Tag Archives: Terminator

Taking on time travel

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Time travel is the thorniest of plot elements. By nature, it’s full of flaws. Take the Grandfather Paradox — watch Futurama for the best example of that. Time travel is difficult because it doesn’t fare well under the light gaze of logic.

But lets push logic aside — whether time travel is or is not possible. When I read fiction (or watch movies or TV), I often want to escape. And what better way to escape than to leave the time period entirely?

Time travel as a plot device offers infinite possibilities. When you’re no longer constrained by time itself, the plot permutations are endless. The imagination can run wild. And for that reason most of all, I love nothing better than a great time travel story.

One of my favorite websites, io9.com, recently ranked all the time-travel-related movies, from best to worst. The article, and their reasons behind each ranking, is worth a look.

For a quick rundown, here is their top five:

5. Time Bandits

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4. Back to the Future 2

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3. Groundhog Day

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2. Primer

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And their top time travel movie of all time is….. Back to the Future (the first one)

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It’s an impressive list. I applaud the effort that went in to compiling it. My take? For the most part I agree, with some reservations. I’m not a Groundhog Day fan, and that barely qualifies as a time travel movie in my mind. And I disagree with the low rating for Ashton Kutshcer’s Butterfly Effect. Sure it was hokey, but what was great about it was how it showed the accumulated futility of trying to alter time.

As far as my own personal list, my favorite time travel movie ever, which made the top ten, has to be The Terminator. It was a brilliant sci-fi/thriller that established a mind-bending franchise. Arnold is great, and both Sarah and John Connor are now pop culture icons.

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Apocalypse obsessions

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Why are we so fascinated by end-of-the-world stories? It’s personal.

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Sci-fi is filled with apocalyptic stories, from asteroid flicks like Armageddon to zombie/plague movies such as 28 Days Later. And this end-of-world obsession is nothing new. Think back 2000 years ago to a book in the bible titled Revelation. What’s it about? Basically, the end of the world.

And now sci-fi themed website io9.com has a list of the most plausible ways that the world, as we know it (meaning human civilization) might end.

Their list:

1) pandemic

2) asteroid/comet impact

3) large igneous province (not a volcano, but a crack in the earth that oozes lava and toxic gases

4) climate change

5) radiation disaster, either nuclear war or a gamma ray burst from space

6) an invasive species that upsets the natural ecosystem and ruins our food supply

7) a black swan, or, something we have no way of accounting for (think The Terminator movies)

The point is we love to think about the world’s end. But why? I believe it’s because our world will truly end one day (at least on Earth). We will all die. That fact is inescapable, and it’s burdensome to think about it every day. Still, it’s there, and it seeps out into mass culture through armageddon stories.

We can’t change this fact, but at least we can have fun along the way.

 

Is time travel possible (for real)?

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When I was young my mother was in college and she took me to one of her film studies classes. I was maybe 8 or 9, and the movie we watched was an avant garde French black-and-white flick called La Jetee, about a man from a desolate future who travels back in time and is killed. A boy watches the man die, and the boy turns out to be that man as a child (You can watch the whole movie here).

La Jetee

Since then I’ve been hooked by time travel stories. They’re a staple of sci-fi, and some of my favorites are The Terminator series, Doctor Who, SyFy channel’s Continuum, and 12 Monkeys, which was based on La Jetee.

Twelve_monkeysmpWhile time travel is an interesting fictional conceit, it’s been pretty much dismissed as an impossibility for several reasons:

1. How could it be done physically?

2. The possibility of time-destroying paradoxes — the most famous one being, what if you went back in time and accidentally killed your grandfather before your parent was conceived?

3. If time travel is possible, then why aren’t time travelers all around us?

I’ve never been convinced by number 2. Number 1 never interested me. Number 3 has always been the most persuasive.

Nevertheless, scientists are getting closer to solving the riddle presented in number 1.

According to this report, a team of Australian physicists have simulated time travel on a quantum level using particles of light. The particle “traveled” through spacetime on a closed timeline curve. This means that the particle returned to its original starting point. It did not create a new curve.

In the simulation, the particle was sent back to an earlier point in time and interacted with the original particle before returning back to the present.

Don’t ask me to explain the nitty-gritty science behind this stuff. I failed physics in college.

So, if I’m reading this correctly, time travel is theoretically possible, at least in the quantum world. Will this mean that we can one day travel through time? Probably not, but who knows?

In the meantime, I’ll keep going back, time and again, to time travel stories.

Time travel – from fiction to fact?

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So far, the answer is no, unless the time travelers are hiding themselves really well.

It’s not too often that you hear of honest-to-goodness scientists searching for time travelers in a systematic fashion, but a few of them are. Richard Nemiroff, an astrophysicist at Michigan Technical University, and his team took a deceptively simple approach for tracking down time travelers: they did an Internet search.

They entered the following terms in the Internet: Pope Francis (there was no Pope Francis before March 2013) and Comet ISON (discovered in September 2012). Their theory — if they found mentions of either before the dates they were known, that would point to the existence of time travelers. They found only one mention of Pope Francis, but that seemed accidental.

Then they called for tweets using the hashtag #ICanChangeThePast2 or #ICannotChangeThePast2, specfically asking that the tweets be sent before the date issued. No responses.

Maybe there are no time travelers roaming among us. Or maybe they’re smart enough to not leave a paper trail.

So, for now, we’re stuck with time travelers existing only in TV, movies, and books. Maybe that’s a good thing. It’s complicated enough in imagination land. See my post on killing Hitler here for a good rundown. Also, check out io9.com’s complicated examination of the paradox-filled, twisted timelines of the Terminator franchise.

The bottom line? Time travel is hard stuff — hard to write about, and possibly too hard for us to ever achieve in reality.

 

Sci-fi is failing us

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Sc-fi is supposed to prepare us for the future, but no one gave the script to the robot creators.

The Terminator came out nearly 30 years ago. It lit the warning flare for a whole generation: artificial intelligence (machines, computers, robots, etc etc) will become self aware and will attempt to obliterate mankind. In the movie, this was done by Skynet, a high-powered war machine. Just as Star Trek has pushed us toward a more egalitarian society, the Terminator franchise has subconsciously tried to prepare us to battle human-hating robots.
 
And it’s been effective.
 
Take Japan’s repeated efforts to create companion robots, such as this nurse robot from Koroko robotics company:
 
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Creepy, right? Can’t you imagine her peeling off that fake skin and shooting you down with red glowing eyes? Something like this Arnold Schwarzenegger metallic monster:
 
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Now those “geniuses” at Boston Dynamics are fouling it all up. They’ve created a vicious robot that looks like… a galloping, headless goat/horse/metal hybrid, both fast and clumsy at the same time. Vicious. Silly. Unpredictable. Death bringers all the same.
 
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Watch this video and you will realize how confused and ill prepared you will be when this robot is hunting you down.
 
 
 
Nope. We only know how to fight humanoid, Schwarzeneggeresque robots. Not these crazy things.