I am not feeling well (not still, but again!), so I really can’t seem to get my head together to write a post. Contrary to the beliefs of JD Ryan and others, it does require a great deal of mental effort to formulate conservative thoughts.
I do have something semi-mindless to talk about, though.
My husband and I have been watching Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on FOX (online, actually), which is a really great show, if you like The Terminator.
Anyway, he hates watching Terminator stuff with me because I cannot get the whole time travel thing. I am so not a sci-fi geek by nature. (But is sure is trying to nurture me into one.)
I seriously have a hard time understanding how John even exists. I mean, his future self sent back the man who impregnated his mother with him. How does that work??
That was rhetorical. I know the explanation. I get it (sort of).
But that is not what I wanted to say.
Okay, now John and Sarah (and Cameron) are trying to stop Skynet, so they can have a life and not have to always be on the run from robot assassins from the future.
What I wonder is, if they succeed, will John cease to exist? Because if they stop it, then the resistance will never exist and he will not send Kyle Reese back to the past, where he impregnates Sarah with John.
Thoughts, anyone?
February 19th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
Wow, yer blowin’ my mind man. So, if all that happens, will Arnold still be Gov. of Kalifornia?
Seriously, this is why, I think, that time travel to the past isn’t really possible, but I’m not up on all the physics of it.
February 19th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
It’s good to know that even when you’re sick, I’m in your thoughts. Seriously, though, you’ve been sick a lot this past year, haven’t you? It’s not like your kids are bringing stuff home from school. What’s up with that? Does your husband get sick a lot?
What do you mean ‘you don’t get this time travel stuff’? Being a conservative requires being stuck in the past and fighting the future.
February 19th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
“It’s not like your kids are bringing stuff home from school.”
I know, right? It’s pretty annoying. I thought this would be a benefit of homeschooling.
When someone here gets sick, we are usually all sick. I think my husband brings stuff home from work. There are a lot of people who go to work sick and infect every one.
Although, my two older boys do go over to their friends’ houses or play at the park at least three afternoons a week. And they go to the children’s ministry at church every Sunday.
Also, I have been volunteering at the preschool program at our church.
It’s not like we don’t have contact with people.
But, it is not just me who has been sick, we all have been. So, don’t worry, I don’t have some sort of serious illness.
Actually, it is more the kids being sick that is keeping me off the computer. Imagine three sick kids couped up in the same apartment together day after day. There is some serious bickering around here.
“Being a conservative requires being stuck in the past and fighting the future.”
If only we could harness the power of time travel…
February 20th, 2008 at 9:36 am
I don’t hate watching sci fi with you!
It’s fun to talk about the whole time travel stuff.
‘Being a conservative requires being stuck in the past and fighting the future.’
Being a liberal means denying the past and present and dreaming up a happy future! Of course it leaves you angry because things are the way you want them to be…
February 20th, 2008 at 10:59 am
“I don’t hate watching sci fi with you!”
Yeah, I should have said that you hate the fact that it took you three years of explaining before I finally understood the whole John Connor thing.
I’m sure you love that I finally like watching sci-fi after years of not liking it.
February 20th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Okay. Leave it to the left-wing geek to come in and save the day for you. There are three approaches in sci-fi to the effects of tampering with the past. Let’s look at this example. If the machines succeed in killing John Connor, there is no resistance. Hence, no reason to go back and kill John Connor. Hence John Connor doesn’t get killed, which means the resistance happens, which means… and around and around. Using sci-fi scenarios, from the most aesthetic, to the most grounded in science (which isn’t saying much, as science provides us no way to go backwards in time, short of a “wormhole” which is basically just a mathematical construct, rather than anything reflecting actual phenomena as we understand it), we can say that the possible results from the Terminators successfully killing Connor would be:
a) The Paradox-Armageddon model: A paradox is created. The structure of the universe is predicated on traditional, mathematical logic, so you create such a paradox and the universe falls apart. Poof.
b) The Dialectical-Universe model: A paradox is created, but who cares? The universe works on a larger scale than simple linear human logic – it can absorb cause-effect screw-ups just fine, thankyouverymuch. Cause and effect will continue under their old rules forward, despite any paradoxes created by mucking with the timeline. If that leaves a character or two with memories of a past that never happened, what does the universe care?
c) The Quantum Universe model: When you apply quantum mechanics to the structure of the universe, strange things happen. You end up with a universe that – in the sense that the universe’s structure is space & time as a cohesive fabric – is shaped like a football. On one end is a point: creation. On the other end is a point: termination. Between these points, time and space spread way out, and each linear path of this separation is a distinct timeline, or – as we sci-fi fans like to say – an alternate reality. The closer you get from the two ends, the more possibly different timelines break off (as the body of the football gets wider). At either end, there are no alternates, as every scenario shares a single beginning and a single ending. In this scenario, cause and effect can stay sacrosanct, because if the terminators are successful, they simply create a new alternate history without John Connor that deviates from the other from that point on. The irony here is that, if this approach is operative, there’s nothing the terminators can do to affect the world they came from, ever. The best they can do is create new worlds where they win, that exist not forward or backwards in time (in relation to their own future), but sideways in time.
You can also say there’s the idea in sci fi literature that traveling back in time to change things is pointless… lets call this the “Predestination Model”… because history has already happened, and if you go back and muck with it, you’ll only – somehow – be playing a role in bringing about what has already occurred.
Does that help?
February 20th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Okay, first I challenge anyone to beat the geekiness level of that comment.
You answered the question about what would happen if the terminators killed John Connor, but my question was actually what would happen if they stopped Skynet from being launched in the first place, which means the computers would not take over, there would be no Judgment Day, there would be no resistance, and there would be no need for future John to send Reese back to protect Sarah in the first Terminator movie, which is how John is conceived.
If that happened, would he still exist? (Think “Back to the Future,” when Marty starts to disappear from the picture because he accidentally prevented his parents from getting together.)
Obviously, this isn’t going to happen because it contradicts the third movie, but I just wondered what would happen if it did.
It is pretty clear to me that this story operates from the “Predestination Model,” since the events of the 2nd movie did not stop Skynet, they only changes how it happened.
Already when Sarah destroyed the Turk, it was rebuilt, so it seems that the final outcome (Skynet) is predetermined.
Note to all: I have not watched this week’s episode yet, so no spoilers.
Wow, Odum, you really are as geeky as you say! Have you watched The Sarah Connor Chronicles?
February 20th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
The example I used was just an example – you can plug whatever “travel back and change the past” scenario you want into those approaches.
And no – the predestination model is not in play with the Terminator films, because they changed how it played out – which means they changed history, just not in the way (and to the extent) they wanted.
An example of the predestination approach would be the old “Assignment Earth” episode of the original Star Trek, where our heroes, in a misguided attempt to protect a nuke from going off in the 1960’s, delay a benevolent alien’s mission to prematurely detonate the device safely until well past his intended margin of error. When he succeeds despite their interference (saving lives), they check their history tapes to find that, according to history, the explosion happened exactly when it was supposed to. My messing with recorded history, they merely played a part themselves in it, changing nothing.
Do I get even more geek points by bringing Star Trek into it?
(No – haven’t yet watched the Sarah Connor Chronicles”, even though it has River from Firefly in it.
Oooh! More geek points!)
February 20th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Ah, thanks for clearing up my misunderstanding of the predestination thing.
And a word of caution, there is a fine line between geek points and loser points. Be sure not to cross it!
February 20th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
I just turned 40. I’m more worried about cholesterol points.
February 20th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
I challenge anyone to bring geekiness into politics the way odum does on a regular basis. I’m just surprised there’s been no obscure comic book pictures in the comments here.
February 22nd, 2008 at 12:45 pm
I keep hoping Bill Simmon’s gonna pop in and back me up, here. But it looks like it’s all up to me.
February 22nd, 2008 at 4:14 pm
I would love to hear from Bill, but I know that he does not read She’s Right.
Maybe he would if I had a regular sci-fi feature.
February 27th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Charity just clued me in to this thread in an email. It’s not that I don’t like She’s Right per se. As a rule, I don’t spend much time in political blogs — I don’t read Odum’s or JD’s blogs regularly either for this reason (except during election season, like now, when I check all your blogs daily), so please don’t take it personally, Charity. I actually have a specific and personal reason for not engaging in political blogs regularly despite my natural interest in politics and my genuine fondness for you all as individuals.
Okay, that said, Odum — I got your back. You summed up the typical approaches to time travel in popular SF quite nicely. In my opinion, anyone that’s given this any sort of thought simply has to embrace the many worlds version. If you go back in time and muck about, you create a new universe that is distinct from the one you left. So it doesn’t matter if you kill your own grandfather thereby making your own existence impossible — that just means you’ll never be born in this new universe. The other universe you left behind is unchanged.
Moreover (and this is me postulating actual time travel here — I’m not speculating about what the writers of the Sarah Connor Chronicles think), if one travels back in time and changes anything — even saying hi to someone, even displacing the air one occupies in that past, one would instantly create a new universe that would be distinct from the one that was left behind.
And my guess is that the ripple effects of the changes that you would make in that past would be chaotic, mathematically. That is, say you go back to the year 1 (or 3 BC or whatever it is) and witness the birth of Christ. That change (you standing outside the manger and peering though the straw vs. you being absent) would have micro effects on the surrounding environment — the air displacement, the heat exchange from your body, the moved straw, the depressed soil where you stood, etc. — and like the flapped wings of a butterfly in China, those small effects would spread out and given enough time, the results would almost certainly be enormous — world changing.
So these SF shows and movies that involve people changing the timeline and then having to somehow fix it are just silly.
I don’t know how the Terminator folks are actually conceptualizing the time stream, but if I had to guess, I’d say they’re using some version of the many worlds scenario. And the implications you mentioned are right, Odum. That means John and Sarah are just fighting so they themselves don’t have to endure Judgment Day and the subsequent apocalypse. Sarah and John of the other universes that they didn’t affect are still screwed.
I actually like this new Terminator series but not because they deal with time travel in some interesting way — mostly it’s because Sarah Connor and Cameron are total hotties. Mmm… robot love.