4. You’d possibly kill everybody by sneezing. Depending on how far you went back in time, there would be a significant risk of infecting the entire worldwide population with an illness that mankind has spent the last few centuries building immunity against. Unless, of course, you happened to contract smallpox immediately upon arrival—then you’d die.
5. You already exist in the recent past. This is the most glaring problem and the one everybody intuitively understands—if you went back to yesterday, you would still be there, standing next to yourself. The consequence of this existential condition is both straightforward and unexplainable. Moreover …
6. Before you attempted to travel back in time, you’d already know if it worked. Using the example from problem number 5, imagine that you built a time machine on Thursday. You decide to use the machine on Saturday in order to travel back to Friday afternoon. If this worked, you would already see yourself on Friday. But what would then happen if you and the Future You destroyed your time machine on Friday night? How would the Future You be around to assist with the destroying?
7. Unless all of time is happening simultaneously within multiple realities, memories and artifacts would mysteriously change. The members of Steely Dan (Donald Fagen and Walter Becker) met at Bard College in 1967, when Fagen overheard Becker playing guitar in a café. This meeting has been recounted many times in interviews, and the fact that they were both at Bard College (located in Annandale-on-Hudson) is central to songs like “My Old School,” which was recorded in 1973. But what if Fagen built a time machine in 1980 and went back to find Becker in 1966, when he was still a high school student in Manhattan? What would happen to their shared personal memories of that first meeting in Annandale? And if they had both immediately moved to Los Angeles upon Becker’s graduation, how could the song “My Old School” exist (and what would it be about)?
8. The past has happened, and it can only happen the way it happened. This, I suppose, is debatable. But not by Bruce Willis. In Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys, Willis goes back in time to confront an insane Brad Pitt before Pitt releases a virus that’s destined to kill five billion people and drive the rest of society into hiding (as it turns out, Pitt is merely trying to release a bunch of giraffes from the Philadelphia Zoo, which is only slightly more confusing than the presence of Madeleine Stowe in this movie). What’s distinctive about Twelve Monkeys is that the reason Willis is sent back in time is not to stop this catastrophe from happening, but merely to locate a primitive version of the virus so that scientists can combat the existing problem in the distant future (where the remnants of mankind have been to forced to take refuge underground). Willis can travel through time, but he can’t change anything or save anyone. “How can I save you?” he rhetorically asks the white-clad dolts who question his sudden appearance in the year 1990. “This already happened. No one can save you.” Twelve Monkeys makes a lot of references to the “Cassandra complex” (named for a Greek myth about a young woman’s inability to convince others that her prophetic warnings are accurate), but it’s mostly about predestination—in Twelve Monkeys, the assumption is that anyone who travels into the past will do exactly what history dictates. Nothing can be altered. What this implies is that everything about life (including the unforeseen future) is concrete and predetermined. There is no free will. So if you’ve seen Twelve Monkeys more than twice, you’re probably a Calvinist.
These are just a handful of the (nonscientific) problems with going backward in time. As far as I can tell, there really aren’t any causality problems with going forward in time—in terms of risk, jumping to the year 2077 isn’t that different than moving to suburban Bangladesh or hiding in your basement for five decades. Time would still move forward on its regular trajectory, no differently than if you were temporarily (or permanently) dead. Your participation in life doesn’t matter to time. This is part of the reason that futurists tend to believe traveling forward in time is more plausible than the alternative—it involves fewer problems. But regardless of the direction you move, the central problem is still there: Why do it? What’s the best reason for exploding the parameters of reality?
With the possible exception of eating a dinosaur, I don’t think there is one.
3 “Even back when I was writing really bad short stories in college,” a (then) thirty-four-year-old Shane Carruth said in an interview with himself, “I always thought the time machine is the device that’s missed most. Without even saying it out loud, that’s the thing people want the most: The ability to take whatever it is that went wrong and fix it.”
Carruth is the writer, director, producer, and costar of the 2004 independent film Primer, the finest movie about time travel I’ve ever seen. The reason Primer is the best (despite its scant seventy-eight-minute run time and $7,000 budget) is because it’s the most realistic—which, I will grant, is a peculiar reason for advocating a piece of science fiction. But the plausibility of Primer is why it’s so memorable. It’s not that the time machine in Primer seems more authentic; it’s that the time travelers themselves seem more believable. They talk and act (and think) like the kind of people who might accidentally figure out how to move through time, which is why it’s the best depiction we have of the ethical quandaries that would emerge from such a discovery.
Here’s the basic outline of Primer: It opens with four identically dressed computer engineers sitting around a table in a nondescript American community (Primer was shot around Dallas, but the setting is like the world of Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men—it’s a city without character that could literally be anywhere). They speak a dense, clipped version of English that is filled with technical jargon; it’s mostly indecipherable, but that somehow makes it better. They wear ties and white shirts all the time (even when they’re removing a catalytic converter from a car to steal the palladium), and they have no interests outside of superconductivity and NCAA basketball. The two brightest engineers—Abe (David Sullivan) and Aaron (Carruth)—eventually realize they have assembled a box that can move objects backward through a thirteen-hundred-minute loop in time. Without telling anyone else, they build two larger versions of the (staunchly unglamorous) box that can transport them to the previous day.4 Their initial motive is solely financial—they go back a day, drive to the local library, and buy stocks over the Internet that they know will increase in value over the next twenty-four hours. They try to do nothing else of consequence (at least at first). They just sit in a hotel room and wait. “I tried to isolate myself,” Abe says when describing his first journey into the past. “I closed the windows, I unplugged everything—the phone, the TV and clock radio. I didn’t want to take the chance of seeing someone I knew, or of seeing something on the news … I mean, if we’re dealing with causality, and I don’t even know for sure … I took myself out of the equation.”
If this sounds simple, I can assure you that it is not. Primer is hopelessly confusing and grows more and more byzantine as it unravels (I’ve watched it seven or eight times and I still don’t know what happened). Characters begin to secretly use the time machine for personal reasons and they begin multiplying themselves across time. But because these symmetrical iterations are (inevitably) copies of other copies, the system starts to hemorrhage—Abe and Aaron find themselves bleeding from their ears and struggling with handwriting. When confusing events start to happen in the present, they can’t tell if those events are the manifestations of decisions one of them will eventually make in the future. At one point, no one (not Abe, Aaron, or even the viewer) is able to understand what’s going on. The story does not end in a clear disaster, but with a hazy, open-ended scenario that might be worse.
What’s significant about the two dudes in Primer is how they initially disregard the ethical questions surrounding time travel; as pure scientists, they only consider the practical obstacles of the endeavor. Even when they decide to go back and change the past of another person, their only concern is how this can still work within the framework they’re manipu
lating. They’re geniuses, but they’re ethical Helen Kellers. When they’re traveling back for financial purposes, they discount their personal role in the success of the stocks they trade; since stocks increase in value whenever people buy them, they are retroactively inflating the value of whatever commodities they select (not by much, but enough to alter the future). When Abe and Aaron start traveling back in time to change their own pasts, they attempt to stoically ignore the horrifying reality they’ve created: Their sense of self—their very definition of self—is suddenly irrelevant. If you go back in time today and meet the person who will become you tomorrow, which of those two people is actually you? The short answer is, “Both.” But once you realize that the short answer is “Both,” the long answer becomes “Neither.” If you exist in two places, you don’t exist at all.
According to the director, Primer is a movie about the relationship between risk and trust. This is true. But it also makes a concrete point about the potential purpose of time travel—it’s too important to use only for money, but too dangerous to use for anything else.
1A I used to have a fantasy about reliving my entire life with my present-day mind. I once thought this fantasy was unique to me, but it turns out that this is very common; many people enjoy imagining what it would be like to reinhabit their past with the knowledge they’ve acquired through experience. I imagine the bizarre things I would have said to teachers in junior high. I think about women I would have pursued and stories I could have written better and about how interesting it would have been to be a genius four-year-old. At its nucleus, this is a fantasy about never having to learn anything. The defining line from Frank Herbert’s Dune argues that the mystery of life “is not a question to be answered but a reality to be experienced.” My fantasy offers the opposite. Nothing would be experienced. Nothing would feel new or unknown or jarring. It’s a fantasy for people who want to solve life’s mysteries without having to do the work.
I am one of those people.
The desire to move through time is electrifying and rational, but it’s a desire of weakness. The real reason I want to travel through time is because I’m a defeatist person. The cynical egomaniac in Wells’s original novel leaves the present because he has contempt for the humanity of his present world, but he never considers changing anything about his own role in that life (which would obviously be easier). Instead, he elects to bolt eight hundred thousand years into the future, blindly hoping that things will have improved for him. It’s a bad plan. Charlton Heston’s character in Planet of the Apes5 tries something similar; he hates mankind, so he volunteers to explore space, only to crash back on a postapocalyptic earth where poorly dressed orangutans employ Robert’s Rules of Order. This is a consistent theme in stories about traveling to the future: Things are always worse when you get there. And I suspect this is because the kind of writer who’s intrigued by the notion of moving forward in time can’t see beyond their own pessimism about being alive. People who want to travel through time are both (a) unhappy and (b) unwilling to compromise anything about who they are. They would rather change every element of society except themselves.
This is how I feel.
This is also why my long-standing desire to build a time machine is not just hopeless but devoid of merit. It has nothing to do with time. I don’t think it ever does (for me, H. G. Wells, Shane Carruth, or anyone else). It takes a flexible mind to imagine how time travel might work, but only an inflexible spirit would actually want to do it. It’s the desire of the depressed and lazy.
On side two of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson laments that he “just wasn’t made for these times” (“these times” being 1966). He probably wasn’t. But he also didn’t want to be. I assume Wilson would have preferred dealing with the possibility of thinking liquid metal before he would accept the invisible, nonnegotiable shackles of the present tense. Which—sadly, and quite fortunately—is the only tense any of us will ever have.
Q: Are you surprised you fell so low in the draft?
A: Surprised? No. I’m surprised I was drafted at all.
Q: Do you feel like the negative pre-draft media coverage caused your stock to fall?
A: Absolutely. But I accept some of the blame for that. I mean, I came to the combine a little out of shape, and then I held a gun to another man’s head on live television. I’m sure that didn’t give scouts a lot of confidence.
What We Talk About
When We Talk About
Ralph Sampson
1 Inside the more unreasonable sectors of my brain’s right hemisphere, Ralph Sampson is the best basketball player who ever lived. I am able to repress this notion, but the sensation remains. He had so much of everything: so much height, so much coordination, so much evolution of species. I would watch him play on Saturday afternoons in 1982; he never scored much and rebounded with indifference, yet he still looked better than any man who’d ever tried to perfect the sport he so casually toyed with. I was ten years old. Al McGuire was announcing those games for NBC, habitually comparing Sampson to an aircraft carrier. It was a valid analogy. But it wasn’t Sampson’s seven-foot-four frame that made him so astonishing; it was more that he seemed to have nothing in common with a man who was seven-foot-four. He was sinewy and deft and mobile; he played a finesse game, and I was too young to realize that this was a weakness. Sampson was better designed for basketball than any human who has ever lived: He possessed the maximum amount of dexterity within the longest possible skeletal structure.1 In my imagination, he still seems unstoppable—an elegant extension of Darwinian engineering. He is more unstoppable than Michael Jordan; he’s Jordanesque, but constructed like Jabbar. He’s Jordan with a skyhook. But this is only in the abstract. Outside of abstraction, Ralph Sampson was the worst thing an athlete can be: Ralph Sampson was a bust. And though I know why that happened and I know why it’s true, I struggle with what that means. It seems to exemplify the saddest thing about sports and culture, which means it’s pretty much the saddest thing about life that doesn’t involve death or secrets.
2 Here’s the first thing we must establish and never forget: Ralph Sampson was better at his chosen craft than you are at whatever it is you pretend to do. In 1985, he made the NBA’s all-NBA second team, which means—at worst—he was the tenth-best professional basketball player in America. Now, in 1985 Arvydas Sabonis was a healthy twenty-year-old playing center for the Soviet Union national team, and he was better than Sampson. Oscar Schmidt, a one-dimensional swingman from Brazil (and probably the best basketball player never to play in the NBA), was arguably in this class as well in ’85, and Moses Malone (and maybe even Dominique Wilkins) was just as deserving of all-star status as Sampson at this point in history. But even if all this is accurate, Sampson was still the fourteenth-best individual in a world where fifty million kids regularly played basketball, living on a planet populated by four billion people. He was the NCAA player of the year three times, played in four NBA all-star games, and earned $17 million in less than a decade. His separation from the rest of society is beyond vast. But we are not working within the parameters of reality; we are working within the parameters of televised sport. And that’s a critical difference. It essentially makes Ralph Sampson a tall, emotive, representational nonhuman slave.
And within these parameters, four thousand rebounds don’t mean shit.
2A This is an essay about sports and life, and it will continue to be about sports after the following 382-word section. But before I return to the topic of Ralph Sampson, I need to mention Britney Spears.
Some might bristle at my use of the word slave in the previous section, partially because Sampson is black but mostly because that word exists in the same paragraph as “earned $17 million in less than a decade.” Those are not slave wages. But Ralph was a different kind of slave; he was a cultural slave, and cultural slaves are compensated with colossal sacks of cash. But they’re still paid less than they deserve, despite the fact that they produce nothing of conseque
nce.
I do not know how much money Britney Spears earned last year. However, I do know that it’s not enough for me to want her life, were I given the option to have it. Every day, random people use Britney’s existence as currency; they talk about her public failures and her lack of talent as a way to fill the emptiness of their own normalcy. She—along with Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton and all those androids from The Hills—are the unifying entities within this meta era. In a splintered society, they are the means through which people devoid of creativity communicate with each other. They allow Americans to understand who they are and who they are not; they allow Americans to unilaterally agree on something they never needed to consciously consider. A person like Britney Spears surrenders her privacy and her integrity and the rights to her own persona, and in exchange we give her huge sums of money. But she still doesn’t earn a fraction of what she warrants in a free-trade cultural economy. If Britney Spears were paid $1 every time a self-loathing stranger used her as a surrogate for his own failure, she would outearn Warren Buffett in three months. This is why entertainers (and athletes) make so much revenue but are still wildly underpaid: We use them for things that are worth more than money. It’s a new kind of dehumanizing slavery—not as awful as the literal variety, but dehumanizing nonetheless. And this is what happened to Ralph Sampson, though I suspect he would disagree.