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.