Terminator 2

[A Black Falcon]

...Finally got around to renting it yesterday... erm, why didn't I watch this like ten years ago now? It was indeed every bit as awesome as its reputation suggests... really amazing stuff, beginning to end. I remember really loving the T2 arcade game back in the early '90s, but of course at that age I couldn't see the film... but I have no excuse for not watching it in more recent years. Not wanting to watch it because I wasn't sure if it'd be as good as I was hoping it would be, perhaps?

Fortunately, it lived up to expectations, which was quite a feat. :)

The plot is a nightmare of circular time loops that make your brain hurt to think about, but time travel always does that...

And no, I haven't seen the first movie yet either.

[Sacred Jellybean]

[Dark Jaguar]

If you ask me the second one is much better than the first one. I could have lived without a lot of the "I'm an emotionally unstable freak of psychology" stuff the woman had, and had MORE "I'm a robot coming to grips with the meaning of my existance" stuff.

By the way, it's not a time loop, it's a time paradox. A time loop would mean that whatever he did in the past would make him go into the past, meaning the future is set in stone.

This basically just says that they changed the future to prevent the robots from existing in the first place, which would thereby prevent Mr T-1000 from coming back to do just that, hence a paradox. They never really addressed how the paradox is resolved though... I suppose we're to assume when someone travels back in time it splits into two realities, and the two robots are basically from an alternate future from the perspective of the humans.

[alien space marine]

[Weltall]

Terminator 2 was better than the first by sheer means of evolution. It was, for a somewhat-relevant metaphor, a rifle versus a musket.

I love the second movie a lot, it's one of my favorites. I also think the series would have best been served to have left it end right there. The third movie was terrible for many reasons, not the least which that T2 had a damn near perfect ending.

[Dark Jaguar]

Erm, there is no "predestination paradox", at least in the context of time travel.

If it's a closed time loop, how is that a paradox? I think you don't seem to get what paradox means. It basically is a statement like "This is a false statement.".

However, the first movie is only a closed time loop for sure after the second movie comes on the scene. A closed time loop is perfectly self consistant, except for one thing. Terminator 2 is suggesting that time travel works two ways simultaneously. It's BOTH "Your efforts to change history are what make it like it is to begin with" and "you can change history creating a paradox".

I kinda hate it when stuff pulls things like that. Is internal consistancy in a time travel mechanic so much to ask? Pick a way for it to work and stick with it. Star Trek is, of course, the biggest offender as it constantly switches between the closed loop and paradox forms. Even Ocarina of Time was guilty of switching it up at least once with the Song of Storms suddenly being a closed loop while all other time travel is in the paradox form.

[A Black Falcon]

Oh, in more recent movie news, I also saw Wall-E and Mongol (in theaters). Thought about making threads for them too, but didn't get around to it... Wall-E is amazing, Mongol pretty good, if quite overly romantic in comparison to how cruel Ghengis Khan was.

Erm, there is no "predestination paradox", at least in the context of time travel.

If it's a closed time loop, how is that a paradox? I think you don't seem to get what paradox means. It basically is a statement like "This is a false statement."

You're right, it's not a paradox, which is why I said "closed loop". It is really confusing and strange, though... so the thing happened because someone who knew it was supposed to happen sent something back in time to make it happen? That just doesn't quite make sense... I know it does, but... it's a very strange concept. Always is, in sci-fi plots involving time travel (Star Trek does a bunch of this stuff, as you say...).

I kinda hate it when stuff pulls things like that. Is internal consistancy in a time travel mechanic so much to ask? Pick a way for it to work and stick with it. Star Trek is, of course, the biggest offender as it constantly switches between the closed loop and paradox forms. Even Ocarina of Time was guilty of switching it up at least once with the Song of Storms suddenly being a closed loop while all other time travel is in the paradox form.

Yeah, I'd probably agree that in Star Trek it gets pretty close to paradox levels sometimes, with how ridiculous some of the timetravel plots get... but it always makes sense, really! (Okay, sometimes maybe not so much).

At least in T2 they only spent a relatively small amount of time in the avoided bad future, when compared to things like Voyager's final two episodes or Year of Hell, which were pretty much "and then at the end they went back in time and avoided all the bad stuff"...

This basically just says that they changed the future to prevent the robots from existing in the first place, which would thereby prevent Mr T-1000 from coming back to do just that, hence a paradox. They never really addressed how the paradox is resolved though... I suppose we're to assume when someone travels back in time it splits into two realities, and the two robots are basically from an alternate future from the perspective of the humans.

What do you mean, that after the two robots were destroyed all the damage that had been caused in the movie and everyone's memories and stuff like that should have suddenly been changed? Well, that just shows how resilient SkyNet is... even being destroyed utterly can't get rid of it, and they know that. :) Seriously though, obviously here changing the future doesn't change the past -- even though there is no robot to send back, that robot sent back is there anyway, because it was sent back... I think that makes sense. The past has happened, the future hasn't yet... but there are many ways of dealing with this. It could be a split timeline too, they don't specify.

... well, T2 didn't put it that way (its ending implied that it was all really over), but in order to continue, the future works in the franchise did. How much fun would it be if it was all really over there? :) Sure T2 had a great ending, but if they wanted to do a third movie, they had to revoke it...

Oh, and SJ, I haven't seen the Die Hard movies either (any of them). :)

[Dark Jaguar]

Let me try that again. First I was responding to ASM there.

There's the "closed loop" style of time travel. This is just a closed loop. Intention is irrelevent. No, I wasn't suggesting someone was intentionally going back to make SURE the future happened as it did (ala Time Squad). I was suggesting that even if they tried to make sure it didn't happen that way, their efforts are what MADE the future happen like it did. That's the closed loop.

The time paradox is not quite what you seem to think it is. I wasn't saying that all the damage should have been "reverted". That makes no sense. Their memories ALONE being altered? What? They'd have to also be at home or wherever they'd normally be before that all happened.

Here's the paradox. Robots travel back in time, the end result being that skynet is never made. Yes the past already happened, but that's the problem, we're dealing with time travel. There is a rather pointless distinction of past and future at this point. As a result, we get to the future where no one ever travels back in time, or do we? The cause and effect is "broken". Did the robots just spawn out of nowhere? Of course not. Indeed, no robots would ever go back at all, so the past is undone, and skynet is made, and so they are sent back, so they aren't made, and not sent back. This is the very essence of a paradox.

There are two ways to resolve it. The first is an alternate reality. The second is a locked "switching time loop". History will repeat forever alternating between two versions.

Of course the third way is that it's a moot point if time travel is impossible. Of course that means faster than light travel is also impossible (the speed of light limit is not really due to any property of light, but rather spacetime, and while many don't seem to get WHY faster than light travel would not just imply, but NEED to be time travel backwards, it takes looking into the math to really get that it's a must).

The forth is far too "spiritual" for my tastes, which is the time conservation principle, which is not unlike other conservasion principles that past physicists suggested that would do things like prevent a black hole from ever forming. Suggesting a principle like that, to me, suggests that the universe is somehow able to "figure out" if something will result in a paradox and take steps to fatalistically prevent the paradox by forcing time to take place properly. Yes I know the idea is rather than the time travel event actually forced a future and without the time travel the future would actually be different, but that only means a reverse paradox, what if someone didn't go back in time and alter history when it's needed for that particular future? Again, the universe would need to be able to detect this and fatalistically play a part in assuring that the time travel occurs. I just don't see that happening.

By the way, let me say what I meant with Star Trek. It's inconsistant in terms of WHICH form of time travel they say their universe works with. Some episodes say "time travel is fatalistic, it's all closed loops", and other episodes say "time travel is paradoxical, the future can be changed via time travel". Some say the time travel changes, even if they prevent future time travel, work "just fine" as they are, and others say that such changes would create "temporal feedback that destroys the universe".

There's no good way to resolve that. Time travel works in ways sometimes that it doesn't in other times.

[A Black Falcon]

I'd typed a reply yesterday, but the downtime earlier wiped it out... :(

But how about 'the past is unchanged, but the future is now different'? That's what T2 chooses as a timeline design, after all. It's not one of your four choices, but it's what they do... couldn't-have-existed-now robots and all. They were sent back by the future that had existed, after all... evidently in Terminator timelines changing history does not change the past or the present, just the future. Perhaps it's a splitting timeline thing, where there is now another universe where things went differently, but they never implied that it was even that... just that it is now different. It's not a paradox, when the robot was sent back it existed, and when it was in the past it was there, even if later events made it impossible for it to have been sent back... it was already in the past, that event happened.

You're right that with time travel saying such things is dangerous, because if you just skip around (in time) that whole thesis could fall apart into incoherence, but as far as they took it, at least, it worked.

[Dark Jaguar]

But where did that robot come FROM? Nowhere? That past depends ON future events.

[A Black Falcon]

It came from the future before the future was changed. But once it's in the past, it's not going to disappear just because with the new changed future it couldn't have been sent back.

[Dark Jaguar]

Oh? And why's that? What keeps it there? Your mistake is thinking of time as "set" once something already happens, but the very fact that time travel exists in these universes shows that premise to be pretty much flawed.

Here's the deal. The intervening time period is kinda irrelevent in a sense. That is to say, the paradox is that the past moment is CONNECTED to the future. In the future, the past is THERE, right through their portal or whatever. The past depends on events in the future, and the future depends on the past.

[A Black Falcon]

No, even though there is a portal connecting them, they are in different times. Changing events in the future will not change events in the past. I think that makes sense.

[Dark Jaguar]

Except that an event in the future DID change the past in this case.

Okay let's try this from another angle.

Think of a loop that isn't a paradox working this way. Let's say the events of the time travel LEAD to the event that sent them back in time to begin with. If the future events have nothing to do with the past, what, would the past suddenly fill up with more and more copies of the time traveller? Think about it. If you are saying the past "just is", that the person spawned out of nothingness in the paradox world, then there's no connection with the future. In other words, the person in the future travelling back in time has no connection with the version that came out of the time portal, and that means that when the future guy steps in, he steps out along with another one of himself at the same time, and that happens infinitely.

[Great Rumbler]

I always found it to be kind of funny that the robot hand and microchip found at the end of T1 was responsible for the technological development that led to the creation of Skynet, which later sent back the robot in T1 to kill Sarah Conner.

[A Black Falcon]

Think of a loop that isn't a paradox working this way. Let's say the events of the time travel LEAD to the event that sent them back in time to begin with. If the future events have nothing to do with the past, what, would the past suddenly fill up with more and more copies of the time traveller? Think about it. If you are saying the past "just is", that the person spawned out of nothingness in the paradox world, then there's no connection with the future. In other words, the person in the future travelling back in time has no connection with the version that came out of the time portal, and that means that when the future guy steps in, he steps out along with another one of himself at the same time, and that happens infinitely.

*Attempts to understand paragraph*

*Tries again*

... Man, I hate time travel...

Think about it. If you are saying the past "just is", that the person spawned out of nothingness in the paradox world,

No, they were spawned from a different future when it still existed. Just because it doesn't mean that that changes the past too.

This is a standard time-travel device, really. Changing events only changes things AFTER the change, not anything before. I remember a series of books about the Adventures of the Time Patrol, whenever something was changed people stationed at times before the change would have to go fix it to make the proper future exist again.

Does this mean that you could potentially create a situation where there are several of the same person in the same time? Perhaps, depending on your other rules, yes... and yeah, that could be horribly confusing and easily abused, if time travel was easy and not controlled. But just because that's so doesn't invalidate this concept of time travel.

[lazyfatbum]

im going to ignore the whole "I just saw t2" and all... that, yeah. God.

I attempted to gain a solid understanding of hypotheticals in time as a dynamic but holy humping penguin dick I lost brain cells keeping track of all the rhetorical-feces that filled countless shitbuckets. The good news though is that theterminator movies are easy to understand now because it's a fucking movie and doesn't aply to any actual working theories other than "its really well thought out and badass". If you want to make it work you have to use fate as a precursor, events happen and must complete its cycle. You can prolong it but it has to eventually play out. ie: the machine future *must* happen, its the only way the time line makes any sense (ie: regardless of their actions, nothing in the future changes). Whether John lives or dies, whether the terminator is sent back or not, the future will unfold with the same outcome, which actually is still left at 'war' with the humans on the lose side. In a quasi-surrealism the machine war future is the current time line with everything prior as the swiss cheese NRA theme park for the Conners. No matter what they do, they follow any infinite path to eventual machine war with the dot dot dot question mark on who's going to win. Sarah made that realization is a stroke of brilliant filmmaking and tried to think 'outside' the continuum and still failed because lets face it, fate's a cunt.