Re: Thoughts on how the Terminator TV series will end?

On Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:28:13 -0500, "Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:

:George W Harris <gharrus@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
:>On Thu, 06 Mar 2008 15:07:05 -0600, "Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
:
:>>Terry Gilliam got it right in "Twelve Monkeys". Bruce Willis refused to
:>>believe in time paradoxes, kept telling all the psychiatrist that it's
:>>all unalterable history, although that turns out not to be the case.
:
:>	eh?  What history was altered in "Twelve Monkeys"?
:
:He didn't realize that Madeleine Stowe's phone call would instigate the
:events that followed.

	Right.  That's not a change, though.  That's just 
discovering new information.

	That was, as I understand it, the entire purpose of 
time travel in "Twelve Monkeys" was information gathering.  
You can't *change* the past, but you don't know everything 
*about* the past either.  For example, take the phone 
message.  They discovered an answering service tape for a 
carpet cleaning business; it was damaged, and they couldn't 
tell what was on it without doing a lot of work.  So, they send 
someone back into the past and have him leave the 
information he finds in a message on that tape.  Then, they 
restore the tape and recover that message.

	The thing is, that message was *always* on the tape.  
Nothing actually changed.  If they had discovered a locked 
chest buried in a particular spot, the could send someone 
back in time to put something in a locked chest and bury it in 
that spot, and that something would be in the chest when 
they opened it, but it was *always* *there*.

	This is what some people call a paradox but which I 
prefer to call a causal loop to distinguish it from instances 
where you can change the past and doing so creates an 
inconsistency (killing an ancestor before he/she reproduces, 
for example).  It's a little mind-bending, but there's no 
changing of the past involved.

	There's an excellent Spanish sci-fi movie called 
"Timecrimes", or "Los Cronocrímenes" that I recently saw at 
the Nevermore Film Festival. 

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0480669/

	It does a very good job of representing this sort of 
'invariant past' time travel.
-- 
They say there's air in your lungs that's been there for years.

George W. Harris  For actual email address, replace each 'u' with an 'i'.