For the past year I've been striving to deliver something fresh and wothwhile every day. For those that read this, I'm going to have to make an exception today - sorry! My main computer has been laid low by an untimely and STUBBORN infection bt the Vista 2010 Antivirus spyware virus, which has thus far survived all my efforts to remove it. At this point I think I'm going to have to go the System Restore route and be extremely thankful that I bought that external hard drive.
Honestly, though, it is one of the cannier viruses I've run across. There were barely any misspellings and it aped legitimate Vista appearances and it's probably voiced by Tony Jay. I, unfortunately, am failing pretty spectacularly at mending and defending.
Nevertheless, so this isn't entirely wasted - scientific perspective on just how stupid some aspects of stupid movies really are.
Showing posts with label apocalypse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label apocalypse. Show all posts
Friday, March 5, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Ethics at Eighty-Eight Miles Per Hour
Again and again, people keep coming back to time travel. Stories involving time travel are popular because, in part, they tap into our common desire to fix the mistakes of our past, to take what we know now and get 100% completion. The TV series Quantum Leap, where Scott Bakula leapt from life to life striving to set right what once went wrong, is a sterling example of this. The Back to the Future trilogy leans more toward the temptations and dangers inherent in that premise. Yesterday, I saw the trailers for a new time travel movie, Hot Tub Time Machine, which - and I know this will shock you - is about a hot tub that is also a time machine.
This movie, incidentally, looks like it will be worth seeing, if only for the time travel and massive '80s-retro factor. Nevertheless, I can't help but ignore that with the trailer taglines "forget the present, change the future," it sort of rubs me the wrong way. Whether it's the guys of Hot Tub Time Machine ("We could combine Viagra with Twitter! Twittagra!"), Marty McFly with Gray's Sports Almanac in hand, the heroes of Chrono Trigger fighting to save the world from Lavos across sixty-five million years, or the time traveller of the day simply resolving to take advantage of future knowledge to reshape the way it all unfolds, all too often there's a massive elephant in the room that the writers either don't notice or refuse to address.
There are two fundamental theories for how time travel could work. The first, which is my personal preference, is that time travel would create a branching of timelines; at the point the time travellers arrived, a new timeline would split off from the one they left, allowing them to manipulate history and the future to their heart's content while their original timeline goes chugging on. The second, which was explicitly used in Back to the Future, postulates one single timeline. In this theory, time travellers actually enter their own history, and in so doing put themselves in a positions where their actions could delete their present and replace it with another, stemming from their actions in the changed past.
Where the elephant comes into play is that, if the second theory is the one that's used in the story, through the act of changing history the time traveller will effectively become history's worst mass murderer. The actions of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and all the rest are nothing compared to what one guy with a time machine in a single-timeline universe could do without even realizing it. Sometimes, of course, the time travellers do realize this - thus making this the Time Traveller's Dilemma.
Maybe it's because I don't put any stock in the concept of a "soul" that this rubs me the wrong way so much. Ultimately, though, I think this is a function of a rational outlook on the universe. Take even a situation where time travel is utterly necessary - say, without going back a few decades for some reason, the universe will be destroyed. In a single-timeline world, everyone but the time travellers would be killed regardless of whether they are successful - the only difference would be if they're killed by the event the time travel was meant to avert, or killed when the successful temporal intervention removes them from time.
The fact of the matter is, time travel is not only dangerous, it can easily cause headaches. For the good of everything, it's best to leave the time circuits off and to keep the flux capacitor from fluxing. Besides, if you're a really unlucky time traveller, you might avoid changing the future by stumbling into something that's far, far worse...
...a predestination paradox. I hate predestination paradoxes.
This movie, incidentally, looks like it will be worth seeing, if only for the time travel and massive '80s-retro factor. Nevertheless, I can't help but ignore that with the trailer taglines "forget the present, change the future," it sort of rubs me the wrong way. Whether it's the guys of Hot Tub Time Machine ("We could combine Viagra with Twitter! Twittagra!"), Marty McFly with Gray's Sports Almanac in hand, the heroes of Chrono Trigger fighting to save the world from Lavos across sixty-five million years, or the time traveller of the day simply resolving to take advantage of future knowledge to reshape the way it all unfolds, all too often there's a massive elephant in the room that the writers either don't notice or refuse to address.
There are two fundamental theories for how time travel could work. The first, which is my personal preference, is that time travel would create a branching of timelines; at the point the time travellers arrived, a new timeline would split off from the one they left, allowing them to manipulate history and the future to their heart's content while their original timeline goes chugging on. The second, which was explicitly used in Back to the Future, postulates one single timeline. In this theory, time travellers actually enter their own history, and in so doing put themselves in a positions where their actions could delete their present and replace it with another, stemming from their actions in the changed past.
Where the elephant comes into play is that, if the second theory is the one that's used in the story, through the act of changing history the time traveller will effectively become history's worst mass murderer. The actions of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and all the rest are nothing compared to what one guy with a time machine in a single-timeline universe could do without even realizing it. Sometimes, of course, the time travellers do realize this - thus making this the Time Traveller's Dilemma.
Maybe it's because I don't put any stock in the concept of a "soul" that this rubs me the wrong way so much. Ultimately, though, I think this is a function of a rational outlook on the universe. Take even a situation where time travel is utterly necessary - say, without going back a few decades for some reason, the universe will be destroyed. In a single-timeline world, everyone but the time travellers would be killed regardless of whether they are successful - the only difference would be if they're killed by the event the time travel was meant to avert, or killed when the successful temporal intervention removes them from time.
The fact of the matter is, time travel is not only dangerous, it can easily cause headaches. For the good of everything, it's best to leave the time circuits off and to keep the flux capacitor from fluxing. Besides, if you're a really unlucky time traveller, you might avoid changing the future by stumbling into something that's far, far worse...
...a predestination paradox. I hate predestination paradoxes.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
2060: The Next Great Apocalypse?
There's a long - not necessarily "proud" - tradition of apocalyptic predictions throughout history. Witness the Millerites, who believed the world would end first in 1843 and then in 1844, or turn the page back to 1999 and look at some of the more hysterical guesses of what Y2K would turn out to be like. Today, the armageddonoids are expecting the world to end in 2012, and so it's no surprise that Roland Emmerich, one of the minds behind the horribly armageddonist The Day After Tomorrow, would capitalize on this by scourging the world in the film 2012.
It's hardly a surprise that this movie was made. It's been nearly ten years since Y2K, and the lack of anything more significant than website calendars clicking over to January 1, 19100 has left an apocalyptic vacuum. As we enter the 2010s, I think it's pretty much a certainty that we'll see more and more 2012er armageddonoids working themselves up into frenzies over "the end of the world," and more and more "apocalyptic entrepreneurs" cashing in on the phenomenon. December 21, 2012 might end up being a rather interesting day no matter what happens.
Come January 1, 2013, though, what's going to happen? History has shown that armageddonoids aren't strangers to the concept of a delayed apocalypse - the Millerites, for example, stood by their leader even after the first prediction of the Second Coming fizzled. I'm sure that some "astrologer" or "clairvoyant" or another will predict destruction and doom pretty much every year afterward, but there's one in particular that may well end up being the same kind of lightning rod that 2012 is today - 2060.
I'll be the first to admit that by the time 2060 actually rolls around, the world may well have far more serious problems than worrying about apocalyptic predictions for that particular calendar. Nevertheless, the human willingness to believe that the end is near and accounts will be settled is a strong one, and when people have a reason to believe that these forewarnings of doom are more rigorous than the predictions of astrologers, they'll probably pour that much more faith into it. 2060 is particularly vulnerable to that, as the date was established by none other than Sir Isaac Newton - probably the most widely-known scientist other than Albert Einstein.
And if a scientist said it, you know, it's got to be true.
Newton's writings of the end of the world didn't come to light until 2003, when previously unpublished papers were unearthed indicating that Newton had "calculated" that the apocalypse would start no earlier than 2060, a figure which he arrived at through Biblical references. Newton also wrote that the apocalypse would happen no later than 2344, but I don't expect people to pay much attention to that. One of the great scientists of history, the man who "discovered" gravity, says the worldmight will end in 2060. That's good enough for them!
Fortunately, we've got a long way to go before phrases like "NEWTON WARNED US" start appearing on billboards and posters. Come the 2050s, though, unless the world has degenerated and civilization is on the brink, I expect there to be people going on and on about how the end is almost at hand and we need to use our remaining time to get right with everything.
Actually, now that I think about it, if civilization was on the brink that would only give even more credence to the idea that Newton Was Right After All.
It's hardly a surprise that this movie was made. It's been nearly ten years since Y2K, and the lack of anything more significant than website calendars clicking over to January 1, 19100 has left an apocalyptic vacuum. As we enter the 2010s, I think it's pretty much a certainty that we'll see more and more 2012er armageddonoids working themselves up into frenzies over "the end of the world," and more and more "apocalyptic entrepreneurs" cashing in on the phenomenon. December 21, 2012 might end up being a rather interesting day no matter what happens.
Come January 1, 2013, though, what's going to happen? History has shown that armageddonoids aren't strangers to the concept of a delayed apocalypse - the Millerites, for example, stood by their leader even after the first prediction of the Second Coming fizzled. I'm sure that some "astrologer" or "clairvoyant" or another will predict destruction and doom pretty much every year afterward, but there's one in particular that may well end up being the same kind of lightning rod that 2012 is today - 2060.
I'll be the first to admit that by the time 2060 actually rolls around, the world may well have far more serious problems than worrying about apocalyptic predictions for that particular calendar. Nevertheless, the human willingness to believe that the end is near and accounts will be settled is a strong one, and when people have a reason to believe that these forewarnings of doom are more rigorous than the predictions of astrologers, they'll probably pour that much more faith into it. 2060 is particularly vulnerable to that, as the date was established by none other than Sir Isaac Newton - probably the most widely-known scientist other than Albert Einstein.
And if a scientist said it, you know, it's got to be true.
Newton's writings of the end of the world didn't come to light until 2003, when previously unpublished papers were unearthed indicating that Newton had "calculated" that the apocalypse would start no earlier than 2060, a figure which he arrived at through Biblical references. Newton also wrote that the apocalypse would happen no later than 2344, but I don't expect people to pay much attention to that. One of the great scientists of history, the man who "discovered" gravity, says the world
Fortunately, we've got a long way to go before phrases like "NEWTON WARNED US" start appearing on billboards and posters. Come the 2050s, though, unless the world has degenerated and civilization is on the brink, I expect there to be people going on and on about how the end is almost at hand and we need to use our remaining time to get right with everything.
Actually, now that I think about it, if civilization was on the brink that would only give even more credence to the idea that Newton Was Right After All.
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