Time enough for a good story

~ sandyfairfax

By Sally Carpenter

Some time ago I re-watched the “Back to the Future” movie trilogy, of the intrepid Marty McFly journeys in the past and future to correct certain “mistakes” in the time line. The films are highly entertaining and great food for thought. What if time travel was possible? How would humans use—or misuse—that power?

Time travel has long been a subject for the science fiction genre but not so much for mysteries. After all, if the hero could go back in time and actually witness the crime, we’d have swift justice but a very short story.

Just what is “time,” anyway? Is it a man-made construct? Watches, clocks and calendars only measure time but do not create it. And time is not universal. With the various time zones, we are not all “in” the same minute.

Calendar use is not consistent. While most of the world uses the Gregorian calendar, the Orthodox Church still goes by the Julian calendar. In the Jewish calendar, this is year 5777. The traditional Chinese calendar has a leap month rather than a leap day.

If humans achieve space travel, how will they age in space, since time is different on planets with a longer or shorter orbit around the sun than Earth? Are human biological clocks so ingrained that the astronauts will continue to function on a 24-hour rhythm, or will they adapt to their new surroundings?

 Back here on Earth, what would be the practical uses of time travel? Humans could go back in time to correct certain “wrongs”: stop the assassination of Abraham Lincoln; prevent the birth of Adolph Hitler, save communities from natural disasters.

 But if John Wilkes Booth were stopped, would another man have killed Lincoln at a later time? If Hitler was never born, would a man even worse would rise to power, since at that time Germany needed a strong leader to pull the country out of an economic shambles.

 If the good guys had access to time travel, that means the bad guys could use it too. What if a Neo-Nazi prevented Oskar Shindler and many others from rescuing Jews during the Holocaust? What if a criminal made sure John Hinkley or Mehmet Ali Agca succeeded in their assassination attempts (President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, respectively)?

 Since time travel would be horribly expensive and not all “wrongs” can be righted, who would decide which historical events to change? The government? The millionaires who could afford the equipment? The poor? Victims of violence? Historians?

 What of the ramifications? If John F. Kennedy had not died in Dallas, how much history after that event would change?

Or would time travelers simply go to observe if certain events actually occurred, such as stories in the Bible? What kind of proof could they bring back? Would modern-day cameras and recording devices work in past times? How could one make selfies in first century without anyone noticing?

While this is gist for speculative fiction, it’s doubtful that time travel is possible. Events happen and disappear. While past events are recorded in memories and photographs, one can’t make history happen again. One can’t return 1500 France because 2016 France is occupying that ground. The World Wars are not still being replayed in an alternative universe; at least I hope not.

Attempts to recapture the past usually fail. Promoters tried to recreate the original Woodstock feel-good festival with Woodstock ’94 and ‘99. The first attempt suffered from security breakdown, and ’99 was marred by high vendor prices, violence, rape and fires. The love and goodwill of the original concert got lost in translation.

What your thoughts on time travel? Should humans attempt to change the past or let bygones be bygones? Are there events or choices in your life you’d like to go back and change?

 

 

 

 

Published by sandyfairfax

13 thoughts on “Time enough for a good story”

  1. Just going back in time–or thinking about it–makes my mind boggle. How many other things would change if you went back twenty or fifty years? Would you be you? Probably not, especially with the idea that you went back and killed your own grandfather. There would be no mysteries, however, if you could go back and see whodunit.
    Very good post, Sally.

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  3. The problem with changing any single event in the past is the ripple effect ’cause you don’t know what else will change by changing that one event. And though you may save Lincoln’s life that may cause other unintended consequences that could be even worse. (Or maybe better…)

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    1. Hi, Paul. You never know if changing an event will make things better or worse. Sometimes people can take a tragedy and bring some benefit out of it, such as becoming more compassionate or helping others in the same spot.

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  4. When I lived in Texas I belonged to a group of writers who had two retired US Army generals in it. Both of them told me that the US Army from time to time did experiments in time travel. Based on the information they gave me I wrote the time travel thriller “Yesterday’s Murder” in which a con man escaping from his gambling debts to the Las Vegas mob stumbles upon an Arizona ghost town and is transported back in time crime to stand trial for a murder committed in 1890.

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  5. Such is the stuff of fiction. The movies are fun to watch even if you spend your time pointing out why it just couldn’t happen. In the latest Terminator movie, one of the characters is living at the same time a younger version of himself is living. The Law of Conservation of Energy and Matter states that two objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time. And since nothing is created nor destroyed, but only changed, it can’t happen.. But it still makes for an interesting, if mind twisting, trip whether it’s going into the future or back to the past. But think of the movie, The Time Machine. It was written a long time ago, but it says so much about the future. Just picture all those blond kids reading their iPods instead of just sitting around waiting for their doom, doing nothing… Maybe the fictional future tells a little about the world now. This was a great piece, Sally., as always.

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    1. Thanks, Gayle. That’s the beauty of fiction, that we can create worlds different from the real one, such where time travel is possible and the murderer is always brought to justice in cozies. BTTFuture movies are great fun, although my brain hurts trying to figure out how and why everything is happening (especially in movie No. 2).

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  6. This is terrific brainstorming with links to actual studies. There are so many ways to examine the topic, too.

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      1. Stephen King’s The Dead Zone touches on some of your ideas. I also believe one of the pivotal moments in our lifetime was the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy in 1968,

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  7. HI Amber. That’s what makes time travel stories such a conundrum. If you killed your grandfather, how would you be alive to go back in time and murder him? Or would your grandmother marry someone else and you’d be born with different genes, talents and personality? Oh, the humanity!

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  8. Some studies have been done with time-traveling subatomic particles.
    http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2015/feb/05/photons-simulate-time-travel-in-the-lab
    And this one even has potential for a sci fi murder mystery, since the photons were sent back to destroy their former selves, if I understand the story correctly. The grandfather paradox is: What would happen if you could go back in time and kill your own grandfather?
    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/time-travel-simulation-resolves-grandfather-paradox/

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