Why movie time travel is impossible

One of the most frustrating experiences of watching a movie is when the logic completely breaks down and destroys the suspension of disbelief, leaving you to mutter, "what the?!*?" One genre of cinema is practically geared to destroy the illusion of a fantasy world: any movie involving time travel. It seems that no matter how hard the writers / directors try to resolve possible paradoxes and just plain stupidity, they invariably fail and I am left thinking to myself about why none of it makes any sense at all.

All time travel movies or television series I have ever watched create unsolvable problems with one simple, mistaken assumption. And I am here to set the record straight, in a purely non-scientific way. Plus, i like to bitch about things.

A couple of time travel works of fiction have actually realized the real central paradox and have made fun of it. "The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" and "bill and Ted's excellent adventure" realized that if going both forward and backwards in time were possible, then the intent to travel back in time at some point in the future causes a huge problem. You can just convince yourself that tomorrow you are going to rob a bank and go back in time and then poof, you appear with a bag full of money. Imagine the following scenario in a world where going back in time were possible. You lock yourself in a time machine which you have pre-programmed to go back 5 years in time and you take a knockout drug to prevent yourself from stopping the experiment. you have lots of money to give your past self. You go back, give yourself the money along with plans on how to build a time machine, and then set the time machine to return to your "real" future timeline one hour earlier than you left. When you get back, you destroy the time machine with yourself in it and never go back to give yourself the money to build a time machine. huh. now, you could repeat this process as many times as you like, maybe every year on your birthday. There is no way this makes any sense.

Most writers who have tangled with time travel seem to think that huge paradoxes arise from meeting your future or past self and exploding or ceasing to exist when touching (dr. who), from altering future events (heroes, quantum leap), or of the possibility of multiple timelines/universes (many DC comic books). However, the real problem with all of these is that the actual act of traveling through time is conceptualized incorrectly. In any time travel fiction I have seen or read, the act of moving through time is produced by the sudden disappearance of individuals or objects and their reappearance in another time/place. This is completely impossible, and not supported by any of Einstein's theories.

Einstein is often cited as proving time travel was possible by showing the relative nature of time. But that is not exactly true. What he showed is that there is a flow of time, and that our individual relative experience of the rate of flow of time is dependent on speed and mass. So going forwards in time, relatively speaking, is kosher and most likely possible. But going backwards is a complete impossibility. The problem is that you cannot vanish from the space time continuum and reappear at another point. Aside from the fact that the universe is not static (it's moving) and that it would be impossible to predict where you would reappear (inside Jupiter, or millions of light years away from your goal in the middle of empty space, you cannot disappear.

What would a real time travel experience look like to outsiders?? easy. You would not go anywhere (no magic). You would either just be moving really fast or really slow. You would not just vanish. Impossible. on the plus side, you might not age when traveling forward. But everyone would be going forward in time, only at different rates.

Also, if the possibility of going back in time were at all possible, this would guarantee the existence of multiple timelines and thus time travelers would have already arrived to prove it exists. It doesn't matter if it takes 1 billion years to invent a time machine, as soon as somebody used it once, then time travelers would appear all over the place in our own time.

Part 2 of: how should god act? Noah

The story of Noah and the ark, now revitalized through a semi-awful movie with the otherwise wonderful Steve Carell, is ground into the subconscious of anyone who was raised in a Christian household (like I was). I think that parents tell it repeatedly to children because of the great rain/flood imagery, coupled with the good intention of teaching their children to be moral. It's one of those stories that is very easy to illustrate with vivid pictures and colors, and so the tale makes its way into many christian story collections for kids.

To recap: god creates man (see last post), then there is a rather large blank spot in biblical history with no explanation, then suddenly there is full blown civilization with bustling cities, ethnicity (or tribes or whatever), large agricultural system in place with domesticated animals, etc. Yet, despite all the advances brought by civilization, mankind has become completely evil, up to the point where only one man on earth is worth saving. That would be Noah, enter stage left. The rest of his family's good or evilness isn't really up for question, since really only the male head of the household counts as anything at this point in biblical history. SO, god has the brilliant plan to wipe out all of humanity and start over with this one family. Apparently he is into recessive genetic traits and incest.

Let's analyze this. Apart from rather pointless, scientific questions such as how could water flood the whole earth, couldn't people escape by going to higher ground, why were there no other boats on earth since lakes clearly existed as well as the sea, it was only for 1 1/2 months for god's sake, couldn't anyone get off their butt long enough not to drown in the water? can't anyone swim?

Okay, besides those obvious questions, I want to consider the meaning behind all this. First, I have a big problem with the statement that every human on earth was evil. What about the children, babies, and mentally handicapped? Were they also evil? Oh, maybe god hadn't created genetic mutations yet. I guess this could fall into the same category in which the whole household is to be judged by the male patriarch. Fine. What is significant about that particular point in history? why not decide everyone was evil 25 years earlier? or 25 years later? Emotionally, I guess god had waited a long time and was finally fed up. He just couldn't take it anymore. So much for his limitless patience and godly quality of immortality/timelessness.

Why destroy everyone? Why start over? Why leave anyone behind? What was the point of letting Noah live? IF the main reward of being a good person in the bible is heaven, eternal life, then what purpose did it serve to save the one good family as a reward, and to make the whole rainbow pact about never destroying the earth by flooding again? Maybe as reward for Noah. Maybe, god really thought Noah's family was attractive and wanted to restart the human race with good lookers. At any rate, people must have either loved or hated him after the whole flood thing. "Oh, there's god's favorite human. great. here comes that jerk Noah!"

That gets to the part about how a god should act. If I created something, such as an omelet, and it got messed up, meaning that I screwed it up (not to imply that it was god's fault HIS creation became so EVIL. I would never say something so blasphemous), I would probably pitch the whole thing and start over from scratch. Unless, I had limited resources, or I didn't want to feel bad that i wasted my time, or I wanted a reminder to learn from my mistakes (hmm, what were god's motivations?). Then I might save one corner of the omelet and keep it on my bedside table for all eternity and form a rainbow pact with it.

Second point is, once he killed everyone off, why start over? Why not make something else? Project human: failure. Next project: really cool blue space lightning. So, if god is the creator, by the way, what is he doing now? Waiting to kill us all off again when we become evil? He clearly isn't spending his limitless time creating things right now. wait a minute...maybe the whole creation thing was a one time thing. God used up his magic creation powder, and therefore he can't create the world again. Maybe that's why he saved noah, just out of necessity. Also, if god had killed everyone on earth off, and then created humans from scratch, then it seems like that would have cancelled the whole Adam-and-eve, mankind doomed to be mortal and suffer for all eternity curse. And god wouldn't want man to get out of that punishment. Also, then god would have to come up with something else to fill up the beginning part of the bible. And how could he come up with a better first chapter than the downfall of man? there's no way he could top that.

Basically, the story of the flood seems completely bogus just in philosophical terms. Even as an interesting fairy tale, I can't quite wrap my head around the lesson I'm supposed to take away from the tale. I think the lesson is just like "Aenima" by Tool: "Learn to Swim!"

Using the bible as an argument against God

It is somewhat backhanded to use the bible against christian claims, or against the belief in a god, since as an atheist one sees no connection between a book written by humans and a supposed deity. However, for the sake of argument, recently I was considering the concept of a god. If you were a god, how should you behave? How should you act toward your creation (humans)? Do gods need a personality?

First, when considering the concept of a god, it is difficult to find any religion that does not personify the deity. I guess some Hindu or Buddhist deities are almost devoid of personality, in that they just sit and contemplate things. But most gods are basically human in personality, with emotional temperament. In other words, if you suddenly became immortal and had power, you would be a god. There doesn't seem to be much else to it besides power and immortality. The christian god has probably the most comprehensive set of powers, including complete knowledge of past and future, knowing everything, being everywhere at once, can create matter from nothing, can create life, created the whole universe, etc. So if you had these list of qualities, how should you act? The christian viewpoint is to chalk it up as "unfathomable" or "unknowable" to our puny human minds.

Now consider the story of creation, and of Adam and Eve as they were in the Garden of Eden, before the fall of man. It's a great, compelling story, but it has a lot of flaws. Note that throughout the bible, and also used as a selling point by christian philosophers, it is stated that although god is the creator of man, he gave man a free will to choose his own actions and his own fate. However, in the initial part of the story about Adam and Eve's fate, that is not how god is portrayed. Initially, he acts as I might expect him to act, as a creator should act. He treats Adam and Eve as children, doesn't tell them much of anything, and tries to create a perfect habitat and life for them, so that they can stupidly and blissfully live out their days, apparently so god won't be bored, or possibly be alone.

God bored?!?! Lonely?!?! I guess that would be considered blasphemy, trying to fathom the impulse of god to create humans. But, a god that has emotions and thoughts surely then has motivations for his actions. So anyway, god watches over the humans and keeps them in the dark about good and evil. Then, they are tricked by the serpent and they make a poor selfish choice as any child might make, and they doom mankind forever. Seems a little unfair to me. God creates humans, treats them like children, doesn't give them all the facts about the tree of life, and then is surprised when children do something selfish?? On what grounds do Adam and eve rest the moral rules? They were apparently simply given a list of rules by god and told "do this or you'll be punished," similar to the 10 commandment scenario, another attempt at dictatorship rule by god.

However, this goes against the idea that god has given humans free will. To me, free will requires having adequate information available to make decisions, otherwise how is it different than blindly following orders or even randomly deciding what actions to take? Also note that after this, and in a few other places in the bible, the relationship between god and man changes, or in other words, the way god acts toward his creation changes. But how should a god act toward his creation? it seems that the most realistic interaction might be more the way it is portrayed in the early garden of eden story. More the position of the scientist toward his experiment.

So, as you can see, this is not really a logically sound argument, but more of a philosophical problem I have with Christianity, one of many.