Theories on Time Travel [and Random-Access-Memory]

A:FATE/CIRCULAR CAUSATION

Travel back in time to save someones life only to discover that it cannot be avoided, or worse yet you were in fact the cause of the persons death in the first place.  Most plausible.

B:ALTERNATE UNIVERSE

Travel back in time t save someones life, do so and return to your own time to discover that nothing has changed…you’ve only changed the timeline of an alternate quantum reality.  Amongst most plausible.

C:SUCCESS

Travel back in time to kill your great grandfather and succeed.  Theory very unlikely if you were successful you would inevitably never be born and never go back in time to kill you great grandfather.  Thus the paradox and the implausibility.

D:OBSERVER EFFECT

Travel back in time to alter history, succeed, but the only person able to differentiate between the reality left behind and the new reality are those directly associated with the time travel…the time traveler.  The extent of the paradox rests in how the time traveler is affected.  Existing ‘out of time’, he may not be affected by whatever changes he inflicts on the timeline, thus the time traveler himself becomes a stranger in this ‘new’ present.  He may go back in time, kill his own grand father and return to present to discover there are no records of his own existence.

SOURCE:some magazine.

My cartographies of Nowa Huta, Sheffield and Second Life led me to consider the articulation of memory and how memories of places develop through familiarization, which is inherently dependent on the scale and thus time taken to travel and familiarize with a place.  This familiarization would then exist as a memory, consolidated in the mind by a web of interdependent synaptic connections that articulate the sensory environment of the place and form the memory.  Over time ofcourse, this neurological network which forms the memory becomes distorted and its image is warped out of time and scale.  It is influenced by an incalculable number of other experiences encounter since that memory was formed.  The memory exists as the requiem of a placeless place, entirely virtual, yet it remains a representation of a place you once were, and will in some way affect your experience of that place should you return there.

Over the summer I visited Alcatraz.  The guided tour on tape attempted to recreate the experience of the abandoned prison cum tourist attraction.  One ex-convict from the prison remarked on how to survive in solitary confinement:

“If you close your eyes for long enough you can see a tiny white dot down there in the darkness and if you stare at the dot for long enough you realize that it’s a TV and, after a time in the dark, you can see al kinds of shows on there, all kinds of films and stories and shows…it takes a bit of practice, but in the end it’s there…that’s how I survived…”

Within our minds we form our own virtual realities, distinct and unique from anybody else’s.  We form our own identity, which is then projected back onto the world via an incalculable number of experiences and encounters affecting anybody else who might be within range of its influence.