The Rules of Time Travel an Epic Look at Time Travel

Is there anyone that if given the chance wouldn’t travel back in time? Think of all the possibilities, not only could you fix what once went wrong, but you might be able to bring back valuable collectibles such as old comics now worth a fortune, that 69 Dodge Charger you’ve always wanted because it reminds of you of an old TV show,  perhaps make millions of dollars on the stock market, or revisit friends and relatives that have passed away, see historical events with your own eyes. You could watch a speech by John F Kennedy, maybe you could prevent the Hindenberg disaster, or even stop the Abraham Lincoln from getting shot which according to one Twilight Zone episode can’t be done. Time travel holds a vast multitude of possibilities. 

Amazing Fantasy 15

Let’s set aside whether or not time travel is even possible and ask ourselves before we head into this vast unknown landscape of time and space just what are the rules of time travel? We wouldn’t want to have an accident in time and space or find out we’ve completely erased our lives from memory. 

There have been a ton of science fiction novels, movies, and television where each story seemed to follow its own time travel laws or appeared to just make up rules as they went along. I’d like to look at those more common ideas along with some good old fashioned speculation. 

Are you ready to go down the rabbit hole or should I say worm hole?

What is time?

What is time? Where did time begin? To answer that question we need to go back in time. We measure time by days and nights, hours, minutes, and seconds. In the beginning there was no night or day, only black emptiness all around. 

Imagine nothing exists. There are no gases, molecules, atoms no energy of any sort because as we said this is the beginning…the beginning of everything, but then something must have been present or we go nowhere from here. 

Not to get too far off track, bare with me for just a second, from my own personal view of the beginning of the universe I have a really hard time reconciling the concept that we should believe that everything, came from elements that we are just supposed to accept as being always there. You can’t have an explosion such as a big bang without energy, gases, or something.

I get the argument then, that belief in a creator would then force us into the same corner, but if we need something or someone to exist already, and how else can you have a beginning with absolutely nothing, then I, personally believe that logic would then dictate a creator who transcends all known scientific laws because he created those very laws…someone beyond our comprehension because if you think about it long and hard enough creation is just beyond our ability to completely comprehend.

If time travel were a real possibility, then there would be rules as would be expected from an orderly creation. We must face the very possibility that time travel itself is outlawed otherwise it could very well cause time and space to go into other chaos. But we want to explore time travel as a fact so we will use our imagination to explore what if.

I guess its safe to say one reason for our fascination with time and thus time travel is that our life is unfortunately limited on this Earth.

With death a certainty and time being limited to all us, mankind has became obsessed with time its passing and measurement. We humans, all of us, only have so much of it. It continues to slip out of grasp daily. Every second every word, every thought, every single solitary action becomes a thing of the past. Always we hurtle toward death inch by inch, faster and faster the closer we get to the end. Yes, time does seem to go faster the older we get. It seems a bit unfair, but in reality time doesn’t move faster, just our perception of time.

But, what if we could stop time or better yet go back in time? Could we then regain some of what we lose on a daily basis?  Such is the subject of science fiction books, movies, TV programs, and imaginations of many a dreamer, myself included.

Is time travel even possible?

Is time travel even possible? Well, Albert Einstein did at least theorize that we could travel into the future. If you build yourself a rocketship or spacecraft, and you went on a journey into space going faster than the speed of light, then according to Einstein when you arrived back on Earth, you would only be a couple of hours older while everyone else would be years older.

But what about traveling backward, that’s what everyone dreams of doing isn’t it? Well, then you’d probably need a wormhole or a machine that could harness a vast amount of energy... a lot of energy!

But since most of us aren’t smart enough to build a time machine, let’s assume we have a genius friend or by some unexplained accident find an open portal through time what would the rules of time travel be?

What happens if you change a moment in your life?

What if we did go back and changed something what happens to our future self, if anything? There is a story I heard that really puts this idea into perspective from the 1980 film, “The Final Countdown” with Kirk Douglas and Martin Sheen.   

In the movie a modern aircraft carrier goes through a time storm and ends up the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. The crew is faced with the question, "Do we stop the attack on Pearl Harbor and what would the ramifications be?"

Sheen’s character, Warren Lasky asked the question, what if you were to go back in time and kill your own grandfather before he got married or had any children. If that happened how could you ever be born, and if you were never born, how could you go back into time to eventually kill your own grandfather?

And so, you have what time travel stories like to refer to as a paradox.

Having contemplated questions like this as a science fiction writer myself on the Time Cruisers novel series available at Amazon right now. 

Let’s say you go back in time and change anything from the past. Theoretically, this could cause you to cease to exist, or to have never traveled back to the past to begin with. But, perhaps no matter what you do, nothing can change the fact that you have been running around in the past at some point. It stands as an fixed event in time. If this is the case then you have by all intents and purposes simply created a separate time-line. 

Basically, you created another road, another path into which your life would flow. That idea is not without it’s problems though because it assumes that you have basically created two separate lives for yourself which means there are two of you with two separate sets of memories.

Marvel Comics and the Marvel Cinematic Universe follows the rule that if one goes back into time and changes something, it automatically creates a divergent timeline.

According to Professor Hulk - “Time doesn’t work that way. Changing the past doesn’t change the future. Think about it, if you travel to the past, that past becomes your future and your former present becomes the past, which can’t now be changed by your new future.”

Professor Hulk

When I first heard that, I really had no idea what he was trying to say. It takes a lot of thought to understand time travel rules. Besides, let’s face it a lot of times movies and television given enough time will do things that break the time travel rules they created for their characters.

So, I wonder how many movies would be ruined if you take away the ability to alter one’s destiny? If in fact, time travel did exist and all you could do is create alternate timelines then it sort of takes the fun out of time traveling doesn’t it.

But, of course there’s the other aspect of time travel, and that’s just being able to see and hear sights and sounds that no longer exist, and who is to say you can’t grab a copy of Action Comics number one and take it back to the present and sell it for a million bucks? If we are unable to alter our pasts even with the unlikely creation of a time machine, then I guess, we better work really hard to make sure our futures go as well as possible. Don’t take anything for granted.

The Spectator

Perhaps, time simply occurs once and that is the end of it. Even, if, you manage to go back into the past and mess around, perhaps, you could not kill your grandfather, even if you tried. After all, he did live long enough to get married, he did live long enough to have children. It happened. It’s a set point, a group of events that cannot be changed.

In this case, a time traveler is nothing more than a visitor, a spectator of what has happened and anything that the traveler does was part of the original timeline as well.

To understand time a little more, let’s imagine that the Creator of time being God is outside of time and time is nothing more than a giant painting with a beginning, middle, and end that he could just put his finger upon at any given point along the painting. To the viewpoint of God the painting is not fluid, it has already been painted. He is looking at a finished product that has already been completed. But, to us, to take in all of time in one gulp, in a way such as this would, quite literally, blow our feeble minds. We think and live in a linear timeline because we cannot take into our minds any more than that.

What about meeting yourself in the past? Science fiction has several possibilities. In the DC Comics I grew up reading, if a person went back to a time where they already existed they would become phantoms. This happened to Superman on a number of occasions.

 

In the film, “Time Cop” starring Van Damme, if you as much as shook hands with your younger self, you would die a gory death instantly.

In Back to the Future a person could just hang out unseen from their younger self and it would all be good. If memory serves me correctly, Doc Brown was very concerned about creating time paradoxes that would destroy the universe and meeting yourself was one of those things you really didn’t want to do.

Back to the Future Michael J. Fox

In the 2002 movie the Time Machine, which was directed by Simon Wells the great grandson of H.G. Wells, the main character Alexander Hartdegen played by Guy Pearce went back into time over and over again in an attempt to save the love of his life only to have her die in every attempt. Thus, when it’s your time to go. It’s your time and nothing can change it.

The Time Machine

What about the existence of parallel worlds? Could they be just alternate timelines? Well, that’s a good question.  I used to think if parallel worlds were real they were the same as alternate timelines, but in truth, perhaps, the distinction could be made that a parallel world exists separately from any manipulation of time, however, scientists who like to theorize about such things might say that a parallel world is created every time we have a major choice to make. Every fork in the road creates another world where one of us goes left and the other right, but if that were real then you’d have to assume some time travel was involved somehow.

If you like the idea of parallel worlds, I suggest watching the first couple of seasons of Sliders. It’s about a young science student that creates a handheld device that opens a portal into other worlds. It’s a lot of fun for the first couple of seasons and then it starts just getting really weird after that.

Butterfly Effect

Then there is the less likely view shown in movies like the Butterfly Effect that changing a moment in the past in your life simply causes the future to change once you arrive back in the present, but you the traveler now have 2 memories of 2 distinct histories.

This is probably the most popular time travel rule of thumb for most time travel stories, and it is the most fun. I assume the Butterfly Effect is named after the short story, “A Sound of Thunder” written by Ray Bradbury where a group of tourists goes back to the age of dinosaurs and inadvertently steps on a butterfly which completely alters the future.