The Return of Rob Ford

I couldn't help but think about time last night. I suppose the shadow of 2011 tilted a lot of peoples' thoughts in that direction. In particular, I was thinking how good it is that while it is easier to destroy than to create, in some circumstances it's not the easiest thing in the world to get the destructifying going. What I'm most thankful for, though, is that what's past is done.

Even before I left Toronto the greenscaping improvements along Bloor Street were controversial, and Hizzoner Rob Ford was hardly the only mayoral candidate that fulminated against it. From what I can tell, though, at this point it's all done aside from a few tree plantings scheduled for the spring - and it's a good thing it's all done, because if I've been able to judge Rob Ford's character from his pronouncements, had he had the chance to put an end to it, he certainly would have.

It's a good thing, I thought while wandering through an dark, shuttered New Year's Eve Yorkville, that Ford can't retroactively stop this. Wait a minute...

Back in the 1980s, Larry Niven wrote the short story "The Return of William Proxmire," wherein everyone's favorite anti-space, milk-price-support-supporting Wisconsinite senator got hold of a time machine and used it to go back in time to cure Robert A. Heinlein of tuberculosis - the idea being that with Heinlein remaining in the Navy, he would not become a prominent sf author and would not inspire the scientists and engineers that came after him.

Of course, it didn't work out that way.

So imagine, if you will, "The Return of Rob Ford," in which the mayor gets hold of a time machine. What might he do with it? Realistically there's only one person who can answer that, but what seems believable is that he might use it to go back to the late 1960s and work to prevent the rise of the Streetcars For Toronto Committee. Without a surge of popular support in favor of retaining the streetcar system, the TTC could easily have remained on its original trajectory toward total streetcar abandonment by 1980 - and more importantly for Ford, he would be laying the foundations for a 21st century city in which transit was all shoved underground, out of the cars' way.

Or would he?

I've written before about my opinion that light rail transit is having an unfair shake in Toronto because of the automatic comparison to streetcars; hell, Transit City is frequently referred to _as_ a "streetcar" program by its political opponents. That problem would be significantly lessened in the absence of an active streetcar system - consider cities like Los Angeles, Edmonton, Phoenix, and Cincinnati, which are replacing abandoned streetcar systems with modern light rail systems - and, in Cincinnati's case, a modern streetcar system.

So, instead, imagine a 1980s Toronto where the streetcars have ceased to run. Transit pressures would still exist, and the political issues that precluded meaningful subway expansion after 1978 would likely remain unchanged. Imagine a climate where there was a greater openness to light rail; imagine the beginning of construction of a complementary light rail transit system in 1990, a construction program that would not have to reckon with opinions toward streetcars or the fallout of the St. Clair right-of-way reconstruction.

Sure, of course, that changed timeline would have to deal with the expense of not only tearing up the tracks, but entirely rebuilding them... but it might be worth it.

The Problem With Predestination

It's important to establish limitations for oneself. If everything is valid, the scope of potential choices can become dizzying, and you can easily find yourself making no progress at all. That's why, when I'm writing and establishing my setting, I so far have two rules that I stick by.

• No magic artificial gravity; and
  
• NO TIME TRAVEL.

The second of those two is, in my mind, the most important. Whereas magic artificial gravity (that is, gravity produced by anything other than mass, acceleration, or rotation) merely gives the laws of physics a few swirlies, time travel can - and, in fictional depictions, frequently does - shake the foundations of all reality. The most disturbing example of this is the predestination paradox: to put it simply, this is a form of time travel where the act of intervening in history changes nothing about the present, for the simple reason that the intervention had always been part of history. I've mentioned my dislike of predestination paradoxes earlier.

The reason I don't like the idea is a very straightforward one - when first examined, it completely negates the concept of free will. Though this question does crop up for the time travellers involved directly in "making history," I'm thinking more in the grand scheme. While the time travellers may question whether or not they're just the instruments of history, a predestination paradox effectively reduces everyone else to deterministic automatons.

This aspect may not be immediately obvious - it took me years to realize the implications, but the implications do nonetheless exist. The people other than the time travellers, from the moment they arrive in the past to the instant they depart the future, must not have any free will - because, otherwise, the time travellers might never have the opportunity to travel through time in the first place. Choices deep in history resonate chaotically, and an innocuous decision made in the past could prevent the time travellers from ever being born. Entire lifetimes could easily be spent within the "locked-down zone" between future and past, billions of people following a script they can never see, to ensure that history unfolds as it needs to, and no one would really be responsible for their actions - after all, they didn't have a choice.

I find it rather disturbing, personally. I don't plan right now to do any time travel-related work, but if I did, I would do what I could to get around the question of predestination. The idea of the observer effect has a particular appeal to me - rather than get all caught up in the issues of the absence of free will, I'd rather explore the implications of time, from a non-linear and non-subjective viewpoint, actually unfolding in anachronic order. Time travellers from 2050 going back to 1750 wouldn't, in this case, worry about creating three hundred years of determination, because technically speaking 1750 hadn't happened yet.

It's just an idea that comes with plenty of headaches - so well fitted, I think, for something to do with time travel.

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.

A Calendar for Ceres

Once humans go into space to stay, the Gregorian calendar isn't something they'll necessarily take with them. A timekeeping system based around equinox and solstice and organized for the needs of an agricultural society may not have much more than nostalgic value to the pioneers of Sol, considering that the environments they inhabit will be purely artificial. Depending on the tempo with which space is settled, humanity's new worlds may well ditch Earth's dating system in favor of one which is relevant to them, and not just an apron string binding them across the light-hours to a land that's no longer home.

Ceres is one potential middle-term colonization prospect, given sufficient impetus and sufficiently low launch costs. With a perihelion of 2.54 AUs and a required delta-v of 9.4 km/s from Earth orbit to Ceres orbit, it would probably languish in the shadow of Mars, which is somewhat closer to Earth and has an orbit-to-orbit delta-v of only 5.7 km/s - Hohmann orbits, though. The issues of relative inconvenience go out the window if one has a ship capable of accelerating and decelerating all the way.

Once NASA's Dawn probe arrives there in 2015, a great deal of questions we've currently got on the books about Ceres may well be answered. For one - the question of whether it has underground water ice. That alone would be absolutely vital to any kind of colonization enterprise. Setting down landers without a source of water isn't a colony, or even a caravanserai - it's a dependency of the most base and coarse nature, and I doubt there would be many people who'd pay to have water lobbed across the solar system when those enterprising colonists could have set out instead for Europa or Enceladus. Water is life, remember.

Presuming that Ceres does have water ice, it's sounding to me like the sort of place a fringe colony - presuming it could find enough investors or venture capitalists to pony up the start-up funds - might set up. And once they got there, hey... why not make a new calendar, relevant to their new circumstances, to celebrate their new life?

Ceres' orbital period is a little over four and a half Earth years - 1680.5 days, and the Cererean calendar divides this out into 1,680 twenty-four hour days with a bit left over at the end. The days are grouped into twenty-one months, each eighty days long, and owing to my vision of Ceres as being run along technocratic lines, they are for the most part named after scientists, astronomers, and people relevant to the discovery of Ceres. Here they are:

Dawn, Piazzi, Hirayama, Maskelyne, Dyson, Wolf, Chandrasekhar, Al-Battani, Von Zach, Kirkwood, Messier, Cassini, Hayabusa, Galileo, Herschel, Biederman, Bode, Olbers, Gauss, and Vespers.

One interesting historical synchronicity I found while researching this calendar originally was that Giuseppe Piazzi's first observation of Ceres came on January 1, 1801, the first day of the nineteenth century. This serves as the calendar's zero date, and corresponds to Dawn 1, 0 AC (Anno Cereris). My original notes, which have since been lost in the shuffle, included a formula I kludged together to translate a Gregorian calendar date to a Cererean one, but with this shared starting point it's roughly possible to figure something out.

Very roughly, though, because there's still the issue of that .5 of a day left over. Originally I could have just chopped it off and decreed that, for the purposes of timekeeping, Ceres' year was precisely 1,680 twenty-four hour periods in length. While that would work from an individual perspective, as someone living in Ceres might not care much where exactly the sun was in the sky, this would have left the calendar prone to drifting. I can't see any sense in building a calendar from the ground up and intentionally leaving it unbalanced.

To that end, to fill in the extra time, Ceres has an extra "day" which isn't a day at all. Where the Gregorian calendar jumps smoothly from December 31 to January 1, the Cererean calendar does not similarly transition from Vespers 80 to Dawn 1. Instead, the space between them - 19 hours, 39 minutes, and 21 seconds by my original calculations, although I may have been off - constitutes Year's End. I can imagine this is would be the day when Cerereans drink to excess; think of it as a temporal Vegas, when anything that happens stays there.

Writing out this post, and coming to the slow realization that there are probably a great deal of mathematical shortcomings in it that would blow my brilliant concept to flinders, has made me want to drink to excess myself. Excelsior!