These are just a handful of the (nonscientific) problems with going backward in time. As far as I can tell, there really aren’t any causality problems with going forward in time—in terms of risk, jumping to the year 2077 isn’t that different than moving to suburban Bangladesh or hiding in your basement for five decades. Time would still move forward on its regular trajectory, no differently than if you were temporarily (or permanently) dead. Your participation in life doesn’t matter to time. This is part of the reason that futurists tend to believe traveling forward in time is more plausible than the alternative—it involves fewer problems. But regardless of the direction you move, the central problem is still there: Why do it? What’s the best reason for exploding the parameters of reality?
With the possible exception of eating a dinosaur, I don’t think there is one.
3 “Even back when I was writing really bad short stories in college,” a (then) thirty-four-year-old Shane Carruth said in an interview with himself, “I always thought the time machine is the device that’s missed most. Without even saying it out loud, that’s the thing people want the most: The ability to take whatever it is that went wrong and fix it.”
Carruth is the writer, director, producer, and costar of the 2004 independent film Primer, the finest movie about time travel I’ve ever seen. The reason Primer is the best (despite its scant seventy-eight-minute run time and $7,000 budget) is because it’s the most realistic—which, I will grant, is a peculiar reason for advocating a piece of science fiction. But the plausibility of Primer is why it’s so memorable. It’s not that the time machine in Primer seems more authentic; it’s that the time travelers themselves seem more believable. They talk and act (and think) like the kind of people who might accidentally figure out how to move through time, which is why it’s the best depiction we have of the ethical quandaries that would emerge from such a discovery.
Here’s the basic outline of Primer: It opens with four identically dressed computer engineers sitting around a table in a nondescript American community (Primer was shot around Dallas, but the setting is like the world of Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men—it’s a city without character that could literally be anywhere). They speak a dense, clipped version of English that is filled with technical jargon; it’s mostly indecipherable, but that somehow makes it better. They wear ties and white shirts all the time (even when they’re removing a catalytic converter from a car to steal the palladium), and they have no interests outside of superconductivity and NCAA basketball. The two brightest engineers—Abe (David Sullivan) and Aaron (Carruth)—eventually realize they have assembled a box that can move objects backward through a thirteen-hundred-minute loop in time. Without telling anyone else, they build two larger versions of the (staunchly unglamorous) box that can transport them to the previous day.4 Their initial motive is solely financial—they go back a day, drive to the local library, and buy stocks over the Internet that they know will increase in value over the next twenty-four hours. They try to do nothing else of consequence (at least at first). They just sit in a hotel room and wait. “I tried to isolate myself,” Abe says when describing his first journey into the past. “I closed the windows, I unplugged everything—the phone, the TV and clock radio. I didn’t want to take the chance of seeing someone I knew, or of seeing something on the news . . . I mean, if we’re dealing with causality, and I don’t even know for sure . . . I took myself out of the equation.”
If this sounds simple, I can assure you that it is not. Primer is hopelessly confusing and grows more and more byzantine as it unravels (I’ve watched it seven or eight times and I still don’t know what happened). Characters begin to secretly use the time machine for personal reasons and they begin multiplying themselves across time. But because these symmetrical iterations are (inevitably) copies of other copies, the system starts to hemorrhage—Abe and Aaron find themselves bleeding from their ears and struggling with handwriting. When confusing events start to happen in the present, they can’t tell if those events are the manifestations of decisions one of them will eventually make in the future. At one point, no one (not Abe, Aaron, or even the viewer) is able to understand what’s going on. The story does not end in a clear disaster, but with a hazy, open-ended scenario that might be worse.
What’s significant about the two dudes in Primer is how they initially disregard the ethical questions surrounding time travel; as pure scientists, they only consider the practical obstacles of the endeavor. Even when they decide to go back and change the past of another person, their only concern is how this can still work within the framework they’re manipulating. They’re geniuses, but they’re ethical Helen Kellers. When they’re traveling back for financial purposes, they discount their personal role in the success of the stocks they trade; since stocks increase in value whenever people buy them, they are retroactively inflating the value of whatever commodities they select (not by much, but enough to alter the future). When Abe and Aaron start traveling back in time to change their own pasts, they attempt to stoically ignore the horrifying reality they’ve created: Their sense of self—their very definition of self—is suddenly irrelevant. If you go back in time today and meet the person who will become you tomorrow, which of those two people is actually you? The short answer is, “Both.” But once you realize that the short answer is “Both,” the long answer becomes “Neither.” If you exist in two places, you don’t exist at all.
According to the director, Primer is a movie about the relationship between risk and trust. This is true. But it also makes a concrete point about the potential purpose of time travel—it’s too important to use only for money, but too dangerous to use for anything else.
1A I used to have a fantasy about reliving my entire life with my present-day mind. I once thought this fantasy was unique to me, but it turns out that this is very common; many people enjoy imagining what it would be like to reinhabit their past with the knowledge they’ve acquired through experience. I imagine the bizarre things I would have said to teachers in junior high. I think about women I would have pursued and stories I could have written better and about how interesting it would have been to be a genius four-year-old. At its nucleus, this is a fantasy about never having to learn anything. The defining line from Frank Herbert’s Dune argues that the mystery of life “is not a question to be answered but a reality to be experienced.” My fantasy offers the opposite. Nothing would be experienced. Nothing would feel new or unknown or jarring. It’s a fantasy for people who want to solve life’s mysteries without having to do the work.
I am one of those people.
The desire to move through time is electrifying and rational, but it’s a desire of weakness. The real reason I want to travel through time is because I’m a defeatist person. The cynical egomaniac in Wells’s original novel leaves the present because he has contempt for the humanity of his present world, but he never considers changing anything about his own role in that life (which would obviously be easier). Instead, he elects to bolt eight hundred thousand years into the future, blindly hoping that things will have improved for him. It’s a bad plan. Charlton Heston’s character in Planet of the Apes5 tries something similar; he hates mankind, so he volunteers to explore space, only to crash back on a postapocalyptic earth where poorly dressed orangutans employ Robert’s Rules of Order. This is a consistent theme in stories about traveling to the future: Things are always worse when you get there. And I suspect this is because the kind of writer who’s intrigued by the notion of moving forward in time can’t see beyond their own pessimism about being alive. People who want to travel through time are both (a) unhappy and (b) unwilling to compromise anything about who they are. They would rather change every element of society except themselves.
This is how I feel.
This is also why my long-standing desire to build a time machine is not just hopeless but devoid of merit. It has nothing to do with time. I don’t think it ever does (for me, H. G. Wells, Shane Carruth, or anyone else). It takes a fle
xible mind to imagine how time travel might work, but only an inflexible spirit would actually want to do it. It’s the desire of the depressed and lazy.
On side two of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson laments that he “just wasn’t made for these times” (“these times” being 1966). He probably wasn’t. But he also didn’t want to be. I assume Wilson would have preferred dealing with the possibility of thinking liquid metal before he would accept the invisible, nonnegotiable shackles of the present tense. Which—sadly, and quite fortunately—is the only tense any of us will ever have.
1. This subplot refers to the actions of a character named Biff (Thomas F. Wilson) who steals a sports almanac from the future in order to gamble on predetermined sporting events in the present. There’s a popular urban legend about this plot point involving the Florida Marlins baseball team: In the film, Biff supposedly bets on a Florida baseball team to win the World Series in 1997, which actually happened. The amazing part is that Back to the Future Part II was released in 1989, four years before the Florida Marlins even had a major league franchise. Unfortunately, this legend is completely false. The reference in the movie is actually a joke about the futility of the Chicago Cubs that somehow got intertwined with another reference to a (fictional) MLB opponent from Miami whose logo was a gator. I realize that by mentioning the inaccuracy of this urban legend, I will probably just perpetuate its erroneous existence. But that’s generally how urban legends work.
2. For whatever the reason, I’ve always assumed vise grips would be extremely liberating for Neanderthals.
3. Semi-unrelated (but semi-interesting) footnote to this paradox: Before Fox plays “Johnny B. Goode” at the high school dance, he tells his audience, “This is an oldie . . . well, this is an oldie from where I come from.” Chuck Berry recorded “Johnny B. Goode” in 1958. Back to the Future was made in 1985, so the gap is twenty-seven years. I’m writing this essay in 2009, which means the gap between 1985 and today is twenty-four years. That’s almost the same amount of time. Yet nobody would ever refer to Back to the Future as an “oldie,” even if he or she were born in the 1990s. What seems to be happening is a dramatic increase in cultural memory: As culture accelerates, the distance between historical events feels smaller. The gap between 2010 and 2000 will seem far smaller than the gap between 1980 and 1970, which already seemed far smaller than the gap between 1950 and 1940. This, I suppose, is society’s own version of time travel (assuming the trend continues for eternity).
4. This is too difficult to explain in a footnote, but one of Carruth’s strengths as a fake science writer is how he deals with the geography of time travel, an issue most writers never even consider. Here, in short, is the problem: If you could instantly travel one hour back in time, you would (theoretically) rematerialize in the exact same place from which you left. That’s how the machine works in the original Time Machine. However, the world would have rotated 15 degrees during that missing hour, so you would actually rematerialize in a totally different spot on the globe. Primer manages to work around this problem, although I honestly don’t understand the solution as much as I see the dilemma.
5. I realize Planet of the Apes isn’t technically about time travel. Time moves at its normal rate while the humans are in suspended animation. But for the purposes of the fictional people involved, there is no difference: They leave from and return to the same geographic country. The only difference is the calendar.
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