Recreating the Past from the Future

Alternate history is a popular genre of fiction consisting of stories that are set in a words where history has diverged from what actually happened. One of my favourite examples is the Robert Harris novel Fatherland, which the author creates an alternate history in which the Allied landings on D-Day failed, and by 1964 Hitler remained in power, locked in a stalemate with the USSR and a cold war with the United States.

But as much fun as it may be to read, or even to create, or it's all still fiction... right?

Well, maybe for us it is, but what about our descendants, far in the future (or perhaps not so far...), who may develop time travel?

The biggest problem with traveling backwards in time, as I pointed out yesterday, is what happens if you change something. Now, if you're going back solely as an observer, and could be certain that nothing would change (i.e. you couldn't actually interact with the people of the time period you were visiting or observing), then that's fine. But what if you wanted to interact, and change things? Well, you could, but then it would change your own reality, wouldn't it? Go back and kill your grandfather, and all of a sudden you don't exist.

Hence, the grandfather paradox. You can't travel back in time and change your own reality.

But what if you didn't want to change your reality; what if you wanted to create an entirely new reality?

That's a different story altogether. The branching universe hypothesis holds that there are infinite number of universes, all-together known as multiverse. If a person travels back in time and changes something, he would create a new reality, divorced from his own from that point in time onwards. Thus, in one world D-Day succeeds, and things play out as they have for us; in another, you could wind up with Harris' version of reality.

D-Day is set on a pretty big scope, however. That might be difficult to change (although perhaps not so difficult if the Germans could be convinced that the Allies were going to land in Normandy). Easier to influence would be single smaller events - what if, for example, you could prevent Lincoln's assassination? Or Kennedy's? Or what if Hitler had been killed during the Beer Hall Putsch? And so forth.

All of which leads one to consider the following question: are we living in one of those realities?

What if in the future, when time travel is achieved, our descendants, whether for amusement, or intellectual curiosity, or a combination of the two, decide to travel back in time and create new realities by changing key events, and then watching what happens?

Philosopher Nick Bostrom points out why an advanced civilization might engage in such an activity. Once we fix the world and remove all the things that we don't want, then we will have to find "something more inspiring", as Bostrom puts it, or something more challenging, as I might put it.

Now, Bostrom doesn't go as far into the future as I have in my speculation, to a world where time travel is possible. But the principle which he outlines is applicable.

Indeed, with the rise of interactive video games where the player can make more and more decisions, and therefore find more and more possible narrative outcomes, we're already seeing people in ever growing numbers in technologically advanced societies playing around with the idea of changing worlds.

Someday in the future, maybe that's exactly what people are doing. Perhaps they are changing our world all the time, and creating all sorts of new worlds. And while the pop histories tend to go for the big picture, so-called world historical figures, like Hitler, and Lincoln, and Caesar, maybe our future selves are more like those historians who concentrate on people's history, where you and I are just as interesting and important, in our own ways.

Would any of it matter to us?

Perhaps not, I suppose, because we wouldn't be aware of it. But it does make one think about the cherished notion of free will. Maybe things that happen to us, both big and small, really do happen for a reason, and we're all just NPCs in a real-life game of "change the world".

Whereas in Dungeons and Dragons, you can create and play a 8th level bard, or a 5th level mage, perhaps in the future, they can play "lawyer Paul", or "police officer Paul", or "historian Paul"... or any of the other paths I could have taken.

Maybe someone is "playing me" right now.

And maybe they're playing you too.

Paul Kimball

Films require funding...

Are We Ourselves?

If the theoretical possibility exists that a simulated universe could be created, then how do we know that it hasn't already been created... by ourselves? In other words, are we the God that we have always imagined - the ultimate programmer?

Am I Paul Kimball... or am I someone future person's version of Paul Kimball, a history project by a super-advanced civilization, like a very, very advanced version of The Sims?

The thought occurred to me as I was walking through a cemetery this morning - wouldn't it be interesting to know how these people lived their lives? Who was this man, and who was that woman? All those tombstones - all those stories.

And then, as I stopped by one gravesite and stared at the tombstone of someone who had been dead for over a hundred years, I considered whether some person far in the future took a walkabout like mine, whether literal or figurative, stared at a tombstone or record or something else with my name on it, and decided they wanted to know who Paul Kimball really was, long after he, or I, died.

And so here "I" sit...

Paul Kimball

Time Travel - A Different Direction?

If the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis is the suburban Wal-Mart of theories about what the UFO phenomenon might represent, then time travel is the small boutique shop that's still in business downtown. Sure, it doesn't get a lot of attention, but it's got some pretty cool stuff to look at nonetheless.

Is time travel possible? Some of our smartest scientists tell us that yes, indeed, it is possible, although not for us, given the amount of energy it would take. Michio Kaku is one of the most prominent exponents of the idea that time travel could happen... someday.

Here's the thing, however - Kaku, and almost anyone else who discusses time travel as a possibility, talks about it from the persective of someone coming to our time from the future.

Things are usually no different when time travel is applied as an explanation for UFOs. It almost always comes from the same perspective - that our descendents are coming back in time to observe / interact with us.

But that creates all sorts of potential paradoxes.

Now, there may be answers to the various paradoxes that would result, but even supporters of the idea that you can travel back in time admit that it would be risky. What if you screwed up, and somehow changed all of existence?

Sure, you would wind up safe and sound in a newly created parallel universe, but there's no guarantee that any of your loved ones would still be around. Going back in time to kill Hitler and prevent the rise of the Nazis, for example, seems like a good idea, but there's no guarantee that the new world you would create would be any better. Who knows? Maybe it would be worse. One thing you could pretty much guarantee is that everything you knew would be different, or gone.

No thanks.

So even on a theoretical level, I don't buy the idea that people are traveling back in time, for any reason.

But what about people traveling forward in time?

That's an entirely different proposition, because there's no risk of altering your reality, so there are no paradoxes to worry about.

But if we don't have the technology to travel in time now, nor can we reasonably imagine having it any time soon, then how could someone in our past travel forward to our time?

The answer is that they couldn't - not from our past, as we know it. But here's the thing - our knowledge of the past is pretty dodgy. We still don't know everything that happened within the 20th century. We know even less about what happened two thousand years ago.

One hundred thousand years ago? One million years ago? One hundred millions years ago!

We might like to think we know how everything happened, but we don't. Anyone who tells you that we would definitely be able to detect remnants of a civilization that inhabited the Earth a million years ago is dreaming - particularly if that civilization was sufficiently advanced to have taken on a different form from ours, and then suffered some calamity that wiped it out. 

What if there was, as some people have speculated, and as legend would have it, a civilization on this planet that pre-dates our own, one that was indeed highly advanced, to the point where it had figured out how to travel through time? Maybe human, or maybe something else... post-human, perhaps.

So let me throw a scenario out there for you, as a thought experiment if nothing else.

One billion years ago (just picking a number), a non-human civilization arose on this planet that advanced far beyond our own, to the point where their existence was in essence virtual, not physical. At some point, they merged into a single consciousness.

With their combined intellect, they eventually discovered how to travel in time, and possessed the power to make it happen - and so off they went, to their future. Not as a physical being, however, but rather as consciousness - only their thoughts could travel through time. They could interact with whatever or whomever would follow them, but only indirectly - a burning bush that talks, perhaps, or lights in the sky that baffle us, or maybe something even more complex and interesting, that deals with us on a subconscious level.

In our dreams, maybe.

Then, once they had finished exploring the future, they decided to explore other things. The galaxy, perhaps, or other dimensions. And then, when it was all finished, they returned home for one final journey... a voyage past the "grey wall" that even they could not see beyond - the one thing, when all other things are known, that would still hold a mystery for something / someone like them.

Death.

Having seen all that there was to see, and experienced all that there was to experience, except their own mortality, they opened that final door, and disappeared forever.

As I said, it's just a thought...

Paul Kimball

Evolving Consciousness, Empathy and Advanced Hon-Human Intelligence

Fascinating video, which raises an intriguing question - how might it apply to a more advanced, non-human intelligence (NHI) that may have gone through the same development?

What if, for example, an NHI is actually us, from the future (making it an advanced human intelligence, of some sort), where we have moved much further along in terms of empathic development, and where our "sense of identity" really has broadened to a communal outlook? Could "we" be trying to help our less developed selves along the way, to lay the groundwork for a truly empathic civilization.

Or perhaps the NHI, if it isn't a future "us", has developed itself into a truly empathic consciousness, and feels obliged to help less developed species to the same destination, without directly interfering in their society?

Possibilities worth considering...

Paul Kimball

Beyond Best Evidence - IndieGoGo campaign video

The fundraising campaign video for Beyond Best Evidence. The IndieGoGo campaign goes live, this Saturday.

Paul Kimball

Ghosts and Time Travel

Assume for the moment that ghosts are real, in the sense that they represent an anomalous, paranormal phenomenon (or at least some of them do). As with UFOs, that begs the question: what are they?

Again, as with UFOs, there may well be myriad answers. The one that most people latch onto right off the bat is that ghosts are the spirits of deceased people who remain in touch, somehow, with our plane of existence. The other popular answer that I hear most often is that what we think of as ghosts are, in at least some cases, demons of some sort.

Perhaps. But what if ghosts are something else? Could it be possible that what we see or experience as a ghost represents a break in the continuum of time? In other words, if we view time as not a linear construct, but rather a wave, or even a loop, could we be looking backwards (or perhaps even forwards) in time when we observe a ghost, or similar phenomena? The person we see or experience, assuming that they are from the past, is in all likelihood dead (although if it's the recent past they may well still be alive, in our time), but as we observe them it is as if through a portal, fleeting though it may be, to the past - in short, they are still alive when we are looking at them, at least in their time.

This strikes me as just as plausible an answer for ghosts than the "spirits of the dead" idea (although the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive). Religious scholars have always spoken about some manifestation of an "eternal now" (Henry Alline, who I studied in college, was one; Paul Tillich was another - see here). Scientists now openly speculate that human-initiated time travel in some form or another might be possible. But what if the "time travel" is occurring naturally, as opposed to the human-created forms we usually dream about?

Maybe, just maybe, when we see a manifestation of someone dressed as if they were in the 1890s, they really are still in the 1890s... even as they are, for a moment in time, also in 2009.

Paul Kimball

Are We Ourselves?

A question that I've asked here before: instead of trying to figure out where UFOs might be from, perhaps the question should be "when" they are from. Could they be time travellers from our distant future? Modern physics tells us that they just might be.



Time travel could account for any number of the weird aspects of UFO sightings, not the least the big question - why don't "they" reveal themselves to us? The simple answer is that they might not be able to - they may be able to observe, but not interact, whether through limitations inherent in time travel, or as the result of some sort of temporal prime directive.

Even more interesting, as a possibility, is that time travellers have been interacting with us, perhaps in ways of which we are aware, and perhaps in ways of which we are not aware. For example - what if future scientists, or historians, as part of a research project, are endeavoring to create multiple time streams, to see how things would have turned out if A had happened instead of B? By doing so, they wouldn't run the risk of altering their own time stream - instead, they would merely be creating a new time stream that continues on separately from the moment they effect a change, that they could then observe.

In short, we couldn't go back and save Abraham Lincoln, or kill Adolf Hitler, in our own time stream (what's done is done, and even if we could, then we would cease to exist, because we would have changed our past), but we could go back and save Lincoln or kill Hitler to create a new timeline, and then watch how things played out.

Indeed, perhaps we are one of those alternate timelines? Perhaps, in the original universe, Hitler was killed, hit by a stray bullet during the Munich putsch, or, more likely, if you were a historian, killed in the July, 1944 bomb plot (if Hitler had been killed in Munich, he would probably not have been important enough a figure to bother with, but the July 1944 plot could have been a pivotal event if it had gone the other way), and some future historians decided to go back and see what would have happened otherwise.

Imagine the ethical dilemma if you knew that you could go back in time, and create a new timeline where Hitler would conceivably have almost another year in power before his defeat, during which time millions more would die - or worse, where the Nazis might have somehow managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in 1944 / 1945, or prolonged the war through the intelligent use of new weapons. Would an ethical species allow such experimenting, and the creation of a new timeline that might lead to a world with real people (just not our people) that would suffer horribly, simply so we could conduct some historical research?

I have little doubt, watching the development of our timeline, that we would. And maybe, just maybe, someone else, somewhen else, did just that... and here we are today.

Paul Kimball