Time Travel without Plot Holes

Discussion in 'Setting Development' started by Charles Whitfield, Apr 19, 2015.

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  1. GingerCoffee

    GingerCoffee Web Surfer Girl Contributor

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    @BayView's comment, going forward in time instead of backward makes sense except you'd need to destroy the device at some point to explain why it didn't exist in the future.

    Or, since time is a one directional, make the machine only able to go forward, no reverse is possible. You go forward and you can't return.

    Another option is to go back before humans existed. If you mess with a dino or two, would that change human history?
     
  2. Steerpike

    Steerpike Felis amatus Contributor

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    There is a Ray Bradbury time travel story where people go back into time before humans and a very minor event (literally a butterfly effect) results in changes when they return to their own time.
     
  3. GingerCoffee

    GingerCoffee Web Surfer Girl Contributor

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    Well we know that could happen. But the OP question is, can one do time travel without a plot hole, not is there a possible potential plot hole with every scenario.
     
  4. Steerpike

    Steerpike Felis amatus Contributor

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    I think the only way to do backward travel without a plot hole is the alternate timeline approach, though I'm open to arguments for other approaches
     
  5. GingerCoffee

    GingerCoffee Web Surfer Girl Contributor

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    For the sake of debate, what could one do before the impact of the Chicxulub event that would inevitably change subsequent events?
     
  6. Steerpike

    Steerpike Felis amatus Contributor

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    Send Bruce Willis back to blow up the asteroid while it was still way out in space?
     
  7. GingerCoffee

    GingerCoffee Web Surfer Girl Contributor

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    Plot hole: no motivation. ;)
     
  8. Vandor76

    Vandor76 Senior Member

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    Some animals survived the event and we all are their descendants. Kill one of them and due to the butterfly effect most probably no Hammurabi, no Caesar, no Napoleon and no you :)

    To the OP : this is way too scientific but at least some parts worth to read (if not else then to improve your techno-babble skills) : http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.0167v1.pdf
     
  9. Shadowfax

    Shadowfax Contributor Contributor

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    For Bruce Willis, blowing something up is motivation enough.
     
  10. Mike Hill

    Mike Hill Natural born citizen of republic of Finland.

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    You can explain it with some type of magic. Of course you need to stay consistent even then.
     
  11. JEH

    JEH New Member

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    I would say no, you can't write time travel without plot holes because time travel can't happen in real life, at least not in my opinion. All great time travel stories like Back to the future, Dr Who and The time machine all had to create their own internal logic on how time travel works, if you over-analyse all the uses of time travel in them, you realise quickly how nothing makes sense
    The best you can do is to make up your own time travel rules and then make sure you don't contradict yourself rather than reality, because you will have to contradict reality all the time.
     
  12. PeterC

    PeterC Active Member

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    Time travel to the future is possible without inconsistencies. It's even physically possible... you just can't return. To travel into the future you "only" need to travel at speeds near the speed of light and let time dilation do it's work.
     
  13. Diatribe

    Diatribe Member

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    "Infinite Universe Theory"

    Basically, once you leave this "time" and travel to another, you splinter off into a newly formed universe in which was formed that very moment. You can never go back to the exact universe you left because the universe is always branching off into another universe based on your actions.

    Thus, there's no plot holes. Things simply are what they are in whatever universe you've placed your character(s).

    Make sense?
     
  14. koushiro

    koushiro New Member

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    I don't think it's possible to write (backwards) time travel without some kind of problem arising. Like somebody else mentioned, successful time travel stories have their own internal logic on how time travel works. As long as you follow that and keep the problems to a minimum, suspension of disbelief of the reader can take care of the rest.

    My favorite time travel story is "Time Traveler's Never Die" by Jack McDevitt. In that story, there is only one timeline. If you go back in time, you either become part of how history unfolded or you die. Like if you try to stop Lincoln's assassination, either you fail or, if you manage to get close enough to actually stop it, you basically just have a heart attack. Now, I personally think that last part is kind of lame, but if you really examine any backwards time travel in a story, it's going to have some kind of problem, whether it introduces a plot hole or a paradox or a rule that just seems kind of lazy.

    Personally, I don't like the "many timeline" method because it just seems much more asinine than pretty much any other way of handling backwards time travel. It makes sense from a plot perspective because it avoids paradoxes, but the idea that you can create an entire other universe simply by existing in the past is just ridiculous to me. All the matter and energy in the universe, you create all that again because you went back in time? You've elevated time travelers to god-like status. Of course, as somebody else pointed out, even thinking about our own reality in such terms can become problematic because we have no idea where our universe came from.

    So I really think it just boils down to which plot hole/paradox/lazy rule bothers you the least. Backwards time travel probably isn't actually possible, so discussing how to avoid plot holes with it may very well be like discussing how to make an actual Penrose staircase. It's a common device in fiction, but it's probably just a concept that's impossible to really put into practice (like an omnipotent being or infinity).
     
  15. Steerpike

    Steerpike Felis amatus Contributor

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    This theory of time travel found its way into science fiction as a result of actual physics, based on primciples of quantum mechanics (a lot of which already seems counter-intuitive to many people). You can a bit about the idea, among others, here:

    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-travel-phys/#7

    Typically, this type of model represents that the universe diverges on a quantum physics level any time it is represented with a choice between states, but some versions hold that often the timelines merge back quickly because the choice between states isn't significant enough to prevent that. Other choices are significant enough so that the timeline permanently diverge. The number of timelines that would result would be essentially infinite. Based on these ideas, and some creative interpretation of certain experiments in quantum mechanics, you get the science fiction version of alternate timelines in time travel. It's the only version of fictional time travel that seems to eliminate paradoxes.
     
  16. koushiro

    koushiro New Member

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    I realize that the idea is based on work in theoretical physics (that lots of people have problems with, but this obviously isn't the place for a physics debate), but you have to remember that we're talking about fiction. Which isn't to say that we shouldn't root stories in reality (stories have to be believable); rather, we should consider the deeper effects such theories have on our story.

    So we want to create new timelines (universes) to get rid of paradoxes. I invent a time machine to go back in time and kill Hitler, but with Hitler dead, maybe my parents don't meet. Or maybe they do and I just have no reason to invent a time machine now. This is the classical paradox we're all familiar with. And obviously, the solution we're talking about is to create a branch point so that there are now two universes, one where Hitler is dead and I don't invent time travel, and one where history as we know it happened. But now let's really think about it. In my last post, I said that it promotes a character to god-like status by creating an entire universe with their actions. This (kind of) assumes that we had one universe before and now we have two as a result of time travel. This is less rooted in actual theoretical physics but is easier for people to wrap their heads around. Now, there isn't anything objectively wrong with giving a character this kind of power (it could be interesting to explore what goes through their mind as they realize what they've done), but unless you're going to specifically address it then I think it's silly (which is just a matter of opinion). As I also said in my previous post, it really just boils down to which problem with time travel bothers you the least. This one doesn't bother me the least so I stay away from it.

    But then let's consider a story where events create an infinite number of possible universes. Stochastic processes could turn out any number of different ways; and they do, a new universe created for each branch point. This kind of makes sense because quantum mechanics is seemingly deterministic, yet many processes are random. So each random event creates new universes for every possible outcome that continue deterministically until a new random event happens, where everything branches again. But it gets absurdly complicated when you introduce time travel. If a character goes back in time, they're presumably going back through multiple branch points, i.e., to a point before certain universes existed. Are all those universes now erased from existence? Or do they continue to exist beside the new universes created by the character's going back in time? And if the actions of a character in the past create an infinite number of new universes, why are we following the one presented in the story? If Joe kills Hitler and produces an infinite number of futures (that are all different from the previous infinite number of futures that may or may not still exist), why do we care about this path in particular being told in the story? It all becomes rather pointless to me, which is terrible for a story.

    So I'll just be a broken record and say it all depends on what bothers you the least. The more you try to rationalize time travel in a many-worlds multiverse, the more problems you come up with. I really don't think there's a perfect way to write backwards time travel (because I think it's probably not possible) so it's just up to the preference of the writer. My original point, really, is that branched timelines really aren't for me unless it's actually useful to the story in some way. There are other ways to avoid paradoxes, but it would probably have to involve a somewhat lazy rule (like in the Jack McDevitt novel I mentioned) or just saying, "Well, we would have thought it would work this way, but we were wrong. We can't explain it, we just know that it happens," which isn't all that unrealistic for a story anyway.
     
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  17. uncephalized

    uncephalized Active Member

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    This is not a problem if you assume that all possible universes already exist, and by time-traveling to the past and changing something you are not actually creating a new universe, but merely stepping into a different one, the same way you do when you make *any* choice in the 'regular' timeline.

    I like the alternate-universe approach (that's the one they used in Dragonball Z), OR I like to assume that any time travel already happened before you ever did it. The universe is causal and determined, and you were *always* going to travel back in time and do whatever. Those changes already happened before you ever thought to make them. So the timeline is fixed either way. By going back in time you're just acting out the part that you had to play in order to put the universe in the order it was already in when you found it.
     
  18. Jack Asher

    Jack Asher Banned Contributor

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    This is the biggest plot hole with time travel:
    [​IMG]
    If your audience can accept that, they'll accept the rest.
     
  19. koushiro

    koushiro New Member

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    This also has some really weird ramifications to the story, but it might be interesting to explore those. If all possible universes already exist, that means that it's impossible to go back in time in your own universe. If you tried to go back in time to kill Hitler, you'd instead be immediately transported to a completely different universe, the one where history happens like it did in your own, but you show up in the 1930s or whenever. That would be pretty complicated to explain to readers (especially since there's probably no way for the protagonist to know what's happened), but it could be pretty interesting to explore. It's less based in real quantum physics, though.

    haha, well I think the general assumption is that a "time machine" is really a "space-time machine" since space and time are an interwoven continuum. BUT! This means that any time machine in a story should also be able to travel to any point in the universe in the current time instantly. I've seen characters in some stories use time machines to travel just in space but not in time.
     
  20. Vandor76

    Vandor76 Senior Member

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    Very good point.

    You can say that the story presented is different in every universe so the reader reads this particular story because he lives in this universe that is branching to billions of universes every second as he reads the book so the ending of the story might be different in those universes (and if he reads the end first, this happened only in some of the many worlds)
     
  21. romansblues

    romansblues Banned

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    Watch a British television show called 'Goodnight Sweetheart'. The plot is a London tv repair man stumbles across a time portal that takes him back to the war era of the 1940's. During the course of the three seasons (if I remember) he leads basically a double life between the present and the past. It was entertaining and could provide at least a hit list of points if you are wanting to research a time travel story line.
     
  22. Some_Bloke

    Some_Bloke Active Member

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    You need to create rules for how time travel works in your universe and keep playing by these rules. One of Back To The Future's rules state that time is a straight line but if you go back in time and change something, the line goes in a different direction like when old Biff picked up the book and gave it to his younger self.
     
  23. Vandor76

    Vandor76 Senior Member

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    That part of the story was crap :( Old Biff went back, gave the book to young Biff and brought back the Delorean to 2015 (yes, THIS year) along an unchanged timeline like if there were no change in it. Later Marty and the Doctor went back to 1985 and found themselves on a very different timeline. This is clearly bending the rules as the plot needs.
    Have I mentioned already that I'm a hard sci-fi fan? :)
     
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