The Chronomancer’s Guide to Traveling Through Time

A treatise on the way mere mortals view the art of temporal shifting.

Greetings, denizens of the third dimension. I altered the past to lure you here today so I could ridicule you about your silly fantasies about time travel. Your various returns from the past, and eternity pebbles do give me quite the chuckle.

Let’s dive into all the wacky theories about time travel you humans have come up with.

The Immutable Past

This is the most egregious example from the standpoint of someone who fiddles with the timeline at will. This is the idea that the timeline is fixed and predetermined, the past cannot be changed. It is usually discovered that all the actions taken by time travelers to try to change the future had already happened when the past happened before or they end up being the cause of the thing they were trying to stop.

A popular version of this comes from your tale where children are responsible for solving the world’s problems: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The Time Turner, which, by the way, is extremely old tech, an hourglass, really?

Anyway, before you find out about this device, a bit of videography trickery happens where several unexplained things happen that help the magitrio survive the very normal childhood task of tracking down a convicted murderer. Each time, it’s explained away or credit is given to a dead guy.

But then, we get to the future, go back to the past, and see that all the things that happened were because future Harrmione (I can see why they didn’t get together, terrible portmanteau, it never would have worked out) had already done the things they were doing. It’s a fully closed loop. Once they go back in time they have no choice but to do the things they already did, but didn’t see themselves doing, because if they didn’t do those things then they wouldn’t have done the things they needed to do to get them to the point where they could go back in time to do the things that helped them do what they did.

This is scary because, if this were the way time worked, none of us would have any free will. There is only one timeline and every point of it is happening simultaneously. You can’t go into the past and change anything, because anything you go back in time to do would had to have already happened when that time happened the first time. The fact that you’re going to go back in time has already happened, and what you’re going to do has already occurred.

If you drop your phone and break it, you can’t then go back in time and stop yourself from dropping your phone because if you were going to do that you would have already done it. The fact that your phone broke means you were not going to successfully stop yourself from doing it. If you were able to, you would have, but you didn’t, so you aren’t.

Because I don’t believe that the universe preordained that I would say “flummaxulor” at this very time, I give this theory 1 out of a googol stars.

The Malleable Past

Now we’re getting somewhere. So, for this example, there is still only one timeline, but if you travel to the past, and you do something that impacts how events went, when you travel back to your own time, the universe will have changed according to what happened from your change onward. No separate timeline. When you change the past it causes a cascade of changes to your present.

Although, this interpretation also has quite a few flaws. The biggest one is the grandfather paradox. This occurs when you travel back in time to before either one of your parents was born and prevent your grandfather from giving your grandmother the shtupping of a lifetime. By doing so, you would have prevented the conception of one of your parents, thereby preventing your own birth. Now, if you were never born, how did you go back in time and prevent your parent’s conception? As soon as you take an action that would subsequently lead to the inability for you to have actually taken that action, what happens?

The movie that mostly sticks to these rules is Back to the Future. Marty McFly goes back in time (umm… spoiled alarm? That looks right). He gets hit on by his high-school aged mom and prevents the initial event that would bring his mom and dad together. Because of this, the people in a photo of his family, including himself, start slowly disappearing to indicate that they are being erased from existence. So of course, the solution is to play the guitar at a school dance (and create a causal loop that is fully inconsistent with the established timeline canon). This surprisingly works and ends up creating a similar, but more favorable future (to him), because he gave his father bravery, or confidence, or whatever virtue was most important in your nineteen eighties.

But, logical conclusion: if he didn’t fix things, and erased himself from existence, that would have changed the future where that little roadblock of not existing would have prevented him from going back in time and making the changes that led to his non-existence. By not causing his non-existence he must exist because by not existing he couldn’t cause his non-existence. Only by not not existing could he prevent his existence to ensure he would continue to exist to prevent the existence that would cause his non-existence.

Because this gets closer to the reality where time can be changed, but it’s super messy regarding any sort of continuity, I give this a π out of 69 stars.

The Fractured Past

Ah, here we go, an elegant, but not simple, solution to predetermination and paradoxes. What if, when you go back in time and change something, it doesn’t impact the future you came from, but creates a branch off of your own timeline that has to suffer the pain of the change you made.

Because the past can be changed in a way that doesn’t affect the future you were in, you can go kill any relative you want to. Also, the past you go to will also be a different timeline. If you go back in time and meet yourself and tell yourself some juicy future-secrets, that can’t be your original timeline because, in your past, future you from even another timeline didn’t come back to spill the tea.

This is the type of time travel you guys used for your Marvel Cinematic Universe. Multiple timelines leading to limitless versions of your favorite characters. Kill one of your characters? No you didn’t, you have Earth-420 to grab them from.

But you quickly see the problem with this. If there are nearly infinite versions of you, are you you? Is there a youier you out there? Are you the original you or are you an alternate timeline you created by a time traveler trying to not drop and break their phone?

In an existence where there is some universe out there that holds every possibility of what reality can be, isn’t this one a little… mundane? I mean, it is for you, not me. I hold time in the palm of my hand. The seconds obey my commands. The aeons flicker by like… like… flickering things. Maybe your universe is the weird one? In the universe where we’ve all fully evolved into our crab forms, seeing an alopecia-ridden ape would be really odd.

The Influencable Present

Okay, okay, okay. I’m not a chronomancer. I’m stuck in this time just like everyone else. I wrote this blog post with a little bit of an ulterior motive.

I really just wanted to talk about how I handle time in my novel: The Observer. So, if you haven’t heard of it, the characters in my book are dead. They are spirits, unseen by the living but working towards various ends to influence the material world. Spirits are able to witness any time and place on the timeline, but the present, the period of time that is experienced by the living, is the only time where the spirit and material world can interact. The past is immutable. Spirits can go back and view events that happened, but they cannot change them. The future is uncertain.  When spirits view the future, they see the course of events that will occur if no change is made to the present. If something changes, they immediately start seeing the new version of the future. If they do see anything they want to change, there are various ways to influence the living during the present.

This way of thinking about time solves the grandfather paradox. What has happened has happened. There’s nothing you can do but witness it. With the present being the only influencable time, it instills a sense of urgency. Did the future change? You only have until the present occurs to figure out what happened and fix what went wrong, or to ensure it does go wrong. There is no predetermination. Future events are constantly shifting, sometimes in a minor way, like getting delayed or distracted for a second, so the person is now walking three feet back from where they were. Other times, shifts are noticed that bring the end of time closer to the present.

There’s also only one universe, at least, there’s only one that the characters know about. No multiverse, if something goes wrong, there’s no coming back, no fixing it, we can only move forward.

If that sounds like an interesting take on time travel, check it out in The Observer.

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