Time Travel?
Don't be so bloody daft!
by D!ck

OK, say for the sake of argument that it is possible to travel in time. You go back to one day before the Lottery and leave a note on your desk telling yourself to buy these numbers, you go back to the day after the Lottery and hey presto, you've bought the right numbers!

Or have you? If you have already bought those numbers, you wouldn't have gone back in time to give them to yourself would you? No, what you would have done is gone back, bought the Lottery ticket, and brought it back with you to the day after the Lottery, and gone to claim your prize.

That's okay, because the Lottery is something that you can plan for, and you can still profit from it after the event. But what about the "Terminator" series of gaffs? These are said the be the classic examples of Time Travel folly...

John is born, he grows up to be a computer whizz and when the computers take over he leads the resistance and smashes their defence grid, winning the war. The computers think, hey ho, we'll send a robot back in time and kill his mum so that he won't be born, then he won't lead the resistance and win. One has to assume they either do this before they are beaten, or that some outlying computer network manages it after the main network has gone down, because if it is left till afterwards, there'd be nobody to do the sending.

Anyway, the Terminator goes back in time to kill Sarah Connor. Obviously it didn't work because she went on to make a second film. Now the History books say that Sarah didn't die, even though a Terminator was sent, but that's not true, because the History books must say that John was born, because thingy, John's father, actually MET him and WORKED with him in the resistance.

Okay, John is born, the terminator was sent, but it failed. Why does the computer bother sending the Terminator if it knows it is going to fail and that the man sent to make sure of this then goes and causes John's birth? It is the first error of logic.

So the Terminator isn't send then, but John is still born, because his father says so, and the computer knows so because the resistance is just about to smash them, but then who's John's father? If the Terminator was NOT sent, then John's father didn't go either, and so John can't have been born, at least not by the guy from the future, this is logic error number two.

The only way this can possibly happen is if the History books say that a robot appeared out of nowhere, closely followed by a man. The robot tries to kill a woman and fails, then the bloke gets the woman pregnant. Elsewhere a child is born around the same time as the woman gives birth, the child and the woman's son grow up apart and only meet when they both get into the resistance, where the computer sees history and _realises_ what happens, and realises that it must therefore send the Terminator back.

Unfortunately if it realises what happens then it must realise that what it did actually caused John's birth, so whether it does or does not send the robot, it will still KNOW that John is born, logic error number 3.

Put bluntly, Terminator is a load of bollocks where time travel is concerned, it just ties itself in more and more knots and looks sillier and sillier as it tries to explain the various reasons for things happening, this isn't helped one iota in the second episode either, more and more paradox's (?) and more and more pathetic excuses.

The one overwhelming reason why non of this works at all is quite simple, and once you realise this then everything else is simple and anything anyone else says can instantly be laughed at: TIME DOES NOT EXIST!

Got that? It's quite simple really, you cannot travel through time because it does not exist. Time is simply a concept invented by man (or possibly aliens, that's not important at this stage!) to help him explain the regular rotations of the Earth around the Sun and the Earth on it's own axis.

The Earth rotates on it's axis on a regular basis, we call this a day.
The Earth goes round the Sun on a regular basis, we call this a year.

These things just happen, if we did not have names for them they would STILL happen, they happened before there were men to realise that it was happening and they will continue to happen after when all life has been wiped out at the end of the first global war.

Did you watch "StarMan" when it was on? In it the alien says:

"When this small star has appeared three more times..."

This is because it does not know Earth's terminology for Terrestrial Rotations, or what we simply call "days". Similarly, North-American indians describe their age in "Summers", instead of "Years". They are much more in tune with the work- ings of the Earth than most - ahem - "civilised" people are. A person is twenty summers old because they have been alive while their part of the Earth has been closest to the sun twenty times, we just call it years, it's another concept and a nice short word to describe something that would occur anyway.

What people call time is really just another method of counting something that has already happened, and something that is _still_ happening, remember that at all times and you know that Time Travel is not possible, because the things that you are talking about have _already_ happened, they cannot be undone because the Hstory books can only be written once, though the actual content can be misread by many different people.

Dick