Lost in the plot

A flood of premonitions occurs to me as I was forced to spend many uninterrupted minutes thinking about answers to the questions that most intelligent people wouldn’t bother deeply considering apart from my incredible collaborative power to theorize the unanswerable, merely to convince myself that I’m not in a toilet. Forget about the toilet, what’s inside my mind is a sweeping new conception of time that may result in a collective emotional shock throughout the history of science and philosophy.

Do you ever notice that your memory of the past is different from one day to another? I’m not referring to a major difference, just a slight but with significant cumulative effect. You might reason it being a sign of aging or memory fades as time goes by. What if my little genius brain tells you that your memory is fine and that the cause for it is because your past had been changed? And do you ever experience a series of events on the next day that gives you a sense of déjà vu as if you had went through it before? Is it because it appears in your dream and why would something happened in the future could end up in your dream?

At this point, let’s assumed that time travel is possible. There is an illustration of how going back in time and changing one thing creates temporal paradoxes that ripple through spacetime thus effectively alters the future as the timeline shifts to compensate. This is described as the butterfly effect. But this only explains what happens when a change in the past makes ripple changes from that point forward in time which theoretically then nothing prior to the event change would be altered and history up to that point would have remained the same. According to the actual theory, if history could be "changed" at all, the mere presence of the time travelers in the past would be enough to change short term events and would also have an unpredictable impact on the distant future, so that no one who travels into the past could ever return to the same version of reality he or she had come from and could have therefore not been able to travel in time. This only applies in the concept of linear time (i.e. time moves only forward).

What if time is not linear, there is no beginning and no end, as if it is moving in a Circular and always changing the present. Imagine the Ouroboros (an ancient symbol depicting a serpent/dragon swallowing its own tail and forming a circle which represents cyclicality, especially in the sense of something constantly re-creating itself, the eternal return and other things perceived as cycles that begin anew as soon as they end). Any change to any part of the circle and the whole circle will be affected. Any point in time changes and all time will change to accommodate it. If you are part of the stream you would not realize you had changed as you are always in a state of change whether you are ahead of the time the change took place or before it.

In Final Destination, we learned that no one could ever cheated death. If not because of the horrible car accident, then it will be a slip in the shower ended up with a broken neck or a major fire in his house. In order for the ripple of change to complete the Ouroboros circle, if someone had been fated to die he will have to die. Otherwise there would be a bottleneck of change either stored up until he died or it would have flowed backwards, changing the past and somehow, someway he had to die. If the universe fails to accomplish his death in the car accident because of some interference, it would have made a course correction and killed him some other way, there is no escape.

As I mentioned earlier, time has no beginning and time has no end. Make any change and that change resonates through all of time, forwards, backwards, all around the Ouroboros circle. Imagine someone managed to build a time machine, stepping into ten years back and got himself killed. If he was killed, then how could he manage to build the time machine ten years later? This is a paradox and could only be possible if time is linear. He would not able to build the time machine or travel through the circle to 10 years earlier because the time stream is in constant flux. The moment of going back is no longer exist, other events will have changed the time stream and it updates them constantly. Even if he manage to go back to that moment 10 years earlier, the mere fact of him arriving there would eliminate the other him, because that other him is now the present him.

The whole idea of being enslaved by time and space is because we perceive time as linear, continuous, contiguous and one dimensional. It doesn't appear to stop, slow down, or speed up at any point, 1 hour is 60 minutes and 1 minute is 60 seconds. We don't jump over pieces of time, skipping forward or back to the points that interest us or moving continuously in one direction, without the ability to reverse direction. If it is the case, can anyone explains how could an American writer Morgan Robertson, in a 1898 novel named Futility, describe the wreck of a brand-new liner named Titan, sunk in its maiden voyage between England and the United States, after a collision with an iceberg, with hundreds of casualties due to the lack of life-boats? This book describes with such a wealth of details; the ship, the travel and what came to happen in 1912, in the sinking of the Titanic that it should be a serious object of consideration by everyone. I could list several more examples but choose not to. It is not my intention to prove something here, refer to the first paragraph.

I believe timeline is flexible, fluid and subject to change and I will stick by it unless Superman decides to wear his underwear inside. Time is endless and events don't necessarily affect things in only one direction in time which opens to the possibility that time travel (both forward and backward) is indeed possible and someone is going to travel to the very beginning and tried to convince God that cows would be a lot funnier if he made them with two heads.

(*Note: If you got confused from reading this article, refer to the title again.)