Tuesday, July 27, 2010


Over the weekend we saw a most excellent movie: Inception. Intelligently made, thought-provoking, and NOT an excuse to have a bunch of special effects parade across the screen (although this had them in abundance).

In case you don't know what the movie is about (usually I am the last to know or I don't ever know), it's about dreams. The subject of dreams and time travel are two of my favorite things to mull over in my mind and get confused about.

Last night I watched an episode of the original Outer Limits, this particular one a precursor to the Terminator series. An earthling from the future goes back into the past to stop an act that ruined mankind. He was successful, but as he went back to the future he disappeared because he was traveling to a world into which he'd never been born.

What if people were able to travel through time, from the future to the past, and change events and thus alter history?

The thing is, where would it stop? Because for every event that was changed, someone else would travel back to unchange it. You'd have people zipping back and forth through time constantly altering events and creating a topsy turvy existence.

Let's say this is going on right now. That means that your perception of reality, everything you know about the world and its history, is ever-changing because someone from the future has come back to change it. Except you are unaware of this. You are unaware because each conscious moment you experience is based on a history that keeps changing.

And suppose some action done by a visitor from the future directly affects an event that prevents you from being born, or causes you to be rubbed out earlier in your life? Then poof, you are not even here any more. But how would you even know that? You'd be gone like the snap of a finger.

Luckily that hasn't happened yet and here you are, but just think, every single thing you know is the result of people from the future changing your past and since they are going back and forth all the time, your past keeps changing.

Of course, with all these changes going on, that affects everything in the future so perhaps some of these time travelers fiddle themselves right out of existence.

Or, perhaps they need to come back here and fiddle with time in order to create their existence. Had they not traveled back in time, they wouldn't have existed.

Just something to tangle up your brain for the day..

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