Time Travel discussion
07-14-2017, 12:51 AM
Leaving aside the issue of whether time travel is possible or not, I'd like to cite one of my favourite works of fiction in this space: the out-of-print (but still around in PDF form) role-playing game Continuum. It's one of those games where the rulebook is more interesting than the actual game, but its model of time travel - and more importantly the civilisation that springs up around time travel - was deep and an engrossing work of science fiction in its own right. It probably didn't do well because the concept of four-dimensional combat (combat through time, that is) is set out in the book and is damn hard to visualise let alone adjudicate.
The foundation concepts are these:
- There are thousands of time travellers, living up and down the run of history. Time travel caused/causes/has caused an entire civilisation to spring up based around it because time travellers are not constrained by having to wait around for things to happen, but are nonetheless constrained by causality.
- If you invented time travel, the first thing you would logically do would be to go as far into the future as required to find out the most efficient way of doing it. The most efficient form of time travel is when it's part of your own physical makeup. That is, your genes mark you as a time traveller, no DeLorean required. Remember that sad Hayden Christiansen/Samuel Jackson movie Jumper? Exactly like that, except through time as well as space.
- All of the various models of spacetime as represented in fiction are fallacious. Neither the "Grandfather Paradox", "the Universe heals its own paradoces", or the "You create a new universe when you change the past" are correct models of spacetime within the game (in fact the latter is seen as a very, very dangerous misconception - one taken up by the game's antagonists, known as Narcissists.) The truth is that there is ultimately only one timeline, only one series of events, which only continues to exist by the application of sentient force to paradoxes (simply put, situations where cause and effect are out of whack or the causality does not make sense) when they occur. You can't go back in time and shoot your grandfather, because other time travellers will intervene to stop you doing so or if need be go further back in time and make sure the gun you use is defective and blows up in your hand.
See the delicious bootstrap levitation in this? Because the Continuum exists, it therefore must be because one timeline is in place, and the one timeline creates the Continuum.
If you do allow a paradox (which time travel is highly likely to cause) to occur, if unchecked and unhealed it literally will destroy the universe with enough time. The only reason it doesn't happen is because it is the responsibility of all time travellers to fix the paradox as it occurs. (This also turns a crisis in existence into an in-character problem as well: if you don't fix a paradox you created or which is seen as your responsibility, someone else has to/will do it, which then means the entire civilisation frowns on you for your lack of duty to the greater good.) Sometimes fixing the paradox will actually involve the creation of another paradox, again, as we'll see.
- The civilisation that allows the universe to keep existing is called the Continuum (and no, it doesn't have anything to do with the Q.) Because it's a civilisation comprised entirely of time travellers, it exists in all time periods, from the point where humanity emerged from a previous, causality-shredding empire (roughly 16,000 BC or so) to the time of the Inheritors (roughly 4,000 AD or so) which is basically when humanity "ascends to a higher plane of existence". (Time travellers, bar the level 20s, er, the Exalted, are forbidden to go outside those chronological limits.)
The driving force of this time travelling civilisation is causality.
However, infinite time travel doesn't mean you have infinite knowledge -- or that just because the Continuum exists that all events known to you are immutable. Doesn't work like that. Even very powerful time travellers (Span 4) still have to rest after time travelling 1,000 years or so. And finding out (say) through personal knowledge the trajectory of the JFK headshot is going to take you a while -- assuming you're even allowed to get anywhere near Dealey Plaza by random Narcissists or Continuum agents wrestling over that part of the timeline.
Also, whilst, from the point of view of a non-time-traveller, the clock seems stopped for you, your body's biological clock is still ticking away. You are still heading towards the ultimate consequence of a mortal life, even with the age-slowing technologies available to higher level time travellers that extend human life out to a good 200, 300 years or more.
It isn't always the answer to "jump out, become a black belt, come back and kick the guy's butt." It's not the Matrix. You still have to account for all that time spent at Mr Miyagi's dojo, and it might take you 10 years of your life -- time which, unless you're very, very careful about it, you are vulnerable since you're a standing target. And then, even assuming you can spare those 10 years off your life, if you jump back into the same moment you left, your friends and family in that time period might look at you a bit quizzically when you've gone from the age of 17 to 27 in literally a day of their time.
Also: too much knowledge is dangerous in this game, because with too much information you risk causality's integrity - the more you know you're going to do, the more bound you are to ensure you get it just right, the less likely you are to get the loop of cause and effect round the right way, and the greater the risk you'll tell someone something that causes a paradox.
The game phrase "Further information is not available here" is the touchstone for this concept: it's a completely neutral phrase that simply expresses that you shouldn't/can't/won't know the answer to a given question at this point in spacetime. Doesn't stop you learning it somwhere or somewhen else.
Causality making sense in the game =/= the timeline being identical every time down to the last subatomic particle; if it was like that then the game simply couldn't exist at all. In the game there's a cottage industry in the Continuum putting actors -- very, very good actors, named, who'da thunk it, the Thespians -- in the place of famous people who've been wiped or erased early from the timeline so causality to everyone who remembers it is not affected. Similar with the Antiquarians, who replace objects as Thespians replace people: has the Mona Lisa been destroyed by a Narcissist? No problem; you need to either get it painted again or go back into time before it was burned and replace it with an exact duplicate. Causality's preserved, but not the precise way it happened the first time. A lot of Continuum work is along these lines.
Also, the certainty of the universe continuing to exist does not mean you will continue to do so. Your character can die according to the timeline ... or he can die unexpectedly and thus be in receipt of so much paradox they are erased from existence in order to correct causality. Remember, the Continuum's only goal is to preserve the timeline and to eliminate paradoxes. If your very existence involves so much inherent paradox that they can't fix it -- your father's been shot dead before he can meet your mother and nobody can figure out when or where it happened -- then the Continuum's as likely to erase you from the timeline. Similar goes for anyone who sees a time traveller disappear or reappear; causality making sense matters more.
I've always liked this concept because it answers the most obvious argument against time travel: if there are time travellers, why haven't we seen any of them? Why haven't they filled up all space and time with themselves by now? It answers the question by saying: a time traveller revealing his existence before time travel is discovered would cause an unsolveable paradox for the universe, therefore every time traveller must adhere to not revealing time travel's existence before The Appointed Time.
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm
