 or 100 years after that there’s enough information retained about, say the year 2070 and beyond that if it’s the year 2131 and you want to go back and live in 2070, you can reasonably do that with a fair degree of authenticity. Now obviously you can’t interact with the people who actually lived in 2070 but you can interact with the simulations of them based on the information they left behind. And if they’re still alive, that would add to the authenticity. So yeah, we’ll be spending a lot of time in virtual life in the future including lives set in different times.
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Let me recommend a movie, Source Code, directed by Duncan Jones, a very good director starring Jake Gyllenhaal. It’s set in Chicago I believe and it’s about time travel. They come up with a device that lets one selected person travel into the past for five minutes at a time repeatedly. It’s a good movie because it’s very logically consistent and also just has a decent story. There are several recurring problems with time travel movies like Back to the Future has one of those problems, it’s not really a problem it’s a cliché. There’s nothing wrong with the Back to the Future movies, I accept that too many movies are like it and that cliché is if you go back to the past you can’t fuck with anything or if you do you have to make everything right, otherwise you’re fucking up the future.
And that’s fine but most time travel movies are written by people who don’t have a depth of reading in science fiction. So they come to the same clichéd conclusions about what’s dramatic and what’ll work and what won’t. And the one where it’s either you have to make everything pretty much the way it was or everything’s fucked, or there’s the other one where you go back to save the Titanic but it turns out by going back you actually sink the Titanic, that nothing can be changed. But things are immutable and yeah you can travel back but the illusion of freedom you have is fake and there are several other time travel clichés that sometimes can make for decent productions but really the way that you’d want time travel to work is in the most logical way possible.
There’s the grandfather paradox that has to do with a lot of clichés that if you go back 50 years in time and you kill your grandpa then you’ve killed yourself because without your grandpa fucking your grandma, you never are born. So, I’m sick of plots that revolve around that kind of setup. I like the plots and only a few people have done this where every time you go back into the past, again which is not possible in real life, but it’s the best way to do it fictionally I think. Every time you go back, the point at which you arrive, say 1941, splits the world into a whole new path; the path that led to you going back still exists and it doesn’t get changed but the world splits into a parallel world 1941 that has the world where you’ve gone back to fuck around with shit. Then it proceeds just normally except with you in it unless you go back to your world; a world where arriving back in time splits the world into multiple worlds.
You don’t save anybody in your world from Hitler, by killing Hitler. By going back in time, you create a parallel world where you’ve arrived you’ve killed Hitler and you’ve saved everybody in that world and if you’ve left open a time gate that moves forward in both worlds between say 2030 on the one end and 1941 on the other end and that time gate stays open as it becomes 2031 and 1942, people can go back and forth between the two worlds; that’s fine. Somebody was just talking about this on the movie review show on NPR that a good time travel movie isn’t about the time travel and the paradoxes and all that shit, it’s about what makes a good movie in general that what happens with the people and then the shit that happens besides the time travel-y shit.
So a time travel movie would have a combination a partnership between the government or governments and corporations like the Disney Corporation to finance and mount this expedition into the past and build a time gate and that’s just about what happens when you’ve got a time gate across 89 years between 1941 and 2030 moving forward into the future into 1945 and 2034 and like people living in one world working in another. People have taken stabs at that but it hasn’t been adequately explored. You wouldn’t want to build a shitload of these. It would be super expensive to build the gate and maintain it and it’d get chaos. You wouldn’t want to generate 10 new parallel worlds every day that would be unwieldy as shit. You’d want your world war or just before World War II world or where you make World War II not happen. Maybe you want your revolutionary war world or maybe you want your Jesus World or your Middle Ages World; it would be like Disneyland. You wouldn’t want a Disneyland on every fucking corner; you’d only want four of them or six of them.
[Recording End]
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