Continued from:

http://textadventures.co.uk/forum/general/topic/6rz9ezwdouksrzmod-jcka/questions-for-christians#67109097-fc22-48f5-ab2f-b2356d79be21

Previously, DL said:

Yea, I thought paradox, at first myself... but...
Superman(#1), stopped the missile, then went back it time...
Superman (#1) always stops the missile...
When Superman(#2) the one that went back is time to save Lois, Superman (#1) still stops the missile. Then goes back in time to save Lois...
So, for a short while, there were 2 Superman's... Then one fly's off to go back in time...
It "looks" like a paradox loop, but it's not.

It's like you stop at a restaurant and have lunch, then leave, only to go back and have dessert...
With a time loop installed, you could have seen yourself come in and have a slice of pie, but you forgot to order yours when you finished eating. You would come back for the dessert, where your earlier self would have seen you.
This would be an effect-causality loop.

...but there would be no need to save Lois the second time around because the future Superman would have already saved her.

2:05:30 Lois sees the low fuel signal flash.

2:07:20 The missile makes contact, and the earthquake begins.

2:09:40 Superman fixes the earth's core.

2:10:42 Superman saves the train.

2:10:50 The dam begins to break. Jimmy falls, and is stuck hanging over the side of it.

2:11:40 The big hole bursts through the middle of the dam.

2:12:20 Supes drops Jimmy off in the middle of the road.

2:13:00 Lois's car runs out of gas.

2:13:10 The earthquake catches up to her.

2:15:20 Having fixed the earth's core and saved everyone else (besides Lois), just after patching up the dam, Smallville flies to the location of Lois.

2:16:20 By the time he arrives, she is dead. This makes him reverse Earth's rotation to turn back time... We see things happen in reverse... We reverse through the flood after the dam...

2:19:43 ...we reverse past 2:11:40 (when the big hole breaks in the dam)

2:19:44 ...we reverse to 2:13:00 -- just as Lois runs out of gas -- then Superman returns the earth's rotation to normal .

Okay, so we went back through time in the wrong order right there. Going backwards, we see 2:11:40 before 2:13:00.

Plus, Superman didn't even go back far enough to stop Lex from firing the missiles in the first place? Anyway...

I'll assume that 2:11:40 and 2:13:00 happen simultaneously and the movie has to show us what happened one scene at a time.

...but Superman shows up in the past just as Lois has run out of gas and after Jimmy has been dropped off in the middle of the road (apparently). No earthquake or flood anymore???

But anyway...

If DL's theory is correct, there would be 2 Supermans at 2:11:40 at this point. I'll call them Main Superman and Rerun Superman.

By the time Rerun Superman got to Lois's car at 2:16:20, she'd be standing there (alive, having been saved by Main Superman before he flew away to deal with Lex) with Jimmy. Rerun Superman would have no reason to go back in time.

Hrmm...

You know...

I have to theorize there would always be 2 Supermans once Main Superman arrived back in the past in this scenario . . .

Seems like there would always be 2 Supermans once Main Superman arrived in his past in this scenario . . .

There’s the fallacy in time travel scenarios. As far as we know, time travel is NOT possible, barring a hypothetical (and highly doubted) Einstein-Rosen bridge. Superman could be a 4th dimension being, not seeing time as a sequence of ‘nows’ but instead seeing and interacting with the beginning and end of a “time-thread” at once or all at once. Superman gave no indication he could do that, nor would we fans want him to. As I believe, this would eliminate “free will” and there would be no point in Superman going out of his way to do heroic feats. It’s already been done. Then, of course, maybe that Lois and world-saving scenario already did happen and he had to go through that situation because he was destined to. It would have happened regardless. But, we 3rd dimension beings had to see the movie to appreciate it so they had to show it on the big screen.

So, in short, if time travel did exist as portrayed in the movie, he should not have flown around the earth in circles. He should have flown much faster than light speed to some ‘once-now fragment’ out in space where light left 6 minutes and 44 seconds ago. Now the question, to me, is... once he met (caught up with) that light, could he have interacted with it anyway?

PS - I may not be making sense. Who’d a thunk it?

Superman could be a 4th dimension being, not seeing time as a sequence of ‘nows’ but instead seeing and interacting with the beginning and end of a “time-thread” at once or all at once. Superman gave no indication he could do that, nor would we fans want him to.

It would suck if Superman was like Dr. Manhattan.

...and I just realized something...

There ARE 2 Supermans! No, wait... That's in a sequel.

I think its supposed to represent the fight within himself. But hey that's films for you.

That reminds me.

https://youtu.be/irfgXDrCRLs

Actually, thinking through Superman... there is a paradox...
When superman #1 finds dead Lois, and goes back in time...
Superman #1 would find superman #2 (the one that looped) after saving Lois, SO... he would not need to go back in time to save her...
UNLESS, the universe has a "change-lock" where events can only change once, thereby stopping paradox loops...

So that... Superman #1, after seeing himself (Superman #2) save Lois, "knows" he needs to go back in time to save her, which would solve the paradox loop...
As in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pandorica_Opens
I like how he read the note that young Amy received that told her to go to the museum, then tosses it away to write the note "again"...
If he did not do this, it would have caused a paradox because he "never" wrote the note the first time...

I think its supposed to represent the fight within himself. But hey that's films for you.

Yeah, I was just trying to be silly. (It was funny in my mind. [Insert maniacal laugh here.])

XanMag, those guys are wrong about Back to the Future.

FULL DISCLOSURE

My thoughts concerning that Big Bang show:

That show is a poser. No one involved is a nerd. They echo nerd talking points, but the show lacks substance because there are no nerds involved who truly enjoy anything being referenced.

Anyway . . .

I love Back to the Future, but...

• Marty accidentally goes back to 1955
• His mom ends up wanting him instead of his father, due to a series of unfortunate events.
  -- At this point:
  -- 1. An alternate timeline should now exist, and everyone we see in 1955 should be stuck in it.
  -- 2. Marty's oldest sibling should begin to fade from future existence in this newly created timeline, but we see that he is fading out of the picture from the original timeline -- which doesn't really make sense if alternate timelines are being created. It seems like Marty and the time machine would simply disappear from that original timeline once he hits 88 MPH, and everything and everyone else in that original timeline would remain otherwise unaffected. That should include any items which come from that timeline. I mean, the brother shouldn't be erased from existence in the picture from that timeline because nothing that happened BEFORE Marty went back to 1955 has been altered in that original timeline.

OLD BIFF

Once old Biff goes back to 1955 from 2015 and gives his younger self the almanac, the new timeline (which includes the infamous alternate 1985) has been created. He should not be able to return to the 2015 from whence he traveled, and the time machine should be gone from his original version of 2015 forever -- leaving Doc, Marty, and Jennifer stranded in that timeline.

If one would argue that things (and people) fade out of existence slowly in this time-traveling universe and that's how old Biff returned to the same timeline he originally left before he eventually faded away, that is not how it works in the films anytime Marty goes back to the future from a trip to the past during which something was changed which created alternate timelines.

So that... Superman #1, after seeing himself (Superman #2) save Lois, "knows" he needs to go back in time to save her, which would solve the paradox loop...

...but Superman #1 wouldn't see himself save Lois, because he wasn't there to see that Lois needed to be saved in the first place.

By the time Superman #1 got to Lois after Superman #2 flew away (which is when he would get there), she would be standing there with Jimmy. She would probably say something like, "hey, you just flew away just now. What are you doing back?" And, to Jimmy, Superman would have seemingly just dropped him off in the middle of the road a few minutes ago.

...and, besides all that, it doesn't make sense that the earthquake didn't get Lois. Supes didn't go back far enough to stop it. All we saw him do was go back in time a little before the earthquake reached Lois and stand there and talk to her before flying off to get Lex.

I totally agree with you about BttF. Great movie but... as far as time travel goes, it’s pretty riddled with holes.

Concerning Superman...

Can he travel at light speed? Or even close? There’s no reason why he couldn’t do both in the original timeline. How would Superman run out of time?? It just doesn’t make sense. Unless... he can’t really travel that fast. I dunno.

Waiting for “Sorry, you can’t post that here.” to lift...

There are two ways to look at travel into the future:

1. Travel near ‘c’ into space and return to Earth. More earth time would have passed than ‘your’ time. You’re gone 5 minutes whereas 1 hour (or ten, or 50, or 1000 would have passed on earth). You’ve essentially gone into earth’s future.
2. Hang out near the edge of a black hole or some other REALLY massive object, like in interstellar. Example: satellite clocks tick faster than those here on earth because there is less gravitational distortion of space-time.

So... what about traveling backward into the past? The only way I can see how it’s possible is to reverse the scenarios above:
A. To slow down your space-time relative to earth space-time. This would be impossible in standard travel. We would have to exit the galaxy, find some distance nook in the universe that has minimal expansion, and the return to earth in order to be on earth AND in the earths past. You can see the impossibilities here I think. BUT... and this is purely theoretical...you can create a wormhole, the “center” of which is essentially motionless. Hang out there, then get spit out of it. Voila! You’ve succeeded in entering the past. But, current physics doesn’t believe this really to be feasible. But... if you’re millions of years more advanced than a human (like Superman possibly could be) he probably chose this route and they just showed us him doing his weird (and scientifically asinine) fast-travel-spin-the-earth-backward thing.
B. Find some place in space where there is zero to minimal gravity and hang out there for a while as still as possible. Again, not reasonable because the earth really ain’t big enough to create a gravitational well/space-time distortion that significantly would alter time as we perceive it.

Back to the Future:

There's a model that does work.
When you change the past, it creates two timelines, branching at that point. But they interfere with each other to some degree; so, for example, both branches have an old Biff returning to the future. Then one of them starts to fade out and disappear. The universe attempts to merge the two realities, mixing and matching bits from either of them to create the most stable timeline. It doesn't have to be consistent, and you can have a paradox because a traveller arrived from a future that no longer exists. The universe heals in a way that minimises total frag entropy; so it's not necessary for every character's timeline to make sense.

A guy can arrive from the future, change things, and then vanish because he doesn't "fit" into the new universe, while leaving behind all the changes that he made. To the people he met directly, it's like the Mandela effect turned up to 11. It's only when you get a major change that somebody actually needs to vanis; minor things just smooth themselves out and maybe people from each side of a small branch have slightly different memories of some events, but that's all.

So if you want to change the future, you just need to create a sequence of events that's vaguely plausible in conjunction with the future you know. Your changed future is the more stable / less entropic, so anything that doesn't fit with your changes fades away.

I'm not explaining well. The tabletop RPG Continuum does it a lot better (it invokes "sentient spacetime" as a way to explain why it's only changes on a human level that matter; not treading on a butterfly. And they do it in a way that really makes sense.) You can play out the whole BttF trilogy with their rules for time travel, and it all works. It just seems inconsistent in the films because the characters (and audience) aren't seeing the big picture.