Time travel as a story telling mechanic has always been… unreliable, at best. When you get to the end, everyone is asking the same question, “But, why did you have to travel back in time to 1493 to save the professor? Why didn’t you just go back to yesterday and stop him from going back to 1493?” Your father was trapped in the 1980s for 15 years because he travelled back in time? You spent 15 years without him? How come he didn’t return to the moment he left? How is time in the past colinear with time in the present? It’s so confusing. I was lost in the past for a decade, and I returned the day before I left, 10 years older? It never makes sense. Because it is stupid.
Yesterday, I travelled back in time and accidentally killed my grandmother before she was born. Two questions: 1) Does that make me a bad person? 2) How am I still here, right now, worrying about the ethical implications of killing someone who died 50 years ago of natural causes. It’s natural to be run over by a logging truck, right? Big paper is so environmental.
It’s the inevitable creation of a paradox that leads some scholars to proclaim that time travel is not possible. Here, I will posit an alternative viewpoint.
The creators of Rick and Morty say that their stories only pivot on interdimensional travel, and not time travel, because of the difficult to explain paradoxes that immediately arise from non-causal temporal interferences. It’s difficult to write, difficult to explain, and impossible to make sense of, because time travel is complicated. A world populated by flatulent butts is easier to understand than Fry becoming his own grandpa because Jiffy Pop in a microwave.
Multiverse theory arises from the idea that every possible change in outcome creates a new dimension. Every possible outcome happens. Many of these dimensions appear to be very similar to ours, to each other, with the differences manifest only on a quantum level. An electron is in a different state in one universe from another, and a chemical reaction failed (or succeeded) to happen. Our entire universe is exactly the same as another, except for a single electron in Alpha Proxima is spinning up, instead of down. Oh, the humanity.
There are a lot of molecules, atoms, and electrons, all being in different places at the same time, giving rise to a plethora of nearly identical but different universes. That seems like a lot of universes. I thought the differences were on a macro level; big decisions making big differences. Fortunately, infinity is a big number, and I think the universes can deal with it.
Okay, so here’s the salient point: What if there were a universe, exactly like ours, except it started a day later? If we could interdimensional travel to that universe, it would be like we were going back in time one day. Everything else is the same, but it is a day earlier. We didn’t time travel. We travelled to a different dimension. If we travelled to a universe that started a week after ours, we could find the sandwich that we left on the bus.
Imagine then, that there is an infinite number of universes that started an infinite amount of time before and after this universe, our common point of reference. Traveling to those dimensions, those unique universes, would appear to us as going forwards or backwards in time. Everything else would be indistinguishable because the only observable difference is the moment that universe began counting time. Before the big bang, if you believe in that nonsense, time didn’t exist. Time begins contemporary with the moment the Swiss invented it as a confidence trick.
If I were to travel back in time and kill my grandmother, I would not be killing my own grandmother, I would be crossing into a different dimension and killing a grandmother-prime, who is someone else, my grandmother from a different, unique dimension. I would not be destroying my own existence, I would be preventing the existence of the me-prime in another dimension. Simultaneously, I would be creating two new dimensions: one where I killed my grandmother (peacefully in her sleep), and another where I did not.
When I return back to my normal dimension, everything is as it should be. There is no paradox. I did not kill my grandmother and I continue to exist; I killed someone else’s grandmother who happens to be similar to mine.
Time travel is interdimensional travel. There is no paradox. There is only cake, and it’s not a lie. Rick and Morty can do time travel, and there is no paradox.
Also, for everyone who wants to go back in time and kill Hitler as a baby, what the hell is wrong with you? Murdering babies is still infanticide! Are you saying that the best idea you could come up with to stop the holocaust is infanticide! Replacing one atrocity for another? What if you just bought his paintings, like the Ukrainians did for Hunter Biden? Crisis averted! The number one cause of genocide is low self esteem. And poison. Think about it.
For the record, I also find the existence of Centaurs difficult to comprehend. More on them later.
—DG
Inside Doug's Head 