I like the concept of time travel and I watched most of the time travel TV shows and time travel movies that I’ve been able to find over the years. I don’t take them too seriously and I don’t nitpick all that much because most of them don’t hold up to that kind of scrutiny.
I honestly don’t know what it is about time travel movies that I like but it is a genre that I have chosen to call my favorite. There is one concept that I haven’t seen touched on with the time machine storylines I’ve watched.
If you imagine for a moment a world where time machines were available, and any moment in our history could be visited from people not only in the past or present or future but from anytime in history. And that’s not a fixed limitation. So let’s take that concept and think about what it means to any moment in time. Let’s just pick Hitler as the example that seems to be a common thread amongst time machine stories. Would you go back in time and kill Hitler. If you did, would someone else take his place or more importantly how do you know that Hitler isn’t the 400th dictator that people keep killing over and over in their timelines.
The more interesting concept to consider is that people from any timeline might go back to kill Hitler, And given the sheer amount of time that exists between the 1940s and the infinite future, is it not conceivable that 100 billion people would suddenly appear in the history prepared to kill Hitler. If they were all Jewish people, they actually could have caused the problem. Millions of Jews trying to kill him. I’d be upset and ready to go to war too.
Let’s use a specific time instead of a whole lifetime as an example. Let’s say people wanted to go back in time and see the moments the Hindenburg blew up instead of the audience we currently know to be present at that moment there could be hundreds of thousands or even millions of people suddenly appearing to watch that event and then presumably minutes later vanishing
Most of the time travel shows that use the storyline where someone goes back in time to change history, they’re the only ones doing it but it doesn’t really make sense that that would be the case because let’s say today there was a time machine and I decided to go back and watch some speech or some historical event why would I be the only one interested in that between the time that it happened or the time that time machines were invented and the rest of all time. Surely my choice to go back to see something would not be unique and that at any event that was significant in our history The audience would be filled with time travelers perhaps so many that it becomes commonplace and they all wear a pink rose or something and that they meet beforehand it some predetermined place to have lunch or something. But even that would be overpopulated by time travelers from any moment in the future and in fact might even include multiple versions of yourself from different points in history. Maybe every year on your wedding anniversary you you and your wife go back in time to the moment you met to watch it from the bushes there could be 60 versions of you and her uncomfortably trying to find space elbow to elbow.
Weird.
