In my Sci-Fi class, we are now on our last unit and we are studying paradoxes and time travel. There are also things that we are learning about called the "butterfly effect" and the "grandfather paradox." The butterfly effect is a phenomenon whereby a minor change in circumstances can cause a large change in outcome. Then the grandfather paradox is quite simple, its saying that if you time travel into the past murder your grandfather before he sires your mother or your father, then where do you come from?
We watched some of Stephen Hawking's "Into the Universe" and he explained that we would never be able to travel into our past because of the paradoxes and loop holes we would create. Nature, he says, would not let us create something like that. We are able to travel to the future as much as we want, and how we do that is we travel just barely under the speed of light, because nothing can ever exceed the speed of light, it's nearly impossible. But then it brings up the question, should we, or even do we want to? If we do travel into the future there is no coming back since we can't travel back in time, ever. Of course I believe that we can; it would just be on a different time line. So let's say you time traveled from your current time to somewhere in the future. Well, the time you jumped from would continue on with a future without you in it; and if you jumped back to the time you jumped from it would be still a different timeline because the time that you originally jumped from kept going and so now there has to be a future that has you in it, so therefore it wouldn't be the same timeline you jumped from originally.
We also read two short stories, one was by Ray Bradbury called A Sound of Thunder, the other one was by Robert A. Heinlein which was called All you Zombies. In A Sound of Thunder the people go back in time to go hunting, so its like a more riskier version of any hunting we could come up with today. We don't go around hunting Tyrannosaurus Rex's. When they go back they have this hovering path that they have to stay on otherwise they might step on something that could spring out huge changes in the future. When the dinosaur is coming and in range the new guy on the team mistakenly steps off the path. But how can one step change the future? It turns out that he steps on a butterfly which then, they discover when they get back to the present, has caused everything to be different and nothing is the way it was. (Hence the "butterfly effect") It's saying that by going into the past, something so small as stepping on a bug could create huge changes that were never meant to happen. Of course some would argue that we were supposed to go back in time then and supposed to step on that bug, so that the future would work out that way. That also brings up the question; if you could go back into the past without knowing what was going to happen to the future you came from, would you still go? I personally would not, I like how things have come out, and without all of the things that have happened to me or the world around me, who would I be today? Everything we go through and how we react to things is what creates who we are as a person in the future.
All you Zombies was far more confusing. It was harder to wrap your head around the idea of the paradox, but once you got it, it was really pretty cool to think about. In the story all of the main characters ended up being all the same person. He was once a female who had both male and female parts, so he had a sex change then went back in time a impregnated his female self who got pregnant and had a baby girl who ended up being him who grew up, and the circle repeats itself. In other words he was his own mother and father. It kinda crazy and very weird to think about but it brings up the question; how did it start? Who did it start with? Who was the original "Jane"? I really don't know the answer to this question. It throws me for a loop...haha.
Time travel and paradoxes have to be one of the more interesting topics, even though I like all sci-fi topics, this one has to be one of the most fun to explore.
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