My Issue With Time Travel

This has been bothering me for a few days now…

Time travel. I know it’s not possible, not yet anyway, so you’ll have to just go with me on this one and suspend your disbelief for a few moments. Let’s say a character in a movie or a tv show or a book travels back in time to stop some horrible event from happening — a narrative that we have seen many times. And let’s say the hero succeeds in changing the future. So if there is no horrible event to stop anymore, then the hero doesn’t need to go back again, thus he would not have been present in the past to change it. Are you still with me? What I’m trying to say is that, logically, the whole system breaks down.

I saw the movie Deja Vu last week (it was horrible, don’t ask me why I watched it) and was struck by the logical impossibility of the conclusion. Denzel Washington goes back in time to stop a terrorist bombing and save a woman’s life. Of course, he and the woman fall in love but he dies while saving the day. Keep in mind that this is Future Denzel operating in the past. At the end, after Future Denzel has died, the woman meets Present Denzel and is oh so relieved. They live happily ever after. The thing is, because the bombing was stopped and the woman was saved, Present Denzel has no idea of this alternate progression of events. So of course, he won’t be going back into the past to stop these things that never happened. But if he doesn’t go back, he won’t be there to stop them from happening. You feeling me? It doesn’t work.

There is a similar logical gap in so many of our time travel stories. What about Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure? Don’t you think if Freud had been picked up by two guys in a phone booth and transported through time that his later works would have been much different? Then why weren’t Bill and Ted up on stage talking about Freud’s contributions to the science of time travel?

Everything falls apart.

Let’s hope we never actually make time travel possible. The whole world would just implode.