So, as an avid “Star Trek” watcher, I’ve been introduced to the idea of going backward and forward in time, and the effects of each on the present (in the case of “forward,” not very much…). For example, at a relatively early age, I realized that in “Back to the Future Part II,” Marty goes to the future and sees himself (and meets his son), but this is impossible because he wasn’t there to live out his life (because he left the “present” to go to the “future”…), thus producing a paradox, of sorts.
Now comes along “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.” The premiere episode was on Sunday night on FOX, and the second one was on last night (I haven’t watched it yet…). The first episode takes place in 1999, in between the movies “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” and “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,” which take place in 1991 and 2004, respectively. For “Terminator 2,” Judgement Day (i.e. the destruction of the human race by the SkyNet computer) was to take place on August 29, 1997 – in “Terminator 3,” that date is moved back to July 24, 2004.
Well, at the end of the first episode, they jump forward through time from 1999 to 2007, thus negating all of “Terminator 3.” Never happened. The timeline adjusted itself such that Sarah and John Connor were non-existent between the years of 1999 and 2007. So, if John and Sarah were successful at stopping Judgement Day in 1997, but weren’t there in 2004 to stop it, wouldn’t Judgement Day have already happened (if they jumped to 2007)?
Alright, so this brings up another point: if the machines (in the future) are sending back a Terminator to take out John and/or Sarah Connor, the second that Terminator is sent back in time, the machines should know if they were successful. That is, if nothing changes where they are, then the timeline was not averted and they need to send another one. If things did change, they wouldn’t know about it because they would never know they ever had the problem: things would just be as they always had been.
So, if you really wanted to take out John or Sarah, and you know your Terminator wasn’t successful, why not send another one to the same time point to get two Terminators after them? Or, for that matter, why take out John Connor when Sarah’s around to protect him, when instead you could go after Sarah’s parents and prevent Sarah from ever having a child (or existing, for that matter).
I think, in the end, machines are just stupid. And they need to stop meddling with the space-time continuum, as they obviously don’t know what they’re doing.
That, or the writers of the “Terminator” series should get a hold of a brief tutorial in temporal mechanics…
touché
Yo Andy, where’s my Cloverfield review? I saw it this morning and would like to know what you thought. I think it’s one of the few movies of the horror genre (or is it action?) that I like.
I just got back from it! Hold your horses! 😉
Geoffrey Thomas a first session Fan of the TV series the Sliders.
I’ve been working on some mathematical models if we slowed down in time enough to observe the hour hand of a clock moving a full circle in a second.
Apparently we can slow down in time slower than that, since there’s no reason why not we can observe the hour hand move a full circle “many times per second”.
It’s inevitable from our point of view at least, we can never reach a point time has stopped if we are ever to time travel despite the fact from the environment’s time frame point of view we are seen to appear to be frozen in time.
The opposite applies if moving though time fast enough to observe the second hand slowed 24 hours the same as that hand would normally in our normal time frame. It’s inevitable mathematics could predicts the number of centuries pass by by the time the hour hand hand moved a full circle.
The figure could be so large universe would not even that old. We could never reach a point time has stopped.
It does raze the question of the theory of time in the center of black holes (singularities) and before the big bang that’s supposed to have created the universe.
Regards
First session Slider Fan. Geoffrey Thomas