The Light Box

The Light Box

2018/08/22

So, I've been watching a lot of time travel sci fi lately.

The logic of time travel is usually not well communicated. There are generally two philosophies: time is either mutable or immutable. In some cases, time is immutable until such point as the characters make some kind of greater impression on "the timeline." This is lazy character development, and it's silly, of course. Ask anyone who has ever been in a car crash how any tiny detail could make huge differences.

The trouble with mutability is that it creates a paradox the moment you are anything more than a passive observer of the past. IE how do you reconcile the two timelines - the one where you traveled from the future, and the (original) one where you did not? Most time travel shows don't care, they'll spin off a new universe with reckless abandon, ignoring any inconvenient ripples. The truth of it is that, in the vast majority of cases, we see something akin to a multiverse where the time travelers create a new universe with each jump through time. But those other, original universes still exist - in the universe you left to save your comic book collection from that childhood fire, the comics are still gone and you, traveler, mysteriously vanished into a hole that no one can follow you down and that you'll never return through. Our travelers are selfishly recreating the universe until it suits them. For this reason, the idea of blinking out of existence is also a silly one. You came from a universe where you did make whatever actions that led you to that point, so your one-dimensional path is still intact, even if in the new universe you accidentally (or intentionally) killed your own grandfather.

The trouble with immutability is that it's a much greater challenge to write. But I would love to see a show where the travelers are sent back as "ghosts", and their visions they see of the past can only serve to affect their futures. Or, where time travel is built into the fabric of the narrative throughout - IE there are limits based on whatever device they use and the continuum is preserved, because those people truly did already travel to the past - and their visit was built into the past.

If you're interested in either theory, Travelers is a unique take on the first, while Primer is the best (only?) example I've seen of the second.

So this doesn't fit into any existing lore I've yet encountered... But, theoretically, if you found or created particles somehow capable of mirroring one another across multiple universes, you could create a device that could measure changes, and pair the timelines up with some kind of diffs software akin to Github for time-space. But, that would be pointless without a way to affect those universes and not spawn a new universe, and if you had a device that could rewrite reality, why would you need or want to time travel?