So Close, So Far, I'm Lost in Time

Time travel.

It's one of my favorite subjects. It opens up all kinds of possibilities for stories that cross multiple time periods. It can be done really well, or really not.

There are options when it comes to time travel. You have two main types:

• Loops
• Branches

Loops are different from time loops, in which a period of time keeps repeating. Rather, I mean the kind of thing where someone went back in time and did a thing, but that doesn't change the future, because they always went back to do that thing. Like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The bit with the patronus at the lake or whatever.

Branches are when they go back and change something, and they divert events onto a different path, resulting in a future different from the one they left. Like Back to the Future. School dances and sports almanacking lead to changes in the timeline.

Now, some timelines are resistant to branching. You try to, say, stop something, but that thing happens anyway, albeit in a slightly different way. History wants to happen, they say.

There are many dangers in time travel. Getting eaten by a T Rex, for instance. But what you really have to watch out for are paradoxes. If you go back with the express purpose of changing some event, whether that's killing Hitler or saving JFK, back in the present, you no longer have a reason to go back, and so never did. But you also did, or the present wouldn't be that way. And then the universe implodes. Good job.

In theory, you should be able to go back and observe without breaking the universe. But then, if you do happen to change something, but that wasn't your original intention, that's not a paradox, and you might change the future. I think.

There are other kinds of time travel I haven't even touched on:

• Travel to the future
• Time dilation

Time travel to the future is, well, different. You can go to the future, say, the year 3000, gain knowledge, bring it back to 2018, and sports almanac your way to fame and riches. This might change the year 3000, so that if you visited it again, it would be different. But this doesn't exactly give you the same issues as travelling to the past, because your… frame of reference is in 2018. So your world remains unchanged. And from your point of view, the future hasn't happened yet, so there's not a right or wrong course of events.

Time dilation is an actual, feasible thing, where time passes at a slower rate for things moving faster. So if a ship is moving at near light speed, a lot less time is going to pass for those on the ship than for people on a planet back home. I'm not likely to get too much into this one, because it makes my head hurt.

Now, in writing, I've mucked about with time travel a few times. Two that I can think of off the top of my head. I'm going to get more into how I handled that in my next post.

I'll see you Saturday.

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Title Source: The Rasmus - Justify