模倣子 The Romance of Time Travel

 Memetic Index

I think my next novel will be about time travel, and a romance. I think I will include a kind of time travelers’ 🧳 🕰 pub where time travelers from all times and dimensions meet for business meetings and just to hang out. The goal of the universe the story might be to improve the species, to “rescue” exceptional individuals from being trapped in time. That might be a bad premise, however. 

Anyway…

Would time travel being possible violate the Anthropic Principle (weak or strong) ?

Or is that a dumb question?

I’ve been pondering the questions. Interesting. Why do you think it might violate it?

I was watching The History of Time  Travel 🧭 🧳 All the various (minute physics also discusses all of the narrative models for time travel) paradoxes that can come up from time travel and how it messes with stuff like entropy and consciousness…

Humans produce artifacts, and those could get caught in strange infinite loops and such. I was just thinking that there might be basic pillars of human existence that might be fundamentally undermined if time travel were possible 

Kind of like living creatures can only exist in 3D universes, not 2D, and 4D is right out. (Three macroscopic dimensions, that is, for all you string theorists out there) So in a sense allowing time travel 🧳 🕰 is like adding another dimension (I just thought of that) And in a 4D universe, you can’t have a functioning GI tract.

Have you watched The History of Time Travel 🧳? Prime video and I think HBO Max. It’s clever. It outlines all the kinds of time travel models through historical “interviews” with experts and the story is mutating as it goes along. 

The nth time I was watching it, it occurred to me that “history” would be too unstable for humans to exist. 

It’s kind of like the movie 🎥 Millennium — how time travelers can only exist if they can be unseen 

Millennium 🎞 is another classic to check out. 

There’s Stephen Hawking’s time travelers’ party, 🎈 which he advertised after it has already taken place  🍾 I was thinking that might be a fun 📕 involving a pub somewhere where time travelers 🧳 hang out during their missions and stuff. That might be my next book. A romantic time travel book. Time travel is a deeply romantic theme, ❤️ 

Interesting way to avoid time travel paradoxes:  to only allow it if it can’t be observed… (1) 

Since it contains the sense of loss, of missed opportunity, and the desperate hope of cheating fate, second chances (a deeply romantic ❤️ idea 💡) Yes, that’s the whole plot of millennium— it’s okay 👌🏾 if it can’t be observed. That’s kind of a macroscopic quantum mechanical thing again. We like 👍🏻 that 😄 

Is that “observability” issue how you were tying time travel to the anthropic principle?  That if we observe each other and time travel violations require “un-observability”, then we must not live in that kind of universe…

Hawking’s party 🎈 kind of gave me the idea 💡 for the time bandit pub (also Deadpool’s Sister Margaret’s bar for mercenaries) 

Yes, I like what you said about the observation requirement. That didn’t occur to me until you suggested it. I was thinking that paradoxes would unravel our perceptions, something like that. 

Anyway, bon appétit 😋 🥘 

A fun angle to add to the time travel narrative could be an environmental apocalypse angle. (2) Like time-traveling agents and spies 🕵️‍♀️ of multiple governments (even extraterrestrial 👽 ones) could be moving between “branes” and times trying to do something. Possibly even rescue individuals from their own timelines, possibly even for breeding purposes. And of course there would be a memetic angle 📐 to it all. 

The Forever War is like Starship Troopers but with real physics, to wit, time dilation.  Not to spoil it, but the main characters go from near future to millennia in the future… Passing through centuries-long periods where Earth 🌍 “went 100% homosexual” to deal with overpopulation, for instance. Mixed gender crews went through the centuries together. If somebody got transferred you never saw them again. They or you would be long-dead by next planetfall 🪐 and that planet 🌏 would be totally different from the last time you saw it. It might’ve fallen into enemy hands for decades and then been retaken. 

I was just cut-pasting our exchange about time travel 🧭 🧳 into a document

I think it’s really starting to shape up into a romance. Have you seen the Vat of Acid Episode of Rick and Morty? It’s a kind of romance. I’m thinking of mixing in elements of Millennium 📀 🤖 The Forever War 🚀 Hawking’s Time travelers’ party 🎈 and also About Time (with Domhill Gleason). I should probably watch The Lakehouse 📫  and The Time Traveler’s Wife. 

I’ve been kicking around your mention of non-observability 👀 🕰 criterion for successful time travelers 🧳 

Everybody seems to think 🤔 that time has to behave in a “certain way” where it might be possible that time travel that does not create a paradox does not create a branching 🌳 alternate time line (no “many worlds” 🌍 🪐 🌎 ) but a paradox-creating trip 🚂 🧳 causes a 🌳 branch. Kind of macroscopic quantization-like (two-slut experiment 🔬) 

From a romantic narrative standpoint, two people are trying to resolve their romantic problems and reach happen end live together. But they may have to sacrifice other versions of themselves, friends, even children 👧 as they switch and abandon timelines, sometimes unavoidably, but sometimes deliberately. Maybe even assassinating ☠️ copies of oneself in other timelines in order to bring knowledge and position from other timelines. The couple is traveling through time, but some instances could be stuck in time, ie, not trained by the time travel 🧭 🧳 guild, maybe there could be jewelry or a tattoo to indicate member to each other. 

What about entropy? If somebody travels back (or forward) in time, at least the matter that makes up their body would be subtracted from the present moment and added to the past point in time, and going forward. So the present universe would become less energetic (violating conservation of energy) and the past universe more energetic. And if the time trip created a paradox, then a new universe would be created, with that additional energy. 

Time traveling 🧭 🧳 forward shouldn’t be too much of a problem. But the traveler 🚀 would effectively be obliterated from the time of departure. It could be kind of a relativistic thing. They wouldn’t Leave as much as “slow down” and rude the river 💦 

Quantum Leap 📺 which I’ve never watched has the idea 💡 of a handler who handles the time traveler, so he or she is not initiating the time jumps. 

I’m imagining a scene where a couple meet in a bar and it plays out like a bowl 🥣 of peanuts 🥜 on the bar 🍻 instantaneously jumps several inches across the bar and goes from being almost empty to being full (possibly of almonds now). “That’s an example of a paradox-creating event” the time-traveler says to the non-time-traveler. 

__________

(1) a separate branching timeline is created only if a detectable action is taken by a time traveler 🧳 so two lovers can escape to a timeline where they both live happily ever after, deliberately grange ting the timeline with paradoxes  Rick and Morty did it, pretty much, in The Vat of Acid Episode.

(2) possible plot line could be finding a timeline where the world 🌎 is going to end BUT the two lovers ❤️ get to be together. Also the idea 💡 that a bunch of alters in other timelines have to sacrifice their lives and happiness to bring this about. Possibly even children of the couple, with other alters.