Sounds like they are trying to smouder peoples desire for change - which is another common feeling that this movies brings. Controling people's thoughts is an essencial part of the communist ideology.

All of those things encourage competition, change, and close examination of history. The exact opposite of what any communist state would want.

Agreed. The best use of time travel as a narrative device is the examination of history and our current perception and relationship to it.

The Terminator series seems quite aware of the paradox and seemed to embrace it. The films seems quite happy to wink and nod and are content to exist within a causality loop. The pieces of the Terminator were required by Dyson to create Skynet, so that explains why the Terminators look like they do and where skynet comes from. It's cheeky and doesn't care. I never got the impression that it was a "mistake." The future was unwritten, but Terminator 3, while not a great film, did have a good ending. It showed that it was all inevitable because the causality loop had to be fulfilled.

just want to throw my hat in with killaken. my understanding of the movies is that you have the initial conflict, which leaves behind technology accelerating the production of skynet and it's understanding of cyborgs. however, a mere terminator unit wouldn't need or assist in the development of time travel. so while the development of skynet, judgment day, and the ongoing rebellion led by john have all been shifted up the timeline, the technological development required for time travel remains the same. thus, when the new iteration of skynet sends an assassin back, they have developed the more advanced t-1000, and the humans have been dealing with terminators long enough to figure out how to reprogram one.

"I didn't build the fucking thing!" - Kyle Reese

Plot Twist: We never hear the T-1000 state his objective.

Arrow Valley Skynet had to send the Terminator back so it could be built.

IMHO, the real problem with Terminator is in T1 and T2 they said you CAN change the future, so stopping the Terminator means avoiding the apocalypse. But then in T3 they said screw that, no yo don't, you can't change the future. Chew on that. Thus retconning the two previous movies. So It's more an issue with consistency of the story than it's in-universe laws.

Terminator 3 wasnt made by James Cameron so it doesnt count. Just like the new star wars movies.

I regard all Terminator movies >2 as non-canon. T1 and T2 are an out-of-universe view of the universe sealing off and healing a pair of paradoxes using each other. (Grandfather paradox and future tech going back to create itself).

Agreed. Steins;Gate is a masterpiece.

TK Dave It really is having rewatching it and I cannot wait to jump into 0.

Nope, Steins;Gate is a completely self contained story.

Agreed about Steins;Gate completely!

According to some interpretations of QM, correct?

No, I think that's agreed upon by all of them.

Information is a concept though. Is QM platonic? o.O

Information is the level of certainty of the state of a system. Information is never created or destroyed. They've actually confirmed this with 3-qubit quantum computers. They set the state of the first qubit (unrelated to the other two), and then obliterated that information. When they examined the states of the other two qubits, they found that, without having to look at the first qubit (which would do no good anyway), they were able to reconstruct the state of the first qubit before the information was obliterated.

Wait, they have quantum computers? I thought that was science fiction, still. Aren't they supposed to be a thousand times faster than anything we've ever had in terms of computing?

I think they make sense in a mechanistic model of the universe in which the appearance of linear causality is just a byproduct of our context within a massive integrated structure of chronology and timespace that operates like fate in the sense that if X happened but the timespace structure was looped because of X then X has to self defeat or complete in some manner. The Actions that cause this are just artifacts of the necessary structure to timespace itself. In other words volition and choice would truly be illusions and all that would be would be temporal homeostasis in the universe. But then no one is really ever doing anything. All of timespace is just a brute fact. Everything is meaningless, no one can do other than what they do, and there's no such thing as truth, science is an illusion, etc. It's got massive problematic implications for all sorts of things, and at the same time there's no proof for it. It's a starting premise or not, it's not something you can genuinely discover from evidence. Like Solipsism, it's more like a psychological ideological feedback loop rooted in a form of intuition about possible interpretations of reality, but it's a dead end that shuts down meaningful decision making, or any other number of endeavors rooted in a more realist notion of reality. So as a thought experiment, sure it can exist as a byproduct of the fabric of the universe itself, but if it didn't then why would it loop at all? COuldn't it just never self defeat into a neat self causal pattern but just infinitely create divergent realities? Not a loo, bot a sort of infinite pring of the present causing the future to cause the past to cause yet another present and an even more different future which then causes yet another different past which then creates a totally unpredicted present which then causes a unrecognizable future which then... over and over, none of them self defeating, none self causing, all causing new versions to make even more new versions, each new version having it's own continuing dependant contingency that continues forward after the "loop". So the person going back wouldn't' reenter their own timeline since doing so would make it not their timeline at all, but an alternate reality that looks like it, till their arrival changes that and makes it something else which didn't cause the loop, but something else entirely, making a different loop with different motives and timing, etc. if the loop was short enough it might even be the same person who keeps universe hoping... like sliders with 1 week of regress time travel each time.

I like this argument though logical, I don't believe it's entirely fallacious. I can think of several slippery slope arguments that fall into reductio ad absurdum yet still present themselves annually.

I suggest pondering this even more. The theory is that there is no time within time. The future and the past are unalterable via time travel. Whatever did happen will happen and whatever will happen did happen. Though you experience the conversation twice, it doesn't happen twice. It happens only once. Thus, on this view, it is metaphysically impossible for you to change the conversation when you travel back to the morning to have it. Whatever you said simply is what you will say. If you will say something different, then that will be what you said. It isn't about remembering what you heard in order to repeat it. Your experiences in the morning are a record of an event that, though for you is in the future, is just as definite as something in the past (indeed, at any point after the conversation in the morning, it is for you an event in the past, but also in the future, until you have it again that evening when you time travel back, after which it will be entirely in the past). That your experiences of the event happen out of sequence normal sequence, indeed that they happen twice from different perspectives, makes it seem weird, but doesn't change anything. It is still one event, according to this theory. Imagine watching a replay of a sporting event that you enjoy. At halftime the team you pull for is losing. The coach is interviewed. From his/her standpoint the first half is in the past and the second half is in the future. He/she expresses hope that the team will regroup and perform better in the second half. From the standpoint of the coach at that time, the future is an unknown. But you know what will happen, because for you both the first and second halves are in the past. The coach in the replay is situated at one point in the timeline and you at the other. So your knowledge is different. But the definiteness of the second half is unaffected. What will happen in the replay is what happened originally, and what happened originally is what will happen in the replay. It cannot change. Think of the second time you experience the conversation (when you time travel from the evening to the morning) as something akin to the replay (granted this is a rough analogy). Though experiencing it again, and from a new perspective, the way the conversation will go is already established. It is how it happened that morning. Experiencing it again in this unusual way doesn't imply that it is a different event. It is the same event. So, after the conversation in the morning, but before you go in the evening back to the morning to have it, you are somewhat like *both* the coach who doesn't know what the future second half will be and can yet have an impact on it, and the you watching it on replay and knows exactly what the past second half was and can have no impact on it. The conversation is both an event in your future that you can impact, and also an event in your past that you can't. That's, I believe, what this theory says. Regardless of whether it's you in the morning having the conversation for the first time, or you in the evening traveling back and having the conversation for the second time, the conversation is one event and is what it is. Your changing knowledge and memories of it don't have any impact that can change anything the 'second time' the event rolls around, because there is no 'second time.' The knowledge and memories already have their impact on how the event unfolds, and were manifested when you experienced the conversation in the morning. That you go through the event twice doesn't change the fact that, on this theory, it is one event. Now, it seems to me the issue here is that for the theory to work it has to at least call into question the existence or nature of free will. And that is a big deal.

The 12 Monkey's explanation is that the conversation already occurred so there is no way to change it. The way to look at it is the entire universe is entirely deterministic. You couldn't do it any different than the way you did it. You're making an assumption that free will exists.

I don't like the 'create/move to an alternate universe dimension' because then that transforms the notion of time travel into something more accurately described as 'universe/reality creation'...which is just too much power to introduce into a narrative. Characters harnessing/controlling/having dominion over something as cosmic as time or giving them the ability to just generate/create an entirely new/alternate version of all of existence just really breaks reality and logic.

one of the issues with Star Trek: If Star Fleet can time travel, why not travel back in time give the tech and knowledge to themselves. Reminds me of a broken mechanic from Baldur's Gate 1. You could export your character and start a fresh game... with all your gear. So it was easy to break the game by killing one guard and equipping your party with some of the best gear.

Because that would be suicide. If you change the past too much, then you may never be born.

There is no reason to believe that you continue to exist within the timeline that led to your creation. Again, it kinda goes back to the concept that each change in the timeline creates a new timeline.

80's Nostalgia Guy, That's why I made the caveat of paradoxes being possible.

Didn't know that.

You'd have to be able to think of time as a traversal dimension. That's a pretty modern concept.

As long as humans have felt regret, they have longed to go back in time to change things.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court predates The Time Machine. I don't know if it uses the words "time travel" but it uses the concept.

Please consider "A Glimpse Beyond the Aether" New Book published by Pegasus about a world that has absolute knowledge of what happens when we die. A few go back in time to make sure this information does not come to light. One incredible woman can bridge time. Available on Kindle Author: Susan Frances Would love to start aa conversation about what it would mean if we knew what the afterlife meant.

and the possible alternative version that Artemis suggested too.

The "self-preservation instinct of the space-time continuum," as Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis phrase it.

You can't compare a videogame with a animation serie though.

If only we could go back in time and convince Rian Johnson to become a plumber!!!

That's what makes Primer so brilliant. They take this fact into account.

wardm4 Agreed The Primer fantasy is the most believable

Didn't seem to me that David failed to take it into account, at least not in his own writing (which employs forward 'time travel' due to relativity). Maybe he didn't mention that problem (and indeed it is a problem, since everything is always in motion). But I wouldn't say he "failed to take it into account." But, I don't see how that fact makes time travel more mathematically impossible. One, there's no such thing as more impossible. It's either possible or impossible. But two, the problem you bring up wouldn't make time travel impossible, just less useful. If I get my DeLorean up to 88 miles per hour and travel 10 days into the past, I should emerge somewhere in empty space. I would asphyxiate and die, thus not able to do anything. But I would have still traveled through time. If I build my Delorean to be presuurized, I won't immediately asphyxiate. But I will still be stuck in the middle of nowhere. But if I made my DeLorean into an actual spaceship, and if I have enough delta-v, I could make it back to Earth and actually do something. Yes, it would be prudent to determine beforehand if anything was going to be taking up the space you'll be time traveling into. But statistically speaking, the odds are you'd just end up in empty space and, if your vehicle is equipped for that, would be fine.

hahah I see people are starting to use their brains. I came up with that theory like 10 years ago when I was writing a time travel story. I just never published it, I did tell some of my professors surprisingly none even thought about the notion. However, it's not an impossibility it's just an impossibility to us because of our limited technology.

That is why the "Science Vulcan Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible"