Thursday 7 June 2012

About - Time-Travel

*please mind the gap between the spoilers and the blogpost. (it means there's spoilers, ignoramus.)*

I want to write a book on time-travel theories. I know. I don't know what the heck I just said either. I don't even watch Doctor Who.

But there is still something about the whole concept that appeals to me. I don't reeeally like watching time/dimensional-travel things, not because I don't like them, but because the possibilities are so vast that it kinda scares me. The idea of changing something in the past that will rob you of everything you know in the future, that's just frightening.

Just think about Sliders. They create some freaking warp-portal-thing, next thing you know, they're all doomed to wander though dimension after dimension until they can find their way home, and as there are millions of possible realities and dimensions, the chances of that happening are about zero. Maybe there's an actual decimal figure to represent what your chances are, but it has so many noughts after the decimal point that you might as well call it zero. Or infinity.

Parry Trotter

I liked the Harry Potter time-travel, I suppose. That wasn't as scary as some versions of the same thing might have been. In The Prisoner Of Askaban, Harry and Hermione have to go back in time to save the day as usual, only in this instance of time-travel, it's like they're bystanders. Kind of. They can see themselves doing all the things they did, but they're not ghosts and they're not floating orbs of consciousness. They're physical, like copies, or clones; they can touch and communicate with things as if they were the Original Harry and Hermione. Even their past selves, if they wanted to.

I'd never heard of that type of time-travel before. I'm used to people going back into their own bodies, taking with them all the knowledge they gained in the future so they can stop whatever happened that time from happening this time. But... really? If you went back into your own body, what if you only knew what you knew the first time round you were living that period of time. Thinking about it is weird.

Consequences

The most mind-boggling bit about time-travel is that unless they've been there and done it, no-one can EVER accurately predict how or if things would change. We can only speculate, and a lot of speculations I've heard have been unbelievably crap. You mean to tell me that you went to the past, changed a bunch of shit and returned to the present with your memory of the travel intact and nothing has changed?

Okay - one.

What is the guarantee that you'll retain that memory? If you continued to live out that timeline, maybe. But if your RETURNED to the present/future instantly, who can say? It's the world as you know it, so maybe you wouldn't notice a difference. But who knows. Maybe you would say, "Hang on... this isn't right.... this isn't supposed to be like this, I must have changed the future!!!!"

Aaand two.

I've always wondered about this, because I hardly ever see it in science fiction - shouldn't the very fact that you travelled to the past changed the present/future? Say you went to the past and did NOTHING, just stood in a particular spot for two minutes and returned to your time. The very fact that you travelled through time was DIFFERENT to the original timeline. Maybe your footprints were a home to some bugs. Maybe your presence made more carbon dioxide and less oxygen in the air that originally would have been. Maybe you just behaved differently with your knowledge of having made the travel. Shouldn't that mean that the present is different the moment you get back?

Hmm! That reminds me a little bit of The Butterfly Effect, which I love (as scary as it is), and also this film that I think is called A Sound Of Thunder, also surprisingly good. I don't know why 'surprisingly', maybe because it started off slow. Can't remember. I love musing about pointlessness like this. Pointless now, yes...


... but once I've found a good plot from this and it's in a book, it will be pointless no more.


Star's Dream:
The Warning/Philosophy Prophecy

At the end of March 2011, I had one of those dreams where in plot, it is incredible, in action, it is vivid and terrifying, and in trying to get the f--- out of it and wake up, its a frantic struggle.

A close colleague of mine and I had attended a Philosophy seminar, at which sat the four teachers who had tought me the subject at college. We listened with curiousity, wondering why everything said was so symbolic. As we listened, dread dawned on us. What was being said wasn't just theories, hidden in their words was a prediction that a war about to erupt. And not just that, they were telling us where to go and who our enemies were.

My colleague and I couldn't believe it. We rushed out of there and summoned up as many forces as we could military, special forces, an army full of people with every skill you could imagine. We could only get to our enemies base by ship, so we sailed. He was Captain of the ship, and I was the Master Archer. I planned to direct my archers to shoot from afar if they tried to apprehend us by water, otherwise we would quietly manoeuvre into their base and take it from there.

The point is, we failed. Pretty much our whole army died and we were about a blink away from death too when my colleague and I activated a time-travelling ability we had, that can only be worked together. Learning from out mistakes, we tried to confront the enemy again without success. Our only insurance was that we had our time-travel ability. It was like a safety-net. We could try anything we wanted and if we messed up, go back and do it again. However, on our third try we were silently ambushed and my colleague was instantly killed, cutting me off from our ability as it can only be activated together.

As the only survivor, enemy soldiers took me into the dungeons of their base and tortured me. In a fit of unbearable pain, I activated my ability alone - an utter shock to me, as I didn't know that I could. The good news is that it sent me back to the right place and time - the bad news is that without my colleague, it did not sent me back to the same timeline. At the seminar, when I tried to explain to my colleague about the impending doom, he was really confused. He didn't understand and thought I was crazy. I approached the philosophers, but they didn't believe me. I was lost in a dimension that was both the same and completely different.



Not gonna lie - despite being complicated,
my dreams can be fckin awesome.

Day 4.
Dawnstar xx

P.S. What is Doctor Who a Doctor of? Time Travel? If so, who authorised this? I'm sure there's no PhD in such a thing.
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