Time Rifts
Darkmoon's Rants #58
Sin from the forum that shall not be named PMed me after reading one of the Time Travel rants I did, which amazed me, since no one reads what I write (hehe), and he had some thoughts on the whole traveling to the past deal. Basically, the whole concept of traveling to the past seems flawed. To paraphrase him:
In Back to the Future, Marty goes back in time, then comes back 10 minutes before he left. That Marty would have no knowledge of the changes he created, but the Marty from 10 minutes later should, right? He would have been effected by the changes to the Space/Time continuum, would have grown up differently, and very possibly would be a totally different person.
The one set of changes made by Marty going back would throw all of existence out of wack, making everything spin further and further off the axis of normality until the universe collapses.
While I do think the theory of time travel, especially to the past, is flawed when looking at big jumps such as the one Marty took, it's hard to truly also know what exactly any change would make. I mean, we have to come back to the idea of whether or not the universe in the end has a single path it wants to take and will try and make everything follow that path regardless of deviations in time.
Just because Marty goes back and changes thing doesn't mean he will be a different person afterwards. There's a good chance he would, and of course, there would be paradox created by this. But, with paradox ruining all of existence, it's more likely the universe would make changes shift towards the original path. Or... it would delete everything involved in the paradox from all of history, and the Earth would explode. No harm, no foul...
In the end, likely travel to the past, especially in long jump, is impossible. Too much at stake. Of course, where's the fun, from a writer's perspective in that. Gotta dream the good stories and write them out.
I was gonna rant on alternate dimensions... but I kinda wore out my ideas on this rant, and now can't remember what I wanted to say. So, until next time.