rayxr
male - 36 years, United States
Blog / Time Traveling UFOs
Monday, 30 October 2006 at 19:45
Over at his Facebox site, http://en.facebox.com/paulkimball/blog/blogid=9...- ,Paul Kimball speculates that some UFO sightings might be time travelers from the future, our descendants stopping by to see how us primitives are (were) doing.
But when you talk about time travel, you can get into all sorts of paradoxes. If someone from the future changes the past, it could end up also changing the future to the point where the time traveler no longer exists, e.g., he kills his great-grandfather. But if the time traveler no longer exists, then how can he change the past?
Maybe time travelers follow a "prime directive" similar to what Gene Roddenberry envisioned when he created the original "Star Trek" TV series. Don't get involved with the natives -- or in the case of time traveler, don't bother your ancestors. You can look, but don't touch.
But even the sighting of a time probe could change history. A driver spots a time probe, is so startled that he has a fatal car accident. Once again the time traveler kills his great-grandpa and so he doesn't exist.
So how to avoid changing history? Simple. Work with what you already have. Time travelers from the future would check the historical records for UFO sightings. Since a sighting has already occurred and the results are known, morph your time machine to fit the description found in the Blue Book files or whatever sources you have. You wouldn't be changing history, you would be creating history as it already happened.
The important detail is to make sure to check all sources so that you know that the sighting involved only your disguised time probe, not something else. After all, you wouldn't want to travel into the past and bump into a secret military craft, knocking it out of the sky. (Unless it already has happened.)
Of course, the worse case scenario would be that you pop in the same time as an ET craft from another world. The aliens might be pissed and chase you back into the future. After all, these aliens created humankind and they don't want humans from another time period messing up their experiment. So they invade the future earth and take out all time-travel machines. "Now" both the past and future are screwed up.
( You get the feeling I should be a well-known, published SF writer? )
Comments 2 Sort comments:
Ray Palm (Tuesday, 31 October 2006 at 23:15)
Paul:
It is all theory. Actually, since there really isn't that much science behind it, I think speculation would be the better term. Usually when it comes to subject like UFOs, time travel, etc., I speculate. That's why I won't be a guest on the "Coast To Coast" radio program like Richard Hoagland -- I'm not running around, wildly promoting a wild claim.
So, in the spirit of speculation, let's say that there could be problems with changing the past, even with multiple timelines. These problems would inhibit time travelers from screwing around with the past.
First, there is the ethical problem. Changing history is dealing with millions of lives. Some would benefit, some would suffer. OK, it would all right to take out Hitler before he came to power, but maybe things would have ended up even worse. World War II could have happened anyway, but between the US and Russia. Maybe Russia would have gotten the A-Bomb first. Anyway, changing history is like playing God. But unlike God, no human would know what the end results would be.
Secondly, maybe there are limits to how far you can multiply a timeline. At a certain point a state analogous to a "critical mass" is created by a surfeit of co-existing timelines and everything blows up.
Hey, maybe that's how our universe was created.
Ray
Paul Kimball (Tuesday, 31 October 2006 at 10:41)
Ray:
I've always thought that the easy answer to the "can't change the past" paradox would be that, as soon as you did change the past, a new, alternate, timeline is created, while yours remains intact. Under this idea, it would be impossible to go back and kill Hitler, for example, in order to make our world a better place today; you would simply create a new timeline where Hitler died, but ours would remain the same.
Of course, it's all theory, isn't it?
Paul
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