Countdown to Comic-Con: The Quantum Mechanics of Cliche—Time Travel and the Multiverse
Ah, time travel and the multiverse. It’s hard to find a big science fiction property that isn’t obsessed with time travel or the multiverse. Marvel pulled off a “time heist” to successfully conclude the Infinity Saga. The next Marvel phase focuses on the multiverse in fits and starts, unable to find a cohesive narrative to weave its diverse plots and locations together. Star Trek Discovery shot itself hundreds of years into the future to save the universe multiple times. Discovery’s younger sibling, the animated Prodigy, reignited on Netflix after abandonment by Paramount Plus. Its season two romps through episodes dependent on time travel and multiverses.
Many other streaming shows use time travel or multiverses as plot devices, including Dark Matter (Apple), Outer Range, The Umbrella Academy, The Time Traveler’s Wife, La Brea, Travelers, and Quantum Leap. A time travel tag search on IMDB lists hundreds of shows.
In contrast, Battlestar Galactica and The Expanse, while employing their own McGuffins (respectively, the Cylons and the Protomolecule), both avoided time travel. The two shows offer plenty of action and deep speculation about the future without resorting to the cliches of time travel or the creation of a multiverse. Sure, they commit their scientific sins, but they don’t reinforce the TTM (Time Travel/Multiverse) trendline.
As an aside, and I’m not going to dwell on this, but as science fiction goes timey-wimey and delves into multiverses, I often find shows with magic or supernatural elements offer more internally consistent narratives because they don’t have to even contend with the appearance of balancing the rules of the known universe with speculative elements that break those rules. They establish their own rules and mostly live within those. Look to Outlander for supernatural time travel. Big stones. Little stones. Who knows. It’s magic.
Time travel is likely impossible except at tiny scales in very special circumstances, and while the multiverse may exist, no theory suggests a way to breach whatever separates the realities. I’m fine with SciFi writers creating an occasional story about time travel or multiverse, but we have been inundated with it of late, to the point where many plot points start repeating, even though the point, especially with the multiverse, has expanded the narrative canvas.
Writers would do better to use tools like scenario planning to enhance their storytelling breadth rather than looking to a mechanism like time travel or the multiverse to inspire them. The performances can be great, as Apple proved with Dark Matter. Great performances can’t overcome a plot that feels like it time traveled from some previous show about time travel.
The problem with time travel
Even Avengers: End Game pokes fun at time travel as they use it themselves. Smart Hulk quips, “Time doesn’t work that way,” as Rhodey references a long list of time travel movies to which Scott Lange concludes that “Back to the Future is a bunch of bullshit.” Even though Hulk’s explanation of time travel makes more sense than many of those stories, it sets up the idea of time branches, which essentially creates a multiverse.
The biggest problem with time travel is that current physics, although it supports the idea of time travel at the particle level, doesn’t offer a way for anything bigger than a particle to escape the momentum of time’s arrow. Quantum mechanics suggests that particle actions can be reversed, meaning they can go back to a previous state. That is not necessarily time travel.
Many physicists see time as fundamental. Others see it as emergent. Some even believe it may be a figment of our imagination. Perhaps the best explanation is that a universe of rules requires consistency, and time travel would create too many inconsistencies.
►For more on time travel, see Michael Marshall’s BBC post: The invisible dangers of traveling through time.
Now, of course, that is part of the reason science fiction writers love time travel. They get to play all of the inconsistencies off one another.
The problem with the multiverse
The multiverse may well exist in some form. The biggest problem with the multiverse is we can’t cross any of the boundaries, regardless of the multiverse model.
In New Scientist, (How could I theoretically reach other dimensions in the multiverse?), Max Tegmark explains the four multiverse theories are like Aether was to pre-relativistic physics. They are theoretical constructs that exist only within the bounds of theory, and those theories offer different, incompatible versions (an infinity of entities). Multiverses are “ascientific” meaning they are unfalsifiable. The multiverse exists at the same level as proving the existence of G-d scientifically.
There are no injections, accidents, ion storms, or other natural activities that will push a person, let alone a starship or anything else large, into an alternative reality.
I have written a lot of poetry about the multiverse. For the future of humanity, it will live best in our imaginations, even if math eventually proves its out-of-reach existence.
Star Trek TOS: The inspiration behind SciFi’s bad habits
At its core, science fiction is about humans finding themselves in unusual circumstances enabled, enhanced or empowered by science and technology. The future may be next week or a thousand years hence. At the nearest level, science fiction deals with the implications of our inventions like social media, AI, self-driving cars, designer drugs, human augmentation and space travel. There are many stories about the future that do not require us to leave Earth’s orbit. Go to the moon, and the number of stories increases exponentially between space travel and trying to survive on the moon, and the potential commerce and science implications of successfully establishing a foothold on our nearest neighbor.
Incorporating Mars further increases the dangers and possible stories without the need for additional elements like time travel or dimension hopping. Just surviving the radiation on the way to Mars will imperil space crews. There are many outcomes and possible solutions to explore.
Don’t worry, I’ll get back to one-offs and story arcs, but…
But writers may ask, “How many shows about the Earth, the moon and Mars can we make?” People will get bored. Given the list of time travel and multiverse stories, the same question can be asked about that subgenre.
So, let me dig into my archetypical hard science fiction show, Star Trek TOS. Star Trek engaged in time travel. And they visited a multiverse. Most of the incidents were accidents, or they involved aliens with advanced technology. That is no excuse for violating the laws of physics, but alien technology removes the implausible act of humans and our technology. Others may have been able to do it, but we cannot, at least not yet. Think of Apollo, the Greek god, who has some kind of mechanism in him that allows him to control his environment. He is an advanced, enhanced being, not a god.
Star Trek TOS incorporated a few time travel tropes and one very successful multiverse story. Let’s take a quick inventory and a brief critique of each version of time travel or the interaction of universes.
The Naked Time
The first minor time travel story comes in “The Naked Time” as the Enterprise pulls back from a decaying orbit after fending off the drunk-virus. Pulling away following an experimental engine implosion regresses the ship’s timeline three days. (So, if this happens, where is the Enterprise of three days ago?)
Spock states that the implosion of the matter-anti-matter engines offers some “intriguing possibilities,” but Roddenberry never returns to this technique for time travel. A lot happens as this episode wraps: the chronometer runs backward. Somehow, after running faster than anything in normal space, Sulu pretty quickly pulls the Enterprise out of the “time warp,” (“Slowly,” he cautions Mr. Sulu)—an implausibility at that rate of speed, given the extraordinary thrust that ignited that journey. Sulu would require some astronomically large breaks.
According to Einstein, the crew would experience shared time. The chronometer would only look different to those seeing it relative to its speed. The only way the crew would know they were going back in time would be to receive a reference signal from outside the ship, which would not be possible.
As for slowing down from a “time warp,” the story does not cover why the engine implosion sent them back in time versus just back through space. Reaching relativistic speeds does create a form of time travel, but only for those traveling, and always forward.
At great speeds, the crew would have aged less than people on Earth if they were traveling in space without the warp bubble. This minor time travel wrap-up creates too many conundrums for credibility. The deeper ones offer even more “possibilities” for writers to fly off the arrow of time.
Tomorrow is Yesterday
The first proper time travel story was, “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” in which the Enterprise travels backward in time after escaping the gravitational pull of a black star. After hurdling through space, they return to Earth as a UFO in the 1960s. Much non-sensical physics and temporal mechanics occur, from alternating and de-altering the future by ‘beaming’ people onto the enterprise and then back into their bodies. It looks cool, but it’s just crazy. For Trek fans, this episode formally introduces the “slingshot” effect that makes putting 20th-century whales in the cargo hold of a Klingon Bird of Prey possible in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
For basic physics, the slingshot effect is real. NASA uses it all of the time to increase the speed of probes through the solar system. No matter how fast you sling something forward, it doesn’t put it in a reverse temporal state.
The City on the Edge of Forever
Next up was “The City on the Edge of Forever.” This was a near-perfect time travel science fiction episode. It isolated the time travel to an ancient artifact and very quickly showed its internal logic. Changing the past could change the future (despite Smart Hulk’s explanation). What’s interesting here is that the Guardian of Forever sees time as linear. Not unchanging, but linear.
The Guardian device or being repeats the past (somehow Earth’s past), which is interesting and never really asked or answered how it knew about Earth’s past, except the vagueness of being a place where time converges, whatever that means. The Guardian was too distant to have observed Earth’s early 20th century yet, let alone having captured a detailed model of all that happened. Much has been and will be written about The Guardian. It is a classic McGuffin. It was used to drive the plot. How it works proves immaterial.
The linear nature of time in Harlan Ellison’s story is essential. Choices don’t create a multiverse; they create a new timeline that changes the past for all except those near the Guardian. The United Federation of Planets does not exist, nor does the Enterprise (at least not at this point in space, if at all). So the only choice is to go back and fix what Dr. McCoy screwed up, which we learn was saving Edith Keeler from being hit by a car. Kirk, after he falls in love with her, chooses to let her die rather than sacrifice his future.
It is simple. It doesn’t explain itself too much. Even Spock’s bandaid and bailing wire Tricorder hack is only used to read a recording, not fix time. One incident changes and the Enterprise’s star triumvirate returns to a restored timeline; all is as it was.
Assignment: Earth
And then we have the mysterious Gary Seven of “Assignment: Earth,” which is the only time Kirk purposefully took the Enterprise crew on a time jaunt. They return to Earth to study how we survived 1969. Gary Seven was on his way to stop the United States from launching an orbital nuclear platform. As with “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” saying that the “lightspeed breakaway factor” propelled them to the past is simple handwaving for the plot.
Putting the brakes on really hard after going really fast doesn’t make anything go back in time. More likely, the nearly uncontrolled acceleration would likely make the crew of the Enterprise seem like they went back in time relative to other people of their age in their universe.
I will skip “Wink of an Eye” and its accelerated humans, as that creates all sorts of other physics problems beyond time travel and multiple dimensions. Living in the same dimension but at a timescale is an intriguing but ultimately ridiculous premise.
All Our Yesterdays
Having already mentioned the whales of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, I will end the time travel reflections with “All Our Yesterdays.” This episode features another alien technology that isn’t overly explained, except it processes people and assigns them to some point in the past. Going to the past involves saving people from the death of the planet. It is revealed during the episode that it was used to punish people at some point in the planet’s history.
The most inane assertion in “All Our Yesterdays” comes as Spock becomes increasingly emotional. This comes from him living in a past where his Vulcan ancestors had not yet mastered their emotions and prioritized logic. Spock would still be Spock regardless of his movement through time. Even Vulcans might unravel when faced with a future of ice and isolation, but any physic break would come from the mental models held by the current Spock, not from any de-evolution of his psyche. That would truly be spooky action at a distance.
Other than that, the Sarpeidon time travel device focuses exclusively on its past. Mr. Atoz and his avatars prepare people and send them to the past. That the Enterprise away team completely misunderstands what’s going on and falls prey to their ignorance points to this being a Season 3 episode. Whatever the time travel mechanism, it makes no more sense than any of the other methods, though the idea of preparing people for their destination is an innovation that may have inspired shows like Dark Matter (Apple) that require a serum to quantum entangle humans.
So much for time travel.
The Alternative Factor
Star Trek touches on alternative universes in “The Alternative Factor,” when the crew of the Enterprise meets the “time-traveler”/multi-dimensional being, Lazarus. At least he claims he is time-traveling. He/they lie a lot. He is more likely an inter-dimensional traveler. This episode posits many questions that go beyond basic quantum mechanics or relativity, like how a small craft with not much power can thrust a human into an alternative dimension or why a void exists between dimensions that can trap living people. The episode, like the fictional life of Lazarus, is a hot mess.
Mirror, Mirror
That leaves “Mirror, Mirror” as a singular alternative reality episode—an episode with so much of its own gravity it has riffled through Star Trek canon to be found in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Enterprise, and Star Trek: Discovery. The new Section 31 movie will also derive from this episode. The home of the Terran Empire is billed as a mirror universe, offering a stark, evil contrast to the in-canon or prime universe. It’s a great story.
It appears that in the Star Trek universe, this one alternative is the most adjacent, the one nearest in dimensional proximity. I’m with Smart Hulk here, though, as that’s not how the multiverse works. The chances would be astronomical that if the crew of the landing party did figure out how to travel back between universes, they would not return to the prime universe, and certainly not with the perfectly orchestrated beaming crew swaps. People traveling between realities would just as likely appear elsewhere than in the mirror universe or even a version of it. With infinite possibilities comes, well, infinite possibilities.
Of one-offs and arcs
All of those Star Trek TOS stories live as one-offs, though one was intended to be a series; however, “Assignment Earth’s” backdoor pilot never caught fire with the studio. The Treks, however, most recently Prodigy and Discovery, and yes, even Stange New Worlds, use time travel, or knowledge of the future, as context against the narrative, creating arcs that infuse the shows with time travel and multiverse elements that can and do affect multiple plots.
I can live with a one-off episode, but I tire not just of the need to keep up with the history associated with a long arc but with the piling on of implausibility’s that weigh on the narratives, sometimes introducing clever connections when none is needed. The alternative universe we need is one without time-stones or slingshots or timey-wimey devices.
One of the problems with television and movie writing is that when something goes well, producers want to replicate success. They seldom actually replicate an idea in a way that honors, meaningfully extends, or perhaps even improves upon a first instance. The Guardian of Forever was a brilliant construct for one of Star Trek TOS’s more intriguing episodes. It didn’t play as well in the Animated Series, and by the time of Discovery, time travel had become The Temporal Wars, and well, ugh.
Wesley Crusher’s traveler appears in Star Trek: TNG, Picard and Prodigy. His supernatural abilities and prescience override the hard science fiction of Star Trek, making it less believable, less inspirational, and less watchable than it would be if they stuck to a more science-based premise.
Bottomline: use time travel and dimension hopping sparingly on networks, in production companies and storylines. Recent TV shows and movies have featured and relied upon a lot of both. It’s starting to be redundant rather than revelatory.
Why SciFi writers should embrace scenario planning
I write about the future all of the time. My stories never include time travel. They never explore the multiverse. Scenario planning holds no quarter for miracles, breaking the laws of physics, or magic. While scenario stories live in plausible futures, they offer an enormous range of narrative possibilities even though they purposefully avoid today’s quantum cliches.
Take an uncertainty, any uncertainty, and play it out against a logically consistent future backdrop. That exercise will suggest many possible stories. Uncertainties are the primary characters in scenario planning. The character shifts between possible futures, and the interactions among uncertainties ignite the narrative fuel. Scenarios should not require suspending belief; they may, however, engender fear or fuel hope.
Remember that the existence of warp drive, hyperdrive, or some other faster-than-light travel mechanism already presents implausible suspension of belief elements in many space-based science fiction shows. Adding time travel, multiverse crossing, or both increases the “incredible factor.” It compounds impossible elements, so hard science fiction stops being hard science fiction.
While current physics theorizes a multiverse in some of its incarnations, it offers no path for travel between them. At least with warp drive, there is a theory that, while currently overwhelming, could be considered an engineering problem rather than a theoretical impossibility (that is, how to create enough energy to warp space, that basis of the theory of relativity and our best current understanding for predicting the effects and nature of gravity).
Scenario planning can set horizons out 50 or 500 hundred years. Businesses seldom work to more than ten. However, the technique works to craft frameworks for narratives that can simultaneously constrain technology overreach while propelling inspiration and freedom of exploration. Rather than making up implausible technologies, scenarios create a framework for telling human stories that might never be considered when the plot and the inevitable McGuffin distract rather than facilitate.
The Future of Science Fiction
Star Trek TOS battled its primetime nemesis, Lost in Space, as it introduced a monster-of-the-week. That was the cliche of the day in the late 1960s. Season 3 of Star Trek TOS often bowed to the monster-of-the-week, weakening its superior storytelling. Today, too many shows attach themselves to time travel and the multiverse, often in ways that bend physics toward magic, creating “me too” plots that impinge on the credibility of the science in science fiction. Science fiction is much richer and more varied. I encourage writers to retreat from time travel and the multiverse; I ask them to steep themselves in more grounded topics and ideas more likely to shape the actual future than mythological constructs we will never experience.
Writing about alternative futures is fine. Frighten. Inspire. Challenge. Those actions require thoughtful exploration of the possible, not a wholesale abdication to theories that will likely never be proven and, even if proven, will likely never influence human lives.
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