Lessons Learned From TV Land Which Every Writer Should Know!

Hi Guys,

As a writer I am an avid tv watcher - usually when I should be writing! And in point of fact as I sit and struggle with the endless continuity problems involved in writing Mage, I have found myself watching a lot of the idiot box lately. There comes a point at which the thought of going back to a book I closed four years ago and promptly forgot about, just to fact check one tiny piece of information, becomes unbearable. A point at which I would rather hit the remote control and watch anything other than write another line.

 

There is a lesson here to be learned my fellow writers. Or actually two. The first is obviously don't start writing a sequel four years later - the pain of maintaining continuity between the old book which you've completely forgotten about and the new one, is not worth it. The second lesson for those who like me keep a companion document with all the facts and details about the book I'm writing, is of course, don't lose that damned document. It is so much easier to go through a companion document than to do endless word searches through an entire novel.

 

However, that's my pain at the moment, and completely a problem of my own making. I accept that, just as I accept that by the time Mage is completed I will in all probability have pulled out all my hair and may well have started on the cat!

 

But on the positive side, all this tv watching lately, has been useful. It has reminded me that there is wisdom in tv land. Great wisdom - and some of it even affects authors. So here - also in part because I can't stand the thought of doing any more word searches through Maverick tonight - I have pulled together a few of the most important lessons I've learned lately. Lessons that I believe we should all take to heart!

 

Lessons Learned From TV Land:

 

 

1 Never piss off a serial killer! Enough said I think. Not sure if this has any relevance to writers save of course for the obvious - don't write unflattering things about these people!
 

2 There is a subset of human beings who are literally too stupid to live. We call them reporters. These people will literally go out at night, unarmed and without any allies to meet strangers in dark parking garages when they know the people they are supposedly going to meet could be dangerous. And even within this subset there is another subset who are not only too stupid to live, but think its a virtue. We call them plucky female reporters! So the lesson for writers? Don't take up reporting as it's clear it will have a detrimental effect upon both your IQ and your life expectancy!

 

 

3 Writers are cursed. I call this Greg's law of Sodding Synchronicity. But whatever you want to call it it is a fact that in any tv series where there is a writer he will always end up at some point being attacked by whatever he writes about. If he writes about vampires, he will suffer a vampire attack. If he writes about werewolves, werewolves will attack him. Crime writers will always end up at some point embroiled in some sort of true crime – often a murder. And so on. The lesson for writers? Either write about pink fluffy bunnies or brace yourself for the consequences!

 

 

4 Never stand near the captain or other important members of a cast or crew. If possible don't even be in the same episode. The chances of suffering a horrible death increase exponentially as your rank decreases. And if you don't have a full name, you're doomed. The chances are crewman number five that you're going to die. The lesson for writers? Yeah I don't think there is one – it's just fascinating!

 

 

5 Time travel always happens. In any series once it passes a certain number of seasons, you will encounter a time traveller. It cannot be avoided. And said traveller will of course vanish leaving the main characters without evidence and scratching their heads. At much the same time Father Christmas will also appear and then vanish. So the lesson for writers? Expect strange visitors!

 

6 There are certain people in the world who thanks to their advanced hacking skills will be able to build a neutron bomb from duct tape and paper clips or carry out brain surgery by reading a few books. The lesson for writers? Get to know them – they may also be clever enough to be able to programme the damned dvd player!

 

Anyway, those are just a few of the lessons I've gleaned lately from the idiot box. No doubt more will follow in time as my hair thins and the cat heads for the hills!

 

Cheers, Greg.

 

 

 

 

Time Travelling Novella Written

Hi Guys,

Just time for one more post before Christmas, and thought I'd use it to let you know that the time travelling bug hit me again.

This time it was the bootstrap paradox that dominated my thoughts again, and in particular one scenario that I previously raised in my posts on time travel paradoxes. I won't give the plot away, but in essence this is the story of mankind's first chronosphere as it undertakes the greatest ever mission of exploration, the journey to the begining of time. The big bang. But of course things don't run smoothly!

This is a novella that I've just sent off for editing, and should hopefully be out on the kindle before the end of the month.

Other than that I thought I should just wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year, and hope that 2013 (now that we've got through the end of the world as the Mayan calander ran out of dates) will be a great year.

By the way, not saying that I ever believed the prediction for the 21st, but does anyone know where I can flog a slighty used bomb shelter and a million freeze dried RTE's?

Merry Christmas, Greg.

Time Travel Paradox - Can A Woman Be Her Own Mother?

Hi Guys,

I was going to continue with the next installment in my Alien Spotters Handbook in this post, but a few days ago in one of the other fora I engage in someone came up with a brilliant time travel paradox riddle, and I felt the need to write about it. Besides the dark vans with the tinted windows outside my house every day, and the men in dark suits with the sunglasses, were becoming a pain! Maybe they'll back off now!

Anyway the riddle that was asked was can a woman be her own mother through the aid of time travel? And the scenario given was this: A woman meets a man, gets pregnant by him, travels back in time, gives birth, and leaves the baby on someone's doorstep. That baby then grows up to become the same woman, gets pregnant, and then repeats the entire cycle.

This is of course a variation on the bootstrap paradox, in that messing around with time only occurs to the woman because she has already messed with it. Thus lifting herself up by her own bootstraps as it were.

Now to look at this juicy little conundrum, I think it's important to first point out two obvious issues. First, at some point in time, in fact for a whole nine months, this woman is actually going to be carrying herself inside of her. The other issue is that this is an obvious case of incest, since this child is going to grow up to have sex with her father! These are both strange and ichy issues, but not really relevant.

What is relevant is as I've said in previous posts, the fact that this scenario does infact make that entire period from the woman's conception, through her time travel into the past as a foetus, until her getting pregnant in the present, completely determined. For this entire period there can be no free will, no random chance. Everything must happen through this period as it happened before.

The reason for this is simple, genetics. In every conception there must be an egg and a sperm joining together, and in every ejaculate of a man, there are millions upon millions of sperm. Now in order for this woman to be her own mother, genetically she must be identical. That means that exactly the same sperm and the same egg must join. The chances of that happening, even if the conception happens in exactly the same way, on the same day down to the second, are of course millions to one. And if a different sperm makes it through, then the new baby will not infact be the woman that is her mother, it will be the sister (or brother) of that woman.

As any change, even the slightest one could theoretically change which sperm is successful, there can be no variation.

So for that entire, say twenty five tears, every free will choice anyone made, could not have been truly free. Because on each repeat of the cycle through time, they would have to make exactly the same choice. Every random event during this time span, could never have been truly random. Because on every repeat of the cycle, the same results would have to follow.

Anyway, that's my take on the paradox.

I'll try to get my next post out before Christmas, once more returning to the Alien Spotters Handbook (Men in Black - I'm just kidding! - Oh and please stop going through my rubbish. I did think it was the papparazzi but they've denied it!)

But if I don't, and lets face it, I also want to get the next novella in the Wizard at Law series out by Christmas as well, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a happy holidays.

Cheers, Greg.

Time Travel - Movies - 7 Days

Hi Guys,

Back to my time travel theme again. This time 7 Days. (Yes I know it wasn't a movie it was a tv series, but I still think it had some interesting insights into time travel and paradoxes.)

7 Days for those of you who aren't familiar with the show, was a sort of time travelling adventure series in which our hero Frank Parker was sent back in time seven days to undo the various calamities that kept destroying the world. And it did raise some interesting questions. Would Frank ever win the heart of the lovely Olga? (No.) Would the right wing reactionary Ramsey ever show a human side? (Actually yes, briefly.) Would the world ever stop blowing itself up in some new way? (And what did they do before they had project Backstep?)

But as well as these the show did point out some interesting aspects of time travel. For a start, and the reason a chrononaut was needed to pilot the ship, the Earth is travelling through space, spinning on its axis and orbiting the sun, while the entire solar system is itself travelling through space. So to go back in time seven days is to potentially arrive at a point in space many tens of thousands of miles from the Earth, unless you can somehow adjust for this movement, and so travel through space as well as time. Few other movies, books or tv series have considered this issue.

The series also showed the Butterfly Effect in action, in a somewhat amusing fashion, as our dashing Chrononaut goes back in time to undo some calamity and also places a bet of a football game, only to discover that his money has been wasted. The changes he made somehow affected a completely unrelated event, i.e. the game.

But the series also raised some time travel related questions, and chief among them, where was the other Frank Parker? If he goes back in time seven days, then surely he should be in a time period when a previous version of himself was living. Yet he never met himself. So did the original Frank vanish each time he arrived? Or were multiple copies of himself living on the Earth in secret?

The fuel source was also another interesting puzzler. Ignoring what it was, one of the limitations of time travel was that each trip used fuel and they only had a limited supply of it. Yet that makes no sense. He kept going back in time seven days, and at that point the fuel he used to make the journey was still there. It had not been used. So potentially they had an unlimited supply of fuel and never actually had to worry about using it up.

Anyway, I quite enjoyed the series but always found these questions in the front of my mind whenever I watched an episode.

Cheers, Greg.

Time Travel - Movies - The Bootstrap Paradox.

Hi Guys,

In this post I'm going to look at one of the more interesting paradoxes often seen in tales of time travel - the so-called bootstrap paradox.

This paradox occurs when objects because of time travel actually have no origin. No beginning. There are a couple of variants. The first is the reverse grandfather paradox, where instead of the time traveller going back in time and killing his grandfather, he has intimate relations with his grandmother and ends up becoming his own grandfather. Fry from Futurama did this after accidentally killing off the man he always believed was his grandfather, in essence meaning that when he was born he actually had no grandfather. (I have to admit I quite like Futurama.)

But the concept is probably best seen in the movie - "Somewhere in Time." Christopher Reeves meets an old lady somewhere in the future, and she gives him a watch. He then goes back in time and meets her as a younger woman, and gives her back the watch, so that she can then complete the cycle and give it to him when she's older again.

Now the heart of the paradox here can best be understood if you ask yourself one question, how old is that watch? The answer is that there is no answer. There can be no answer. As far as can be determined the watch never began. It simply arrived at some point in time and then kept re-arriving there. So from some perspectives the watch may be ageless, it may also be all ages at the same time, and from other perspectives it could actually be infinitely old. After all if you stop at any point along the time continuum during the period when the watch is in either character's hands, you have no idea how many times its been through that cycle - old lady to young man to young lady to old lady to young man etc.

There are of course more violations of physics than just this occuring. For a start the watch is not aging as it goes through the cycle. If it was, even very very slowly, the watch would eventually turn to dust, and the old lady would have nothing to give the young man. But of course that would also mean she could never have received it as a young woman and the paradox / cycle could never have begun.

So the watch has to somehow be unaffected by time. But more than that it has to be completely unaffected by everything. So if the woman became angry one day and threw it at the wall, it might chip the wall but could never in turn be chipped by it. Because if it were, then with every repeat of the cycle that chip would become worse. Theoretically therefore the watch actually must be indestructible.

And of course if the watch was a wind up type, the coil could never be overwound so as to damage the watch and stop it working.

I wonder how much someone would charge for a watch like that? (Though of course the watch could never be sold since it has to be back in the old lady's hands later on to give to Christopher Reeves. - Maybe you could borrow it though?)

Cheers, Greg.

Time Travel - Movies - The Time Machine.

Hi Guys,

Sorry it's been so long since my last post. Life intrudes as it so often does.

This time I'd like to turn my attention to movies and some of the ways in which writers and directors have looked at time travel, both the paradoxes it creates and the ingenious ways in which they try to get around them.

In this post I'll look at the movie The Time Machine, based on the book by HG Wells. It's important to note that I'm talking about the movie since it takes a departure from the book in several important aspects. In the case of this post, it's in the way that the hero is prevented from changing the past.

As those of you who've seen the movie will know, the hero is prevented from saving his fiancee by the intervention of time. Every time he goes back in to the past to save her, he is prevented by the machine never arriving at the right time. The reason given is that since he invented the time machine purely to be able to go back in time to save her, if he then saved her he would negate his reason for inventing the machine in the first place. In short he would create a paradox.

On the face of it this seems like a cunning plan to prevent a paradox from occuring, but it leaves us with two problems. The first is of course, how does the machine know? Or failing that, how does time know? Conceivably he could be going back in time to do any number of things such as investing in a company who's stocks he knows are sure to rise. So how does the machine know that he is going back in time to save his fiancee? The fact that it does know implies that the machine or time is both sentient and probably telepathic. It knows his plans, knows it will create a paradox, and actually works to prevent them.

The second problem is much more difficult to get around. There were multiple ways in which he could have saved his fiancee. His plan which was very simple, was to go back to that point in time and rescue her from the gunman. But he could have done a great many other things to prevent her murder. He could have gone back a little further,perhaps to that morning and rearranged her day so that she would not be walking along soon to become crime scene later on. He could have gone further back and arranged for her to be perhaps overseas on a holiday at the time of her impending murder. Assuming the gunman was later identified he could have gone still further back, and had him arrested, prevented him from getting hold of a gun, or even stopped him from being born.

All of these actions would of course have created the same paradox, and so presumably the time machine or time itself would have had to have stopped him. But how? The machine would have had to have known at every step what his plans were. Or it could have simply prevented him from ever going backwards in time at all. In the end to completely prevent paradoxes from occuring it could only have done it one way, it would have become a one way time machine - it could only go forwards.

I'm sure you'd agree, that's not the sort of time machine we want to imagine.

Cheers, Greg.

Time Travel - Killing Hitler (part two). He had it coming!

Hi guys,

In my last post I looked at the ethical implications of killing someone (Hitler) through the use of time travel. In this one I intend to focus on the practical.

Clearly the thought behind going back in time and killing Hitler before he rose to power, is that by preventing a great evil, you could make the world a better place. (Unless of course the time traveller has some other nefarious purpose in mind!). My question for today, is would this in fact, make the world a better place?

It's plain that Hitler's rise to power led to both the holocaust and world war two. A great many lives were lost, many more were damaged through the horrors of war. There can be no arguing this. However looking back from 2012, it can also be seen that a great many global and social changes were wrought because of both the war and the holocaust. Some of these have been positive, some negative, and some are yet to show their full impact. Here I'll list just a few.

i) The United Nations. In 1946 the old League of Nations was dissolved and the United Nations formed, with the intent of bringing the entire world together in one body and preventing forther wars. It clearly hasn't succeeded completely, the advent of the cold war effectively stymied things for nearly fifty years as the world was divided into two sides, but since 1991, this has not been the case, and the UN has started flexing some muscle in peacekeeping. Hopefully this role will grow as the twenty first century unfolds.

ii) The World Bank and the IMF. Both of these have arisen from the UN and out of the ashes of WWII, and both have a goal of promoting economic stability and aiding in the development of the poorer nations. Again their work is far from done, we have recently experienced one of the worst crashes in eighty years, but they have both shown that they can be a positive economic force.

iii) Israel. Obviously the impetus for the creation of the state of Israel came from the holocaust.

iv) Women's liberation. The emancipation of women began long before WWII, and as a kiwi I am proud that the suffragette movement succeeded in bringing the right of women to vote to New Zealand first. However, WWII brought a huge boost to the movement as women were asked to work in factories and on farms etc while the soldiers were away fighting. In doing so, women showed that they could work in the same industries as men, and that they could be just as productive.

v) Nuclear power. The Manhatten project may have created the nuclear bomb, but the advent of nuclear technology has brought many more applications than just weaponry. This includes the nuclear power that provides energy to many countries around the world, nuclear medicine where radionucleotides can be used to aid in scanning bodies for illness, radiology and of course radiotherapy to fight cancer.

vi) Rocketry. At first flush this might seem a small thing. We discovered how to launch missiles and send men into space. But consider the huge benefit that the development of satellite technology has given us. Everything from the GPS in your car,and satellite tv, to whole new advances in our understanding of not just space, but the Earth itself. For example, would we even know that there was a greenhouse gas problem and global warming if satellite technology had not been used to show global temperature and ice flow trends?

These are only a few of the things that have arisen from the ashes of WWII. There are of course many more, such as the reunification of Europe and the adbent of the jet engine which boosts international travel and tourism.

Some of these things would have come about by themselves in time. The emancipation of women for example was a movement that had begun long before WWII and which would have surely continued without women being forced into the workforce during the war. But how much longer would it have been before this became accepted?

Others might or might not have come about at all. Would Europe have reunified without WWII? Would the United Nations have formed, or would the far more limited League of Nations continued?

And then of course there is the other question that we cannot even begin to answer. If WWII had not happened, what would have been the world's path. The answer is that we simply don't know.

My point in discussing these things is simply to show that even out of the worst events in human history, good things can come. In killing Hitler and preventing WWII we place the good as well as the bad at risk. So the usual claim that killing Hitler and preventing a great evil would make the world a better place, can't just be accepted at face value. The truth is that we do know that good has come from this evil, and we have no idea at all what might have come to pass had WWII not happened. And we have even less idea of what may still be coming in the future as a result of it.

In conclusion, if we had the power, going back in time to change the past with the view of making a better world, would in essence be gambling.

Cheers, Greg.

More Time Travel - Killing Hitler.

Hi guys,

Well it's been another week, and truth to tell I haven't written a heck of a lot. Partly it's just that I'm still fatigued from completing Pawn, and partly it's that I simply can't decide which book to work on. There are about five in the nearly complete stage at the moment.

So I thought I'd return to my time travel posts, and this time look at one of those old movie scripts and ethics questions that keep coming up. If you had a time machine and so had the power to go into the past and change things - would you? Should you?

I'll deal with this topic in two instalments since it's somewhat complex. In this one I'll only look at the ethics of the act. Or put another way, if you had a time machine and could go back and kill Hitler, or if you're squeemish, prevent him in some other way from rising to power, would that be the right thing to do?

On the face of it, it would seem ethically sound to stop a madman from rising to power starting a world war and murdering millions of innocent people. And if you knew now that someone, say your next door neighbour, was set on this course, you would probably feel the need to intervene in some way. But that's not the situation we face in this situation.

Here we are talking about undoing something that has already been done, in the hope that we would create a better world. I will leave the question of whether this would actually create a better world for my next post. For this one, it's only about the ethics of the act and its forseeable consequences.

Now my money on this is that to change the past in such a way would be morally wrong. Not because of some poetic idea of the sanctity of time etc, but purely because the act itself, would be murder. Even if you used a non-violent system to prevent Hitler from rising to power, it would still be mass murder.

My reason for saying this is essentially a take on the butterfly effect, that is one small change in the past, can make a huge change in the future. In this case, even though Hitler did terrible things which could presumably be undone, he changed the entire world, and more importantly, the people that make it up.

Here I'm not speaking of attitudes, or the rise of fascism, or anything like that. I'm speaking simply of the consequences of what he did, having been fashioned into the essence of probably nearly every man and woman alive today.

Consider this. I would not exist today had Hitler not risen to power. No more would my sister. The reason for this is simply that our parents met after the war,and had the war not happened, they would never have met. Now you may say that I have a vested interest in this, and you would be right, I do. But so does almost every single person on Earth.

The war changed things on a global scale. It caused people in their tens of millions and more to travel around the world, some fighting, some fleeing. It created uncertainty in nearly everyone else, and worried people are likely to have sex at different times and in different places, and with different partners then they would were they not worried. To put it more bluntly, there's - I'm worried sex, and I'm too worried to have sex, sex. There's I'm leaving to join the army sex, and you're here and he's away in the army sex. I think you can get the picture.

As I've previously said, to make even the tiniest change in the world of someone potentially about to procreate, is to essentially alter the course of that procreation, and essentially change the person born. In short, if the wrong sperm fertilises the wrong egg, which could happen for almost any reason, a different person is conceived. When you have world wide changes happening that effectively completely transform procreation by altering times, dates, and even partners, then you have to expect that those changes will transform the world.

The conclusion from this is apparent. Had Hitler not risen to power and started world war two, then nearly everyone on the planet under the age of say eighty, would not exist. Assuming though, that things progressed similarly, those say six billion people like you and me who would not exist, would have been replaced by a different six billion people. So in terms of total loss of life, assuming no major changes, there would be seven billion people alive today. They just wouldn't be us.

So given this situation, what are the ethics? For me it's fairly obvious. Take time out of the equation and ask yourself this question. If there were a machine in existence today, that would kill one person, but create another person for everyone that died, would it be right to put someone you don't like into that machine? The answer of course is generally no. You can't commit murder to create a life. Adding in the mechanism of time travel doesn't change this.

Now some will say in the new world that is created there would have been no murder. And that's actually correct. For those people on the alternate time line, we would never have existed. We would have been undone. But that doesn't alter the fact that at some point, someone went back in time and essentially murdered six or seven billion people.

Anyway, there's my take on the thorny question of changing the past and killing off even an evil mass murderer like Hitler. In a nutshell because it kills the innocent as well, it's wrong. And the fact that you can create an entirely new time line where the undone never existed, doesn't change the fact of what was done.

Next post, assuming something else doesn't come up, forgetting about the deaths, would killing Hitler actually create a better world?

Have a good day.

Time Travel and Free Will.

Hi Guys,

Just finished off Pawn (finally) and put it out on to the kindle thingie, and so since I had a little time on my hands (no pun intended), thought I'd return to my time travel theme.

This one is not a paradox so much as a simple logical incompatibility between two ideas. Time travel and true free will.

First, to set the scene a little, a short definition of true (or libertarian) free will. In essence this view of free will says that our decisions, what we choose to do are completely free, and that if we were somehow to rewind the universe a little bit and face the same choice again, we could legitimately make a different choice. In order to do this, libertarian free will requires that that part of our minds that makes some choices, exists outside of the bounds of the normal universe. (No I'm not talking about a drug induced state!) But in essence, it says that our decisions have to be based on something other then the chemicals in our brains, the atoms and molecules of the universe and all of those other physical things that we know exist. Because if our free will, our decision to choose was based in a part of our brain that was completely predicted by these things, then if we rewound and reran the universe all over again, we could only ever make the same choices. Thus our actions would be completely deterministic.

There is a model of free will that is compatible with a deterministic universe - oddly enough it's called compatibilism. And it says yes, our every decision, choice etc is based completely on physical things like brain chemistry and atoms and fields etc, but we still believe we can make free choices. The fact that if someone could somehow know the position and movement of every atom etc in the universe, they could predict with one hundred percent certainty our every choice, is irrelevant. (I tend to think of this as the illusion of free will. It's free in as much as we think it is.)

Anyway enough said about free will, and sorry for the lecture. Now to time travel and why it completely opposes true free will.

So let's say that a time traveller from the year three thousand goes back in time to three thousand BC, a short six thousand year romp. Sounds good doesn't it? But what our time traveller has done in taking this journey, is fixed every single possible action for the entire six thousand years. Absolutely everything that occurs during that time must be fixed exactly so that by the time the year three thousand AD arrives and we're at the point where he's ready to jump back in time, he must be at that point. Every change he made in the past, must have been made for him to be there.

Sounds confusing I know. But let's look at it in another way. Our time traveller goes back to three thousand BC. At that point we know that everything at three thousand AD must be as it was when he left. So if he makes a change in the past, it must already have been part of the universe that led to him being able to jump back in time.

So now he's back in three thousand BC, and as luck would have it, he stubs his toe on a rock. It hurts and he yells out, and a couple of people see him, and maybe laugh. That's the entirity of the change he makes. Sounds like nothing. But it's not. That tiny change would have profound consequences up the line. So say one of those people who laughs is a girl, and when she goes home that night she tells her hubby of it. He laughs too. Then they make love and start the baby factory rolling. Now because of that laugh, that one minute of story telling, they make love one minute later than they would have if he hadn't stubbed his toe. One minute, seems like nothing doesn't it? But this is the butterfly effect in action. One minute and one sperm out of fifty million swimming merrily away as it hunts down the egg. So what are the chances that the same sperm that fertilised that egg in the time line before the man arrived to stub his toe is the same one that arrived in the next version? One in fifty million more or less. Different sperm - different person being born. And of course that new baby grows up in the past to do different things to what the original person would do, and the changes multiply, until finally when the year three thousand AD arrives, the time traveller doesn't exist. That can't happen.

So the only way around this problem is to have the order of past events between the year three thousand BC and the year three thousand AD absolutely fixed. Not a single iota of variation can occur. This in turn means that every change the time traveller thought he made in the past wasn't a change at all. It always had to happen in order for the time traveller to be there at the right time ready to jump back six thousand years.

So stubbing his toe wasn't a change. It had to happen. The girl laughing wasn't a change. She had to laugh. The baby being concieved a minute later, actually had to be conceived at exactly that time after all. And the wrong sperm fertilising that egg was in fact the right one after all.

And as for the rest of us and the belief that we have true free will. If a time traveller could actually leave from our future and arrive in our past, then we simply can't have such a thing. Because every action we take, every choice we make, has to be the exact one necessary for that time traveller be there in the year three thousand ready to jump back. Even if we have no direct connection tothe time traveller.

Now imagine that someone from the very end of time, say forty billion years or so in the future, goes back to the very beginning. Now the entire span of the universe is fixed.

Anyway I think that covers the basic idea. Time travel does not allow for the possibility of true libertarian free will.

Feel free to ask questions or tell me I'm wrong.

Cheers, Greg.

Time Travel Paradox

Hi Guys,

Thought I'd take a short break from editing to post about one of the many time travel paradoxes out there. I find these things fascinating by the way, even though they fairly much establish that no meaningful form of time travel will actually be possible.

This paradox which I encountered through my time on the philosophy forums, isn't the classic killing your grandfather one, or the butterfly effect. It's the violation of the laws of conservation of mass and energy. (Sounds boring doesn't it - but it may still be the most telling damnation of time travel of them all.)

In essence we have all heard the old saw, energy can neither be created nor destroyed only transformed. And of course the same applies to matter, and thanks to Einstein we now know that matter can be converted to energy. Regardless what all of this means is that if in the universe there are x tons of matter and y joules of energy, the total of the two cannot change. There will always be x plus y in total. (No maths I promise.)

Time travel violates this law directly. In essence it says that if you live in a universe with x plus y and someone goes back in time, then suddenly you have less matter and energy in the present, and more in the past.

Ok, so that's the boring stuff part of the paradox. It seems minor even if it breaks the law if an eighty kilo man with so many joules of energy suddenly vanishes from now and arrives a hundred years ago. It's just a law isn't it? Well no.

To understand this problem let's look at it in an extreme example. So say we have one destination in the past where people want to go, and of course the crucifiction stands out for both the religious and the non. Now I get in my machine and travel back two thousand years. A little more then eighty kilos (I refuse to say how many more) of me leaves 2012 and arrives at year 0 AD. And of course because I've learned my ancient tongues and am wearing the right clothes no one notices me. Harmless right?

Not.

I go back from 2012. But so too does someone from 2013, and someone from 2014 and someone from 2015 - I think you get the picture. Now assuming that mankind continues sending one person back to Calvary every year and our civilisation survives another thousand years, that's now another thousand people wandering around that hilltop, all trying to pretend to be locals. But these as you will guess are extremely conservative figures. Assume now that once the machine is invented more then one person wants to go back each year, and then allow for the fact that the Earth will hopefully survive, with people on it, though they may not be entirely human, for the next billion years, and they all want to visit that one hill at that one time.

That's hundreds of billions of people, and getting back to the conservation laws, hundreds of billions of tons leaving the future one by one, and arriving at one time and place. A hundred billion tons is a small mountain, and the heat energy alone given off by so many people - well have you ever been to a rock concert in the cold night air and felt somewhat warm? Under that sort of weight the ground itself would start to fail and if they all jumped at once, it would shake too. If they cried out, the sound would be deafening. In short it would be a disaster.

But now take a more extreme example. The big bang. Scientists tell us that it began very, very quickly, a matter of a few seconds. And from it we know the entire universe was created. So now we have an event that people from every race and every world over all say thirty billion years of the life of the universe would want to visit. (In their spaceships naturally since there would be no air.) Can you imagine what the effect of trillions or more, spacecraft and passengers all arriving at one spot at the exact same moment would be?

I can't. Unless of course that was the cause of the big bang itself?

Anyway, just some random thoughts. I should get back to editing.

Cheers,Greg.