Time Travel in Sci-Fi

So as some of you may know i am a big fan of science fiction. But after watching or reading the majority of sci-fi im left feeling ashamed for my fellow human story tellers. Ashamed at all the gross lapses in judgement which fail under scrutiny. They attempt to frame a realistic reality and simply fail miserably at often both the the little details and huge failures in the very basis of the plot. The absolute worst offenders are stories of time travel.

The biggest mistake is right up front. Most everything in our universe is time reversible. Our classical macroscopic universe already includes it. The 'past' is just an incomplete and flawed manmade concept. It is not along some dimension of 'time'. There is only the now. The past can only be reached if you reverse the entirety of the universe.
So many stories have a person enter a time machine to be sent back to the past. The concept is flawed. If you were to reverse the time of the contents of a time machine, the person inside would grow younger and lose memories and regurgitate up complete hamburgers and what not. It may seem absurd, but is actually much more sound than any other proposition. But, the lack of the interactions which the contents had had prior to entering the time machine would cause the entire process to collapse and be unable to continue unless supplied with exact duplicates of the interactions that the contents originally had prior to entering the time machine.

If you wanted a true time machine, it would have to reverse the entirety of the universe EXCEPT the contents. And since nothing can move faster than light, once the machine was turned on you would have to wait at least the current age of the universe(perhaps twice that) for it to begin. How would you power such an immense field? But ignoring all this for a moment, we are still left with the same problem as reversing just its contents; everything that originally depended on the contents will collapse as it is no longer present.

Regardless of the improbable(impossible) method of time travel portrayed, there are still gaping issues with the 'branching' of time. Most stories use this form so that the hero can accomplish some sort of change. The problem is that if there are multiple branches of time, there is going to be some serious issues with several time travelers(each of a different branch) all going back to the same point in time and space. What are the physical effects of 200 human bodies all being overlapped instantaneously? And if you subscribe to the many worlds quantum theory, there will be a hell of a lot more than 200 bodies... more like (the elapsed time between the destination and the origin in planck's time) - (the number of divergent histories which result in the time travel not taking place). Planck time ticks at roughly 5.39106 × 10^44 per second, for those who didnt know(which is a mighty big number). That much mass packed so close would likely create a black hole.

Looper gets a special mention here for being just batshit stupid. In this movie(as in several others such as back to the future) there is only one time line. We know this because changes in the past here retroactively update things sent back to the past. But making ANY change in such a system would be impossible. The ending of the movie makes no sense. You're left with a victim gasping in bewilderment as time travelers are simply erased before her eyes, and has full knowledge of what NEVER happened. I could go on at length about how many holes are in this movie, but instead i will simply state how utterly stupid the writers of hollywood sci-fi are. Retarded.

The only method for pseudo time travel which holds up to scrutiny is the actual creation of a new universe, even if imperfect, directly modeled from what we know of the past time period. And injection into it. Perhaps via virtual reality or some more advanced version which we dont have name for yet.

Perhaps i dont give enough credit to the media. Perhaps they are much more intelligent than they seem. Perhaps instead it is a grand conspiracy to reduce the populace's IQ. But i doubt it.

Bad luck OP. Consider yourself lucky you're not into firearms or any type of combat etc. because then 50% of movies would make you cringe. I for example moderately enjoy watching Walking Dead but it makes my teeth crack every episode when I see blatant stupidities in these fields that could be sooo easily avoided. Or the skull puncturing with litte effort by way of a pocket knife, even done by kids, holy shit. I mean there's physics in the way and shit like that, at least pretend it's harder.

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Moonyu wrote:

Its called willing suspension of disbelief.

Its what allows us to enjoy superhero movise, horror movies and the like. science Fiction requires it in vast amounts. Hence the term fiction.

In my mooned series, Moon would be either dead already or a vegetable from all the abuse he takes.

Its the readers job in ignore fact and simply enjoy the show.


All that said, bad SciFi writing is painful to read. The author should at least put a little effort in to it.

Science fiction may be fiction, but its basis is suppose to be grounded in reality(unlike fantasy). Thats why it has 'science' in the name.

Its amazing that these studios throw hundreds of millions of dollars around and yet cant afford to employ a moderately intelligent person with a background in science to proof read the script for logical contradictions and unsound science. Perhaps i should apply for a job as a consultant at the studios.

Hi

Ahhh time travel every TV/movie franchises favorite tool for continuing another season, lol how many times did Eureka do that, every season? haha

cheers

Reverse time travel actually being real in any form is an idiotic idea.