The Time Machine is one of the few sci-fi films to venture into the future, not the past (Rex Features)
The book “The Time Machine” also mentioned killer satellites long before space exploration was a technical possibility.
Forget cause-and-effect. What about unintended consequences? Perhaps instead of Hitler a more competent strategic and military thinker would’ve been in charge. You would change history alright, but certainly not for the better.
Edge of Tomorrow was a pretty good recent time travel flick.
just ask Dave Lister about time travel, particularly to 22-nov-1963
It’s no paradox. It’s an impossibility that some desperately want to believe. The inherent contradictions are called a “paradox”.
The future hasn’t happened and the past is gone. We’re the future as it’s happening.
In the early 90s, there was a TV movie called “Running Against Time” starring Robert Hayes. He has a brother who was killed in Viet Nam. Hays is a history professor who meets a man who has invented a time machine. He decides to go back to Nov 22, 1963 to prevent the assassination of President Kennedy, thinking that, if Kennedy lived, he would have kept the U.S. out of Viet Nam, and his brother would not have been killed. Hays’ character not only fails to prevent the assassination, but ends up being accused of Kennedy’s murder. Lee Harvey Oswald convinces authorities that he tried to stop the assassination, and ends up becoming a national hero. Hays manages to return to the present day, and makes a second attempt to change history by going back in time with the intention of convincing LBJ to pull us out of Viet Nam. The plan backfires, and LBJ instead becomes convinced to escalate the war.
He sort of has it right.
You can visit the past, but in doing do, you have created a new timeline going forward. You cannot return to your original timeline. The new timeline may be similar, but because so many events turn on what amounts to chance, the further back you go, the more unrecognizable your starting point will be should you ever return to it.
There is a coherent “real” timeline, we may or may not be in it, that “created” timelines either merge into at some point or branch away from entirely. What happens to those branching timelines is the stuff of fantasy and nightmares.
I'll always make sure to be carrying one of these, just in case.
Paradox is not possible, imho. If it can be done it already has been done. Your future self is predestined to do so, if you traveled back in time.
Master Ken will show you how to move faster than the speed of light.
Absolutely amazing video:
(begin at 4:20 if you are impatient)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hMoA7Q75cg
A Sci-Fi story that I don’t remember the title. A guy goes into some small cinema and watches a Roman army fighting a gory battle - and it IS gory, heads, arms, legs getting lopped off everywhere. He realizes he is actually watching a film of the real centuries old battle.
It turns out some guy has invented a time machine in the sense he can go back to any point in history and record it in real time, and the best thing he can think to do with it is to record the events, run it as a movie, and sell tickets.
Enter our hero, who proceeds to go back and record the events leading up to Pearl Harbor (along the line that Roosevelt knew and let it happen), the crucifixion of Christ, etc. - you name it - all the turning points in history. He then blabs his findings to the public and causes all kinds of Hell.
Soon he is being chased by “Them” and no matter what he does, they are always seconds behind him. Figuring he was going to be caught, he sends out (via YouTube? :-)) the instructions on how to build the machine as his last act of defiance.
“They” catch up to him but instead of killing him, ask him what he considers “the past”. He comes up with all kinds of historical dates. “They” remind him “the past” can be as short as a few seconds ago (which allows anybody anywhere to look into anyone’s life and see all the skeletons in the closet).
Then they let him go to a Brave New World where everyone can view your past - in detail.
Funny thing is that I thought as he did - “the past” was long ago, not everything up until the last second. Man, if everybody could look into my past . . . :-)
After I read Psychoshop I don’t believe in paradoxes anymore. The argument against it being an issue in there is size, given the over all size of the universe little “impossibilities” in Earth’s history really just don’t matter.
Regarding that last one, Heinlein used to call me every year to sign me up for the blood drive at the WorldCon. He called once when I wasn't home and my youngest son took the call. Heinlein chatted with him, and described to him the plot of the story he was then writing, which turned out to be Door.
Another good one is David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself.
I'm currently writing a novel about time travel, and one of the key issues is, would you try to change the past? In the novel, that's called "time crime," and the penalties for trying it are very severe. My main character is sorely tempted once to try it, but decides against changing the past.