Talk:Time travel

Plastic terminators?
The first two Terminator films are listed under the plastic heading.

I could be missing something relevant because I haven't seen either of them for a while, but are we all sure they're plastic time travel plots? The characters either assume they're in that type of story or at least act like it just in case they are, but is it ever revealed that they really are?

I also think it's a little odd, if listing examples of characters travelling back in time but only as ghostly observers, to include Superman but not Scrooge. I don't just want to jump in and add examples to a list because if we all do that it will turn into a TV Tropes page. Ugh. 94.1.166.231 (talk) 21:45, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

I've travelled back from the future...
to inform you that time travel is impossible. Scherben (talk) 23:50, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

"Conscious time"
There's another version of plastic history which I think has become more common, especially since the 2005 Doctor Who reboot: history can naturally be changed pretty easily, but there's some conscious entity that repairs or prevents changes (or, worst-case, just nukes the affected region to quarantine a paradox). Sometimes it's literally an anthropomorphic "Time Herself", but it could also be a Time Control Bureau from the 29th century or super aliens who set up a Web to preserve (their chosen) history or even ravenous time-eating monsters.

This is different from "resistance in direct relationship to the importance of the event" because the resistance comes from an entity or group that's far from omniscient or impartial (what counts as "important" to the Time Control Bureau is dependent on how it affects 29th century Earth) and also not omnipotent (so really big changes may actually be easier—if you vaporize Earth in 2018, or just wreck the entire spacetime continuum, the Bureau won't exist tomorrow to undo it).

Variations on this idea are what Doctor Who comes back to the most. When the Doctor can't just change things on a whim, it's usually not a law of physics, but the Time Lords and their Web of Time, or Time Herself repairing things, or the Reapers showing up to eat the paradoxical region of the universe, etc. Even when it does seem more like physics (fixed points in time, the Blinovitch Limitation Effect, etc.), that usually doesn't mean changing time would be impossible, or even hard, so much as that it would be dangerously stupid. Meanwhile, e.g., the Arrowverse follows rules more like Doctor Who than like the DC comics their shows are based on.

Of course Doctor Who is ridiculously inconsistent (intentionally so, at least for some writers), so nowhere near all stories fall into this pattern ("Aztecs", "Myth Makers", "Space Museum", "Time Meddler", and "Inferno", for example, explore all the other options), but I don't think that's relevant to this article; I think it's the "intentional resistance to change" idea that's spread from Doctor Who to other mass-market time-travel fiction.

Anyway, this seems by far the least plausible if time travel works in reality. So, a it becomes more popular, does that mean we should see fewer people taking those stories as "how time travel works in the real world"? No, of course not; it means we see people saying "You couldn't do that with a time machine; history would fix itself" with a straight face, never even thinking about how "history" could even understand what needs to be fixed. --157.131.152.164 (talk) 05:12, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

Another claimant
Can be found here/your inventive news-site of choice.

Sounds 'cooked up' to me. Anna Livia (talk) 16:15, 4 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Can no longer access the above - but will add . Anna Livia (talk) 10:29, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

As the 2021 article has gone here is another one. (Can anyone prevent the linkrot?) Anna Livia (talk) 23:15, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Will add this to the list. Anna Livia (talk) 19:28, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

Isaac Asimov
Into which category would 'The End of Eternity' fall? There should be some mention (but I am better with factoids and links than wiki-formatting). Anna Livia (talk) 10:36, 29 July 2021 (UTC)