Time Travel: Everything You Need to Know

Bryan Carmichael
Jan 3, 2021
7 min read

Updated: Mar 14, 2021

Note: This is the first article of a new series I'm writing titled Everything You Need to Know. If you enjoyed this article, be sure to stay tuned for all future articles.

Introduction

What? You want to learn about time travel? Time travel is a confusing, complex and somewhat mesmerizing topic to discuss, and I’ve been meaning to write this for quite a while, but never really figured out the best way to.

However, what better way than to open my new series, Everything You Need to Know, and my writing in 2021 with an article on one of the most confusing topics you’ll ever read.

Good luck having your mind taken apart and put back together. I’ll see you on the other side.

What’s the Deal with Time Travel?

Why is it unlikely that we’ll ever figure out how to achieve time travel? Firstly, it’s too unstable to tamper with, the risks outweigh the benefits by a large margin. Any fabric of time that is not tied back together can cause unstable branches in time, resulting in time loops, temporal breaches and openings into alternate timelines.

The last one sounds good, but I promise it isn’t. The human mind would not be able to comprehend the experience and the very fact that we’re in a different timeline would make our cells deteriorate and cause dimensional glitches (much like Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse). To put it in simple English, if there is even one loose end, the space-time continuum would collapse.

Secondly, the very notion of time travel is a paradoxical concept that in itself would cause a lot of loose ends. Here’s the most famous example.

Say you go back in time from 2021 to 1961, and you kill your grandfather. Your grandfather, being deceased as a child, would not be able to marry your grandmother and give birth to your father, who in turn gave birth to you. Subsequently, you would not exist, as you were never born. However, because you were never born, you never existed in the first place to kill your grandfather, and as such he lives, marries your grandmother, gives birth to your father who in turn gives birth to you. However, you now are alive with the capability of killing your grandfather in the past, which you did, as such he’s dead and you don’t exist, which means he’s alive and you exist, and so on and so forth.

You would be glitching in and out of existence for eternity, all because you held a grudge against your grandfather for that time he wouldn’t give you candy before dinner.

As proven, trying to achieve time travel is too dangerous a thing to handle, it’s also too complex for us to understand, and is very easy to break down, causing armageddon.

How is Time Travel Portrayed in Entertainment?

Time travel is portrayed in many different ways throughout the entertainment industry, the most famous of which, I imagine, is from Back to the Future. This film revolves around the time travel concept that the simple notion of travelling through time creates an alternate timeline which becomes the new form of reality. This is due to the fact that in the first timeline, the travel never occurred, and so to avoid breaking down the consistency of the film, new timelines are created replacing the existing timeline as reality.

The best example of this is when Marty McFly travels back in time to 1955 in the first film, and upon returning to 1985 finds that his parents’ personalities have completely changed. This is because while Marty was in 1955, he happened to interact and entangle with both of his parents, causing them to make different decisions which lead them to become different adults (alteration of character development). This is proof that when a change is made, a new timeline is created, as when Marty returns to 1985, he now lives in the reality where his parents are cool people instead of in the original timeline when they were boring.

This is a very easy concept to understand and adopt for the reason that it remains consistent throughout the story. You change anything in the timeline, a new timeline is formed. This also allows the writers to explore alternate realities where different outcomes happen due to different decisions that are made (such as the 1985 in the second film where Biff rules the world).

The second type of time travel is adopted in many video games and standalone-episode TV shows. It’s the concept that when either something finishes, you fail, or you die, you’ll start again as if nothing happened. This is convenient because you can allow literally anything to happen to your character and it won’t affect anything in any other scenario. Shows such as Mickey Mouse and Geronimo Stilton adopt this method of story. The simple term for this format is: not in canon.

In a time travel situation, whatever the time traveller does in one timeline, it’ll reset and the traveller can then go through a different series of events in the parallel, identical timeline. This is adopted by many action films, my favourite of which being Source Code, where a deceased U.S. Army pilot has his consciousness transferred into the body of a school teacher on a train in a different timeline. In the original timeline, this train has already been blown up by a terrorist and the purpose of sending the pilot back is to identify the bomber and how to defuse the bomb. This is to prevent the bomber from committing any more atrocities in the original timeline. Try to wrap your head around that.

The next type of time travel isn’t really time travel at all. It’s the concept that you can only rewind and fast forward moments in your own timeline, however the further back you rewind to the more of reality you erase, and vice versa. This is the concept adopted by the time stone in Doctor Strange. The use of the stone is only to slow, stop, fast forward or rewind time in the moment. It can also create time loops and paradoxical scenarios, linking back to the not-in-canon type time travel.

This type of time manipulation is good, because it too is consistent, where events can only be altered by reversing everything up until that point, leaving no possible holes in the timeline. This does create the problem that when fast-forwarding time, we can never really be sure if the outcome is what would have happened had time naturally progressed.

This next type of time travel has also been adopted by Marvel, this time in Avengers: Endgame. They deal with time travel where when you travel, you travel into a different timeline. Unlike Back to the Future, when the time traveller returns, the time traveller returns to his original reality. It is a bit like portal jumping.

This works to a certain extent. From a selfish point of view, the timeline that the viewer calls reality essentially has an infinite number of timelines at the disposal of reality and can be used as a resource bank/garbage dump for all of reality’s problems. It also gets rid of the paradoxical conundrum where killing yourself in the past kills yourself and so on, because you’d only be killing yourself in an alternate timeline.

However, it feels a little bit cheap to me in the sense that in this type of time travel, you still can’t alter anything that happened in your past, only in alternate pasts. Unless you wish to stay in said alternate timeline, I don’t see how this mode of time travel is useful except for being a resource bank or garbage dump.

The final type of time travel I will go into is the concept that there is only one timeline and there will only be one timeline. When you travel, you travel to a different point in that same timeline. This is portrayed very well in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban with the time turner, as well as in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure with the phone booth.

This is almost the best thought-out time travel variant. However, it also doesn’t come without its flaws. It is reliant on the fact that everything that happens in that one timeline is pre-written and that it’s a universal system where everyone understands everything, such as Harry realising that he has to cast the Patronus Charm in order to save his past self from the dementors (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban). However, the second something is forgotten, or something derails from the system, as stated very clearly in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, the system falls apart and creates very irreversible paradoxes. To sum it all up, this is the most elegant type of time travel, but also the most fragile.

A Perfect Time Travel Concept?

Is there a perfect time travel concept that we could maybe wrap our heads around completely? No. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be so many fictional time travel variants. The truth is, time travel is all of the above and none of it. We all hold part but not the whole puzzle. It really is best for us just to leave the concept of time alone and focus on more sustainable ways of living our future.

My personal favourite time travel concept? It would have been the single universal time travel concept as it makes almost the most sense. However, I fear that the risk of the entire spacetime continuum collapsing in that concept is far too high, as such I don’t think it would be my favourite.

Instead, I think the right balance between consistency and safety is the time travel used in Back to the Future, where the notion of time travel in itself replaces the current reality with a new one, but where the traveller is still able to recall past events of the original timeline.

Conclusion

That is the crash course on time travel. A crazy, confusing mess of endless problems and far too few solutions. If you didn’t understand most of it, I don’t blame you. Time travel is not a concept to be understood, but instead to be admired for its complexity and mystery.

Time travel also serves to remind us about how much we don't know and how much we're unable to understand about nature around us. Even if, by miraculous chance, we do invent real time travel in the future, I imagine that it won't be around for long, for either it would be banned by modern civilisation for being too dangerous and unstable, or it would have collapsed our entire reality and therefore our existence.

For those of you who still wish to pursue knowledge on time travel, your best textbooks would actually be the movies listed below (in alphabetical order):