Time Machine Issues

One of the things that I mentioned in class that I don't think I explained very well, is how odd the assumption of time travel is. When H.G. Wells created the idea of the time machine, it was an interesting idea, because he was living in a period of time that was functionally different from his grandfathers. Up until about the 18th century things had been pretty much the exact same for millennias, the power just changed hands. For the first time, in H.G. Wells' time, the use of technology had improved some things and made others obsolete. The idea of the future and the past being radically different was now not only a possibility, but a growing reality. But, the past and the future don't really exist.

For example, if I were to get into a time machine right now and go back to the Ancient Roman Republic, that place is no longer the past for me. It's no longer the past for anyone. It is most certainly the present, for me, for Caesar, and for anyone alive at the moment. For them the past that they can imagine is the ancient Greeks, the founding of Rome, and the Siege of Troy, where they believed Rome traces its beginnings from. All because somebody at some point wrote about it. But, it doesn't exist, in reality it's gone. It stopped existing, which means it doesn't exist. It exists within the imaginations of the Romans. To create a tree the seed must cease to exist. Therefore, the past doesn't exist in reality, solely in Imagination.

Similarly, the future doesn't actually exist either. The future is also within human imaginations. A long running joke in science fiction has been to ask the question, "Where are all the jet-packs and flying cars". The same place they've always been! In your head!

So really a time machine doesn't actually go back in time, it just changes the conditions of what the present means. So the paradox of time travel, I think is less "what happens if i kill my own grandfather", as posited in class, but more "how can i experience, what is by its very definition, cannot be experienced?" How can I see what cannot be seen? And if you pay attention to all the time travel movies, that is always the central conflict. In Looper, "young Joe" makes it clear that he doesn't care about his future, and by extension his future self. He can't see his own future, even if he is a little more forward thinking than his compatriots. "Old Joe" can't see the future that he's about to create by killing those children, which is ultimately fixing the time line into the destructive place it's going. Because when going back and forth into the past and future there is always a gamble that people pretend isn't there, that there actions have further reaching consequences both positive (like in Back to the Future) and negative(Looper or Butterfly Effect). The exact, exact, exact same as the present. The only show that pretends there are no consequences of doing whatever the fuck you want is Doctor Who, and even they allude to having consequences sometimes.