Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Is Time Travel Possible?

Episode Date: October 2, 2018

Do any science fiction movies get time-travel right? Will it ever be possible? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want or gone. Now, hold up.

Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy, which is more effortful to use.

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Hi, I'm Daniel. And I'm Jorge. And we're here to explain the universe. Dude, came in so late there. Oh, sorry. Do you want to travel back in time and get that right? I guess I was out of time. Hi, I'm Daniel.

And I'm Jorge. And we're here to explain the universe. I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist, the creator. Ph.D. Comics. And I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. And together were the authors of the book, We Have No Idea. Which tries to tackle some of the biggest questions of the universe and doesn't answer any of them. That's right. Like, for example, today's topic, which is which movies get time travel right? Are there any science fiction movies that actually get time travel scientifically correct? Any that could really plausibly happen.

given some technology in the future that we could invent. That's the question we're going to tackle today. We went out in the street and we asked people what they thought. What do you think? Here's what people in the street had to say. Do you think time travel is possible? I think theoretically, yes, like based on math and everything, but I don't think we as humans will be able to.

I hope so, but I don't know if it is. because everyone in movies always says you need infinite energy, and I don't think that's possible. Probably. I mean, there's so much out there that we don't know about that I don't think I could really rule it out. What's your favorite time travel movie, Daniel? Man, I got to tell you, I don't think I like any time travel movies.

What do you mean? You can't enjoy any of them. Right. The problem for me is that when I watch science fiction, I really want it to make sense. I mean, you can invent whatever rules you want. come up with your own universe, with your own physics, whatever. But then it has to follow those rules, because if you don't follow the rules, then anything

can happen, and then you're not really invested, because at any point, the plot could just shift and twist and spike, and, you know, you could save the universe with crazy glowing bananas or something. So you have to have some rules. What do you think it's so appealing about time travel, right? There's so many movies about it, books. Why do you think humans love to think about time travel, or when? wish they could do it. I think there's a lot of reasons. I think one is just fascination.

Like, I'd like to go back and see what dinosaurs really looked like. Or I'd like to know who really killed JFK. Or I'd like to travel to the future and like learn the secrets of the universe that humans will one day reveal, right? There's a feeling that we're like trapped in the present. And if only we could travel somewhere else, we could seize and learn something new. And some of these things are facts. Like there is a real story about how the dinosaurs died or how the moon.

was made or all this kind of stuff. It really happened. And in some cases, the clues for it are just gone. And if you could travel back in time, you could learn those things for real. The other big thing is that people wish they could change things they've done in the past, right? Of course. Who doesn't, right?

Yeah, like regret. You have regret about things you did. You wish you could go back and, like, I don't know, been more bold with a certain person or been more set something differently than before. So that feeling of regret, like, oh, I can't go back.

That's right. And we're trained, like, in video games, you know, you have another life or you can save the game and go back and try it again, right? That's a really tempting idea. Or you remember an argument you had and you wish you had gone back and said something different, like when you'd had time later, to come up with a really juicy zinger and you could go back and deliver it and embarrass somebody. We've all fantasized about that.

And then in terms of the future, we worry about the future, right? It's like an unknown that makes us concern. So we sometimes wish we could see what would have, what's going to. to happen. Yeah, yeah, or even steal secrets from the future, right? Imagine you could go forward in 100 years, scoop up a bunch of inventions, bring them back, and then, you know, get rich and famous, right? You could steal ideas from people who haven't even been born yet, right? It's like almost a victimless crime because the victims are not even yet fetuses. Right. So you could, again, but again, I guess it's also, again, this idea of the past and the future being inaccessible

to us. Like you said, we're trapped in the present. And the present itself is a weird idea. Like, what is the present? You know, if you imagine like time is like a line, the present is like a moment and instant along that line. But weirdly, it's not static, right? It's not a place like in space. It like moves forward at one second per second. And we could spend a whole podcast diving into the mysteries and the science of time and probably we should. We don't have time today. But I think it's worth thinking about what time is so we can understand what aspects of time travel are scientifically problematic. so that we're prepared when we dig into all these deeply flawed time travel movies. Yeah, well, then that makes sense why there are so many movies and stories about it. It's like it's a great fantasy to be able to travel through time. Absolutely. I'd love to be able to do it. I mean, if somebody built a real working time machine, I would be first in line to use it to answer deep questions about the universe and go forwards and backwards

and buy different pair of socks and all sorts of stuff. We just wrote down a little sentence here that I think will help us drive home the point of what time is, which is by saying what time is not, right? Absolutely. That's a great way to define this. There's a long list of what time isn't. Time is not raspberries, time is not clouds. Yeah. But an interesting one we wrote down was time is not like space. What does that mean? well we're all fascinated with space right and the idea of space travel is fun and even just in terms of space like is in your environment like where you are on earth we get in our car we drive somewhere we have this agency right we can go where we want we can move forward and backward we can move up and down a little bit we can move side to side we have this freedom to move in space right i think that's where this notion of travel comes from and we'd love to apply that same notion to time and in fact it's very scientifically um titillating to think of time as a fourth dimension of space and it's true that in Einstein's

relativity he binds time and space together into this one concept called space time. It's like all part of the same kind of space, right? Yeah. All kinds of the same mathematical construct.

It's a four-dimensional mathematical construct that has three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. And we kind of wish we could travel through time the way we travel around. in space like skipping around or doing loops or going back to the same spot but we can't do that with time it's like it's a one directional and it's always moving forward that's right and in any science fiction universe you're going to have a theory of physics you're going to have some science in that universe

and that theory is going to have time in it right if it's a story where something happens right and if it has time in it then it has to have cause and effect and that's causality right a happens then b if a caused b then a has to happen before b in science fiction we typically give people free reign to come up with their own new laws of physics and then create a story in that universe right that's the creative element of it but they have to come up with a consistent set and for it to be consistent it has to follow causality and causality rules out time travel right so that's the big bummer that's the big bummer that's the big bummer then you

because everything has to be linked from A to B be deceived by the loss of physics, you can't just kind of jump around. That's right. And you also can't even really avoid it by trying to make like little changes. You know, there's this famous story, one of the earlier time travel stories, Ray Bridebury, I think the story's called the butterfly effect. A guy goes back in time and he goes, he's like hunting T-Rexes or something pretty awesome. There's some company. And they tell them, you can't touch anything but the T-Rex. They find T-Rexes, which were already going to die.

so it doesn't affect anything else in the future. But he accidentally steps on a butterfly, and he kills that butterfly. And killing that butterfly has some effect. You know, some lizard, which was going to eat that butterfly, now it doesn't, and then dies. And then the thing that was going to eat that lizard dies, and then the thing that was going to eat that, right?

And then dot, dot, dot, 50 million years later, who knows how big the effects are? The world is a chaotic system. Any tiny little change, that crushing a butterfly could lead to enormous changes like humans don't evolve. or the world is completely different. So any change to the past can have enormous cataclysmic effects in the future. Which might affect the human going back in time in the first place, right?

Exactly. Think about it like everything that happened in the past is a partial cause of you because the system is so complicated and interconnected that anything in the past can conceivably play a role in your creation. So if you're the time traveler and you go back and do it, anything, even just breathe air molecules and warm them up a little bit, you're changing some of the things that

caused you. And so then you, as a physical object in a science-based universe, no longer really exist. Right? So it's an immediate paradox. Even if you just go back in time and take a breath, right? Right. You're tecting around. Molecules that might

have somehow influenced you being there. That's right. Yeah. Okay. So cause and effect is a big bummer, it means that you can't mess around with the ordering of things. You can't mess with logic and the loss of physics. And even small changes will snowball into large effects. I remember now the name of that story is the sound of thunder. It's a Ray Bradbury story. It's a really awesome story. Cool. All right. So you're saying time travel is impossible. Now we should clarify time travel

backwards. Backwards. Right. Because that would reorder cause and effect, right? Because we're always traveling forward. We're always traveling forward in time. That's not a problem. We're all time travelers. We're all time travelers. It's not a very exciting ride, but you're on it. And some, I mean, technically some could even travel forwards faster than others, right? Like if I hop in a spaceship, goes to the speed of light, come back, I travel through time differently than you. That's right.

Now that we're done with the bummer part, the time travel backwards is not possible. Let's talk about the exciting part, which is you're absolutely right. Time travel forward, there's nothing preventing that. Okay. And you could build a machine, which... which, you know, just, I mean, it's very simple, actually, technologically. You just, like cryogenics. If I freeze you, right, the Jorge Popsicle stays in place for a million years.

As long as we have technology, as long as we have technology to defa you and revive you in five million years, then you have traveled forward five million years. Like, my consciousness will have taken a break popped out in a future time. That's right, yeah. And, I mean, there's lots of moral and biological problems with that, but from a physics point of view, you're just stretching cause and effect. You're not breaking it. You're making effects later.

Stretching it. Okay. Yeah. So time travel backwards. Time travel backwards is impossible. And that's kind of the basis of most fun movies, right? It's like going back and changing something. And I want to talk about that some more.

But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. the holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay.

terrorism law and order criminal justice system is back in season two we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight that's harder to predict and even harder to stop listen to the new season of law and order criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts my boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now I'm seriously suspicious. Oh, wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon.

This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating.

He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it.

They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha.

On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So time travel backwards is impossible. That's the basis of most.

fun movies. And so how do most movies get around this impossibility of breaking causality and logic? Yeah, so I think that most movies are just banking on the fact that nobody's really paying super close attention and

it's just there for the ride and doesn't care as much as I do about movies being logically consistent. They assume most people are not trained physicists. That's right. And I think a lot of science fiction fans probably more relaxed about whether the universe follows its rules. And so if you're willing to break the rules, then you know, you can do anything you like.

But they at least put up the appearance usually of trying to follow some rules. And so how do they do it? Well, one classic way is the split universe. They say, okay, you go back in time to see your grandfather, for example. And then when you arrive back in time, you split the universe. It's the original universe in which you didn't go back in time. And this is this new universe where you've gone back in time. Like it's a timeline.

We talk about timelines, right? Yeah. And so you're a product of the original timeline, called Timeline Zero. And now you have inserted yourself into another universe, called a Timeline 1. And if you make changes in Timeline 1, it doesn't affect Timeline Zero, which is what caused you, what created you, where you came from. So you're free to muck up Timeline 1. You can kill your grandfather, for example, and he can be dead. And in Timeline 1, you're never even born.

Right. Well, there's a famous scene, that famous scene in Back to the Future, where Dog Brown, played by Christopher Lloyd, explained, basically, like, he whips out a chalkboard and explains time travel to Marty. And so he, like, draws the line. It says, like, this is the time where you're in. And then you travel back in time, and you split off a different timeline. Man, that movie has so many problems. I think you know where to start. Because, yeah, they try to go, in that movie, they try to go for the alternate timeline theory. Right, that's the theory, right? But it doesn't even really make sense because in that movie he has, what, broken up his parents, so his parents won't get together, so they won't make him, right? So, problem number one is if they're in the split timeline theory, then it shouldn't matter, right? He's in a new timeline, but he's disappearing. You notice like he's fading from the photographs and his hand is becoming transparent.

Why is that happening if he's from the original unchanged timeline, which can't be changed? the new timeline can affect the old timeline. Yeah, which in which case you're not really in a split timeline at all. Okay. The other thing, this is the thing that really irks me about that whole approach, is that why does he fade slowly, right? It takes him like, you know, two hours of movie time for his hand to gradually disappear and then it's moving up his forearm.

The universe should have just exploded right away. No, if he doesn't exist anymore, then boom, he just doesn't exist. It makes no sense. you're killing a childhood favorite movie here I know it's a great movie everybody I love the movie go and watch it I showed it to my kids they loved it

but from a time perspective it just makes no sense and that's the part that that drives me bonkers and you show it to your kids and then like I can imagine you showing it to your kids okay the movie ended then you whip out a chopper

and then launch it to it and one hour lecture of how this movie was bonkered all right kids I hope you enjoyed that it's all wrong well in comparison let's compare this now to

other ways in which other movies have sort of try to get around this impossibility of time travel. So what are other ways the movies try it? So other ways people do it is to imagine one consistent universe where you go back in time and then do you change the future but the future has

already been affected by you're going back in time. Meaning you can't change the future. Well you can the past always can change the future right. That's the way it works, right? Causality. A causes B. You change A, it changes B.

But in these stories, they try to make it so that the future comes back to affect the past and that that past has already even taken into account into the future. So an example of that is the movie like Looper or Primer is sort of similar. Right. Or Harry Potter is one of my favorite time travel movies. The third Harry Potter? Have you seen the Harry Potter movies? Yeah.

It's like he goes back in time and tries to change things, but it turns out he was there all along. That's right. He was there all along. And the same thing was going to happen anyways. That's right. And so they avoid the split universe thing, right? Where it happens one way once, then happens another way later. Like that makes any sense for it to happen later.

We're talking about time travel, right? And so in the Harry Potter example, he loops back and he's there. There's sort of two of him for a while, right? There's the one that's come back to change this and the one, the original one. So the A version and the B version. And so the way they try to avoid that. any inconsistencies there is that the second time through when he's looped back and he's observing the same events from now having already seen it once,

he somehow feels obligated to follow the rules, right? Because he could break them. If Harry goes back in time and doesn't save his life, what would happen? Well, we don't know, right? Because then he would die and then he wouldn't be there in the future to come back and he wouldn't be there anymore. right? It would blow up the universe. It suddenly wouldn't make sense logically. So if he saves him, if future Harry saves him, and then he becomes future Harry and doesn't save

himself, it's a logical inconsistency. But I mean, that's a separate question of like, is there free will in the universe and all that? But, you know, I feel like that's a separate conversation. No, that's totally connected because that's the cause and effect, right? We have the freedom, we have the free will to change causes. That's how we have an effect on the future. Oh my goodness. Well, we could launch into the whole thing about free will, but as an idea of like a single timeline in which the future, in which the present already took into account you going back in time, what's wrong with that idea? From a physics point of view, everybody has to play nice, right?

So everybody has to agree, we're going to follow this dance card and do exactly what we know we have to do to create the future that we came from. It only works if there's a very tightly constructed loop there where the things you did in the past cause your future self, exactly the person who then came back to the past, right? Right. And for that's the same scene. Well, you said it's the way you said it has to be finally constructed, right? So if the writer is really good and finally constructed, then it's logically. consistent, isn't it? All right, so there's two

possibilities. If you believe in free will, this is all bunk because there's no way to control what people do. And people have the options to do whatever they like, including screwing up the future. If you don't believe in free will, if you think that people are just a product of their experiences and their situations,

then there's still a problem. Even if you're a brilliant writer, you're having to solve an enormously chaotic problem, which is somehow cause a pass, a create a past, which exquisitely causes the future which will then come back and cause that same past. Like even in the Harry Potter example,

he can't just decide what he's going to do. He's got to follow a dance card and be told exactly what to do. And other movies have the same idea. For example, one of my favorites that I mentioned earlier, Primer. In Primer, they climb into a box and the box moves them back in time

and then they get out of the box, right? And then there's two of them. So there's two of them that overlap in the same time period. Right. But before they get in the box, they have to isolate themselves because there's two of them at the same time. One of them has to isolate itself so that it doesn't interact and it doesn't do anything

to mess up the future. Right. So the way they've handled it there is they've said, well, one of them is going to be a good citizen. It's going to go sit in a basement and not interact and not create any time problems, right? And you see this a lot in time travel movies where they say, they travel back in time and they say, oh, don't touch that or you can't kiss that girl because you'll cause a problem, right?

Right. But it's impossible because the world is so complicated and so interconnected that, as we were saying earlier, anything you do, even just being there, is going to cause these problems. Right. Over millions of years, though, that's more likely, right? Yes. Like small changes over millions of years, that's a problem. But, you know, maybe like small changes over a couple hours. Yeah, you're right. If we destroy the universe in a million years, who cares, right? As long as we get to make money in the stock market. Yeah, I see where you're going.

Well, this is a perfect point to take a break. December 29th, 1979, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious.

Wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now hold up, isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age.

It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was.

Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in data. evidence so tiny, you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha.

On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so those are two great devices. Multiple timelines, one exquisitely constructed, logically consistent timeline in which there's no free will. Are there any other ways that people do time travel?

Well, there's a whole other approach, which is trying to think of time as a dimension of space. And that's sort of the original idea we had earlier. Like, why can't we move through time, the way we move through space? And you see this in some movies, for example, very famously an interstellar. You saw this movie. It involves a guy going into a black hole, which has its own problems we can talk about in another episode. But imagine you can go outside of that. It could have a whole episode just on how interstellar has problems.

And Interstellar, a great movie. Lots of the physics is correct. But this part of it is total gibberish. He goes inside of a black hole. and inside the black hole, he can move through time as if it was space. Like he can say, oh, I'm at this time, I'm going to walk over to the left by 10 feet. That's going to take me back 20 years. He's in this like Tesserac, right?

Like this kind of like cladoscope type of reality where like moving sideways moves you sideways backwards in time or something. Exactly. And he uses that to talk to his daughter and send her a message and give her the secret physics that knowledge that means that they can get off the planet, et cetera, et cetera. problem with that is he's moving through time as if it was space, right? So, like, he's here and then he was there. So they've

created another dimension of time on top of it, right? What is moving through time mean? Moving is motion over time. It just doesn't make any sense. And the reason is that stories have time, right? Stories are a narrative. I'm sitting down, I'm telling you a story by the fire

where cavemen. There's a narrative. It starts and it finishes. It has to have time through it. So if you're going to create this new idea of time, being able to move through time like it was space, you can't tell that story without adding another new dimension of time to it. So in interstellar, they

create time as if it was a dimension of space, but then they bolt on this new dimension of time without telling you. Right. Extra time. Extra time. Movie time. Right. Story time. Well, it's interesting that we can't, like, and that's kind of the magic of movies, right?

is that you can make fantasies and story in books and stories you can violate the loss of physics and still somehow come out with a fun story. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, that part of that movie is forgiven. I personally liked interstellar a lot. I thought it was a lot of fun.

I rolled my eyes and groaned that one scene, you know. But I like that in that movie, physics saves the ears. And everyone's like, oh, and you're like, groan. I try to groan quietly. and internally. I save it for this. I save it for talking to you, Jorge. I battle up all that resentment. I remember I went to

see Contact. Do you remember the movie Contact? Of course. I love that movie. One of my favorite movies of all time. It's about this woman who receives a signal from space, and it's up her search for the meaning of life. It's an amazing movie, really great. It's based on

a Carl Sagan book. And a movie where the scientist is the hero, right? Not an evil scientist, not a bad scientist, not a mad scientist, It's not a selfish crazy selfish crazy scientist but the hero. Yeah. Awesome movie.

Go see it. Robert Zemeck has directed it. But I happened to go to see that movie when it first came out with a bunch of signal processing PhDs. Uh-oh.

Like four of them. These are like Stanford PhDs and like signal. And we came out and I was like oh, that was amazing. And they were just laughing at like all the ways they try to boost the signal

or like let's invert the phase, whatever. And they thought that was all bonkers. It's probably like going to see, it's like probably like watching, you know, CSI with a bunch of actual forensic scientists. Enhance that image, you know.

So, but I try to be a good citizen in the movie theater. I groan internally and I try not to spoil everybody else's experience. You keep it in. I bottle it up. Exactly. Another one in that same category is the movie Arrival, which is based on a short story called the story of your life.

Yeah, I love that. It's a nice story. Yeah, it's very well written. It's beautifully written. And it has the same idea. Aliens come, and these aliens have a different perception of time. They can move through time as if it was a dimension of space. And the cool thing is that the author has thought about what would that mean for their language. So in the short story at least, and a little bit in the movie, it changes the linguistics of the aliens, which makes it hard initially for humans to figure out what they're doing because they write their sentences all. at once, not like, I'm starting now and I'm ending there. They have this different kind of language where they create this blob. I think it is that the consciousness of the aliens are spread through time. Yeah. Like their brains

are spread through space, their consciousness is spread through time. And so they can reference facts from the future and from the present and from the past. And that's cool. But that breaks the causality thing, right? Like their consciousness in the future can't possibly affect the consciousness

in the past, right? there's that problem, but I don't even have to get into that to take apart that movie, which is they have this nice idea, but they don't even really follow through because, for example, the aliens have a conversation with us back and forth. I say this, you say that, I say this, you say that. A conversation has time in it, right? So if they were going to be consistent about it,

then they should just be one blob of a conversation. Here's everything I'm going to ever say to you all at once, right? There shouldn't be any back and forth in their linguistic structure at all. But they were like talking down to us. That was the problem, right? They needed to find out how to talk down to us. Humans who only thought it linearly forward. Yeah, or too stupid to understand their language, right?

Or we're too stupid to find the potholes in the story. It's the same idea that they want to liberate us from time because that's a really appealing idea, but they need to tell a story. And in the story, time has to move forward. There has to be dramatic elements. Something in the future can't really affect something in the past. Like, you can't reverse, right?

All right, well, I think we're out of time, Daniel. Time's up. Let's time travel back to the beginning of this podcast. You do it all over again. And start over. How do you know we didn't? Maybe we did. Maybe this is the second time.

Yeah, yeah. Maybe this second time. Good thing we went back and we made this podcast so funny. You should have seen the first time we recorded this. And the first time we listened to this podcast. Oh, my God. You were groaning. out loud like Daniel in the theater.

Do you have a question you wish we would cover? Send it to us. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, one word, or email us to feedback at danielandhorpe.com. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism.

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