Excuse me!?! Have we met before? That was just unprovoked and uncalled for.
Travelling to parallel realites?
- Thread starter Crewman47
- Start date
Excuse me!?! Have we met before? That was just unprovoked and uncalled for.
I would imagine that if alternate realities exist then there's a concept of relative distance between realities; eg the realities where flying cars are becoming commonplace would be nearer to us than the ones where travel between alternate realities has been developed, because the former would be less different from ours than the latter. It therefore seems unlikely that as yet we're being visited by persons from nearby alternate realities. If they are here, perhaps they're either time-travellers from the future or "sideways" travellers from far-away realities where technology is dramatically more advanced than in this neck of the woods; eg ones where the Dark Ages never happened.
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Logically, you'd need to bootstrap yourself to the original timeline somehow; eg by travelling via wormhole. Otherwise, the task of returning to the original timeline would appear to be pretty much impossible, even in principle. If the many-worlds theory is true, then seemingly there's a timeline for every single quantum permutation of the entire universe in all its history. Hell of a big haystack to go searching in. The enormity of the task might even make the actual travel bit look like the easy part.
You cannot tell me you said that stuff about UFOs being time machines without ever having seen the movie Repo Man. That was a direct quote ripped from the lines of Miller, as was my response. And if you really haven't seen it, do so.
Plate of shrimp.
That would be this one. You should have left breadcrumbs or something.
From the Angel episode Underneath:
"WESLEY: (standing, excited) You could go anywhere, you could leave.
ILLYRIA: That's not possible.
WESLEY: Of course it's possible. Are you telling me the great Illyria, idol of millions, was limited to one small dimension?
ILLYRIA: I traveled all of them as I pleased. I walked worlds of smoke and half-truths, intangible.
(turns away) Worlds of torment and of unnamable beauty.
(looks into the mirror, Wesley's reflection over her shoulder) Opaline towers as high as small moons. Glaciers that rippled with insensate lust. And one world with nothing but shrimp. I tired of that one quickly."
This kind of references the Buffy episode Superstar. That is all.
^Scrawny71, double posting is against forum rules. Use the multi quote feature to reply to multiple people.
To be honest, I haven't seen that movie in 20 years. I may have conjured that quote subconsciously. Since you were quoting a movie in reply to me, I retract my outrage.
To be honest, I haven't seen that movie in 20 years. I may have conjured that quote subconsciously. Since you were quoting a movie in reply to me, I retract my outrage.
I have traveled here from a parallel universe. I know this because my car keys are in a different place than where I left them this morning. Everything else is the same.
Can anyone help me get back???
Can anyone help me get back???
I thought you were riffing off the movie where Miller's monolog intersected with this thread's subject matter. I was just trying to let you know I was in on it without blowing the gag to everyone else. My mistake.
And just to let those of you who haven't seen it know what I am talking about:
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4QKiYar9pI[/yt]
Sorry for diverting the thread to a humorous offshoot that was not really there in the first place.
I've oft pondered the idea that while other quantum realities may not be "literal" places (I've encountered the current theories on this before), that one function of the entire mechanism might be that such worldlines are forced into literal existence if one attempts to physically travel there, and then exist from that point forward. In essence, "going there" is creating a virtual reality for physical matter to enter, at past a certain point that reality becomes stable and self-perpetuating.
What an unsettling thought it would be if you could find out whether the reality you occupied didn't "always" exist, and was given a specific definition at some point in the past; even your own memories and past experiences in the timeline retroactively coming into being, from your limited and linear perspective.
As far as time travel goes, I once heard the theory that while a traveling who goes back in time is forever unable to return to our exact present, that he still would appear to return because an alternate version of himself that is imperceptibly identical would in turn arrive from another timeline - the new arrival himself unable to return to his original starting position. With an infinite number of potential timelines, it is turtles all the way down.
On the subject of the "distance" between realities, I like to work with this model, at least as far as writing fiction goes: the closer a reality is to yours, the more identical it is, but at a certain point it is so identical that it doesn't have a perceptible existence to you. At a certain stage, there are an infinite number of infinitely more identical timelines to yours, and these, from your perspective, exist only as potential. They're not physical - in your terms - and you can't go into one and meet your identical quantum clone and have a chat. Compared to your own timeline, another reality only becomes existant when it has diverged enough from your own to have some really significant differences.
As you thumb back and forth through the deck of universes, everyone's perspective is relative.
In a piece of fiction that I'm developing though, there is a statistical probability, extremely remote but measured against infinity, a certainty to occur, that states once in a while a highly divergent reality is founded nested among a spread of otherwise evenly gradient timelines. In other words, it's like this: while traveling from your world to the world with the flying cars, you find a dozen Earths that are each only mildly different from yours. But halfway to the flying car world, you abruptly pass through a world where the last ice age never happened and something caused the human species to go extinct fifty thousand years ago. Or a universe where Earth never formed at all four billion years ago. These abnormal realities, being pressed up and intertwined with otherwise nearly identical ones, result in strange phenomenon for their neighbors.
What an unsettling thought it would be if you could find out whether the reality you occupied didn't "always" exist, and was given a specific definition at some point in the past; even your own memories and past experiences in the timeline retroactively coming into being, from your limited and linear perspective.
As far as time travel goes, I once heard the theory that while a traveling who goes back in time is forever unable to return to our exact present, that he still would appear to return because an alternate version of himself that is imperceptibly identical would in turn arrive from another timeline - the new arrival himself unable to return to his original starting position. With an infinite number of potential timelines, it is turtles all the way down.
On the subject of the "distance" between realities, I like to work with this model, at least as far as writing fiction goes: the closer a reality is to yours, the more identical it is, but at a certain point it is so identical that it doesn't have a perceptible existence to you. At a certain stage, there are an infinite number of infinitely more identical timelines to yours, and these, from your perspective, exist only as potential. They're not physical - in your terms - and you can't go into one and meet your identical quantum clone and have a chat. Compared to your own timeline, another reality only becomes existant when it has diverged enough from your own to have some really significant differences.
As you thumb back and forth through the deck of universes, everyone's perspective is relative.
In a piece of fiction that I'm developing though, there is a statistical probability, extremely remote but measured against infinity, a certainty to occur, that states once in a while a highly divergent reality is founded nested among a spread of otherwise evenly gradient timelines. In other words, it's like this: while traveling from your world to the world with the flying cars, you find a dozen Earths that are each only mildly different from yours. But halfway to the flying car world, you abruptly pass through a world where the last ice age never happened and something caused the human species to go extinct fifty thousand years ago. Or a universe where Earth never formed at all four billion years ago. These abnormal realities, being pressed up and intertwined with otherwise nearly identical ones, result in strange phenomenon for their neighbors.
No, because if you go back in time, you're still part of the resolved quantum system of the time you came from, and in that quantum system, your dad was never murdered. Your own presence within your past quantum-entangles it with the future that's already resolved a certain way and makes it part of the same fixed system. So from your perspective as a time traveler, you'd be predestined to fail if you tried to murder your father. Within your quantum frame of reference, you would be unable to alter anything in your own past, because you're already bound to that particular timeline and can't perceive any others, can't receive any information from them.
Does this mean there's no free will? No, because it's a special case. As long as you're in your own present, moving forward in time, then you're part of a quantum system that hasn't been resolved yet and you can affect events. But if you go back into your own past, then that's a quantum system that's already resolved and you can't alter it, can't perceive any information except that which is already a part of your own past. (By analogy, your freedom of movement is a lot more constrained if you're trapped in a box than it is if you're walking around in an open field. Free will is contingent on the circumstances.)
Of course, an unalterable past doesn't give you a lot of storytelling options, so fiction tends to favor the model that history can be changed. But if we're talking about what real physics says on the matter, then it says you can't change your past, period. You can't perceive the same event happening in more than one way, because the equations wouldn't add up and the physics would break down.
But then, physics also says that any wormhole or equivalent passage into the past might be subject to runaway particle-radiation feedback (as particles cycle through it into its own past and multiply themselves many times over) that would cause its rapid collapse before anyone could pass through it. So time travel might never be possible anyway.
Well Lost managed to have a pretty entertaining season using this model. Everything the main characters tried to change ended up being something that did happen.
Jack refused to operate on young Ben Linus, so Kate & Sawyer "saved" him by bringing him to the others thus creating the Ben we know. Or when the losties tried to set off the bomb to change the future; but (IMO) just simply caused "the Incident" that was previously mentioned on the Swan Hatch recordings
