Introducing the Time Travel APOCALYPSE | Unveiled

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Understanding the Time Travel Apocalypse</h4>

What happens when the end of time… is time itself? Is the ticking nature of this reality… also its fatal flaw? And, how many mind-bending knots can one theory tie itself in… before the end of the world might even be a kindness?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re taking a closer look at the time travel apocalypse.

The ability to move through time runs to the core of so many great science fiction storylines. It’s a superpower, even if those that wield it often aren’t your stereotypical, cape-wearing, world-saving hero kinds of people. The time traveler often has to go under the radar. Quiet and unnoticed in whichever time they’re infiltrating, so as not to trigger some sort of existential collapse should anyone realize who they are. It’s a delicate business with potentially dire consequences… all of which serves to ramp up the tension in all the best sci-fi examples.

Time travelers in the real world, however, are seemingly not so careful. Or, at least, there are many who have clearly chosen to break rank. Multiple times in just the last few years, time travel claimants have made headlines the world over by predicting armageddon. In 2022, word spread online of a traveler known as “Edward” who claimed to have taken part in an experiment in 2004. At that time, he was working in LA, but via the experiment he was transported to the year 5,000… where he snapped a photo of the future LA, which Edward claims is entirely underwater. Meanwhile, and again in 2022, a series of time travel warnings were posted on TikTok - including reported dates in that year when massive, world changing events should’ve happened, such as the sudden disappearance of two million people, and the sudden emergence of another group of nightmare creatures. 

Ultimately, the TikTok prophecies proved incorrect. But, more broadly, a genuine time travel apocalypse is about more than just the testimony of individual people. All too often, those can be easily discredited. But the mechanics and plausibility of time travel is something that even mainstream science is directly interested in. To a point, we need to understand the subtle workings of time in order to maintain some quite mundane things of the modern world, like GPS systems, satellite networks, and all types of space travel. We know that time is relative, and that it runs differently on Earth (in our frame of reference) compared to how it would under essentially any other conditions in the universe. In this way, you might say that time is actually unknowable, and it’s in its many gray areas that doomsday theories can take shape. 

Firstly, let’s imagine that there’s only one timeline; this one. Nowadays, this idea has been severely challenged, thanks to the development of various “many worlds” and multiverse models of reality - and we’ll move to those shortly. But, for now we can still imagine the universe as just one, unending, unbroken and complete thing. How does the time travel apocalypse unfold? All we need to do is consider one of the most popular paradoxes, but if it were to really get out of hand.

A bootstrap paradox, otherwise known as an information paradox, is where information is moved between the present, past and future so that, actually, it can never exist outside of that loop. But it can also never be taken away, either. For example, imagine that you are given a book as a child by an adult. You then live your whole life with that book until you, as an adult, travel back in time and give that book back to the child that will grow up to become the adult who gives the book to you. There’s no breaking that cycle. The book exists in perpetuity. And yet, it only exists because it’s being constantly passed around between the two people in the loop.

Now imagine, though, that written inside that book there’s something very, very bad. As we learnt in a previous video, Professor Nick Bostrom of the Future of Humanity Institute has formulated the Vulnerable World Hypothesis to demonstrate just how, well, vulnerable, we really are. Bostrom talks of so-called black ball technologies, which are things that - if they are invented - will trigger the end of the world. The example he spends most time on is easy-to-make nuclear bombs, but really a black ball technology could be anything. It could be a genetically engineered, one hundred percent death rate virus that’s easily and instantly spread. Or a machine designed solely to attract asteroids from space, which turns Earth into a cosmic punching bag. Or a self-replicating AI that will always, always grow to hate humanity so much that it just has to kill us all off. You… get the picture. If that kind of technology - if that kind of information - were to exist, then you’d seriously hope that it would somehow remain hidden and unknown. Throw it into the bootstrap paradox, however, and not only would the cat be out of the bag… but it would be inescapably released in probably exactly the same way, time and time and time again. This is the end of the world, but on repeat. It’s a record that skips and skips and skips, but it’s impossible to turn it off.

In some ways it taps into a block universe way of thinking, otherwise known as eternalism. This is a philosophy of time in which all moments are presented as existing as one. The past, present and future are all equally real, all equally happening, within the wider 4D block that is reality itself. On the tamer end of the scale, this means that the moment when you pressed play on this video exists (still) alongside the moment right now, and the moment when this video will end. Nothing moves through time as we might typically understand it. It’s more like everything just pulsates through spacetime, reconfiguring and reconfiguring in ways that it was always supposed to do. The bootstrap paradox is a little different, though, because it specifies this feeling of inescapability. And, in this case, the mechanism for the end of the world is what’s inescapable. If true, and if the right conditions formed, we could say then that the Apocalypse was, is and always will be nigh… because it’s essentially baked into the fabric of time itself. 

Unsurprisingly, the picture changes (quite a lot) when we add the potential for multiple universes into the equation. Really, it’s little wonder that the multiverse has become such a popular theme in contemporary science fiction writing, because it seemingly solves so many of the problems that time travel throws up. Hugh Everett’s hugely influential Many-worlds Interpretation may have been formulated as far back as the 1950s, but its repercussions are still being explored. It views reality through its smallest parts, and suggests that for every single quantum event… all possible quantum outcomes do take place. The theory allows for this by proposing that reality splits whenever a decision is made or a chance occurrence unfolds. Time is then viewed as something like an infinitely branching tree, sprouting more and more branches with every passing second. 

On a larger scale, this might be shown as the differences that could happen if you apply for two jobs, before choosing one over the other. At the point that you make that decision, your reality splits, two separate versions of you exist along two separate timelines, and their lives play out differently (perhaps very differently) as a result. But the Many-worlds can also be shown on smaller scales, such as the different timelines created when you choose to turn left or right at a junction. Or the ones created when you choose to wear red or blue. Sit or stand. Blink twice or blink once. In theory, there’s really no limit to how particular you could go… with every single alternate path simply branching out from the one you’re on now. 

So, how does the apocalypse come into play? The Many-worlds Interpretation seemingly solves the bootstrap paradox, because it allows for an infinite number of “try agains”. The never-ending loops of self-fulfilling information now can be escaped from, because they’ll only ever exist on some (not all) of any one person’s timelines. And that should make us feel quite a lot safer. No longer could we one day become doomed by the wrong information being passed back and forth, causing us all to die over and over again. However, while you could view the multiverse as a kind of existential safety in numbers… it also implies that no one timeline is particularly special. No matter how important you think you are right now, there are actually an infinite number of yous, spiraling off all around this present moment. An infinite number of your friends and loved ones, too. Of the towns and cities that you know. Of the planet that you live on. And so, if a black ball technology is ever introduced… if it ever does become possible to drop just a little bit of poison into one slither of reality… then why not into this one? In the multiverse, it’s not like that one action would even be noticed, in amongst all the other endless variations. And that’s… pretty scary.

On the one hand, with the bootstrap paradox (and the possibilities it could bring) you have what you might even now term the traditional time travel apocalypse. On the other, with the eternal mass of the multiverse to get lost in, it really is the case that nothing’s sacred anymore. Not even your own time as you think you’re experiencing it.