Where are all the time travellers?
Apr. 5th, 2010 08:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerSomebody asked this question (rhetorically, of course) on a documentary we watched a while ago, and on the face of it, it's a good one. If time travel is possible, why haven't we been surrounded by quaintly-dressed strangers with futuristic camera phones snapping pictures of the London Eye before it blows up in 2011, pinching priceless art treasures before they get destroyed, or trying to fathom why supposedly intelligent people would ever elect Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair?
Answer is simple, if you go with the theory of time travel as propounded by eminent crank and sf author James P Hogan in The Proteus Operation, which sadly seems to me to be the most plausible. Forget about the notion of new timelines sprouting off whenever someone chooses to have toast instead of cereal for breakfast; much too cumbersome. For the most part, the universe lumbers on along a single timeline, not predestined but going the way of the choices that people actually make, unless someone arrives in it from a different point in time. At that moment, a new alternate timeline is created, and the time traveller inhabits that timeline, not ours. If he's travelled back in time, it branches off from his arrival point; if he's gone forward, he goes to the future as seen from where he is, which is not the future the main line is heading for. (Example: someone going forward from here would travel to a world where global warming has wrecked the climate, while on the main line Professor Dinkelfwat's amazing discovery of greenhouse-gas-eating nanobots in 2014 will save us in the nick of time. I hope.) Either way, while these timelines are just as "real" as the main one by any criteria that the traveller can apply, they're not the main one. The one thing you can't do with this kind of time travel is go home.
Of course, this theory of time travel is extremely depressing and of limited use for stories, like most real-world science these days. But it seems plausible to me, and answers the rhetorical question above.
Answer is simple, if you go with the theory of time travel as propounded by eminent crank and sf author James P Hogan in The Proteus Operation, which sadly seems to me to be the most plausible. Forget about the notion of new timelines sprouting off whenever someone chooses to have toast instead of cereal for breakfast; much too cumbersome. For the most part, the universe lumbers on along a single timeline, not predestined but going the way of the choices that people actually make, unless someone arrives in it from a different point in time. At that moment, a new alternate timeline is created, and the time traveller inhabits that timeline, not ours. If he's travelled back in time, it branches off from his arrival point; if he's gone forward, he goes to the future as seen from where he is, which is not the future the main line is heading for. (Example: someone going forward from here would travel to a world where global warming has wrecked the climate, while on the main line Professor Dinkelfwat's amazing discovery of greenhouse-gas-eating nanobots in 2014 will save us in the nick of time. I hope.) Either way, while these timelines are just as "real" as the main one by any criteria that the traveller can apply, they're not the main one. The one thing you can't do with this kind of time travel is go home.
Of course, this theory of time travel is extremely depressing and of limited use for stories, like most real-world science these days. But it seems plausible to me, and answers the rhetorical question above.
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Date: 2010-04-05 10:58 pm (UTC)