Ever since HG Wells' The Time Machine, we have been fascinated with the idea of using technology to manipulate our sense of time. Like clocks and cogwheels churning forward, or Don Quixote whincing at windmill billows spining over hillocks, our sense of time is determined largely by the progress of events. Or, of energy expended. Like a flame consuming a matchstick. Or, on a cosmic scale, of stellar energy fizzling out in supernova and creating new forms of matter from its debris. While the most speculative forms of physics and cosmology can hypothesize what the nature of Time is, our own human experience and common sense will tell you that Time is just the sequence of matter deteriorating. Consider this proposition: before the Big Bang, before this current material cosmos existed, there was no "Time". Even in the earliest micro-moments after the Big Bang, the laws of Physics were so condensed that the current state of matter as we know it did not yet form. When matter did coalesce and expand, immediate the state of energy deterioration - or transformation - began, and the Four Forces began to exert its formulaic influence over the cosmos. Matter is transformed into energy and energy is constantly expended and the sequence of transformation is what "creates" Time. Time is observed as velocity, as acceleration, as consumption and explosion, as evolution and deterioration. And even is what was aflame is extinguished and rekindled, the new flame may resemble what was previously observed, but it is a new phenonmena, similar to what may be witnessed in a previous moment but it is in essence, not the same flame. This is what happens even if science were to "reverse" a material event by recreating the same material substance eg. destroy matter and reconstruct it: the new material may resemble the atomic structure of what was destroyed, but in essence, it is not the same as what preceded the destruction event.
So, I postulate that Time Travel is purely fantasy. And rightly so: the only universe where Time Travel backwards has ever occured yet is just past the "Writers' Block", the familiar old lame avenue where fiction writers and cliched Hollywood screenwriters have re-visited too frequently. In STAR TREK, the new writers wanted to stay within the established mythology and create a whole new timeline of events from the very beginning of James T Kirk and his history with the USS Enterprise NGC-1701. For the JJ Abrams 2009 version, they have old Spock (now lamely called Spock Prime) return to a pre-Borg/post-The First Contact universe and streak off a new series of events that will re-write histories for the Enterprise crew. The same unimaginative treatment was saved for Terminator Salvation. Ah, with Christian Bale (post-re-imagined Batman of course and as well). It is as if it was important for the studio or producers to try and retain the interest and support of the franchise fandom. I think that most of the people who fancied the Austrian muscleman as the Terminator or cute-faced Nick Stahl as the young John Connor (dead-ringer for American Idol Kris Allen, you say?) are a generation removed from today's Blu-ray audiences. Even the robot effects of T3 look phoney by today's EFX standards. But whether the re-shaped storyline of the 2009 Terminator will be better than a Transformer-meets-Alien format will depend on whether audiences just want action and explosions per second, versus what was originally a morality tale about nuclear holocaust and an over dependence on computer networks. Both have been neutralised as threats in a post 1980s world: comets came and went as fashionable catasphrophes and gay marriages are more talked about than tsunamis. It is time for another plotline in popular culture: perhaps the next new threat even after Da Vinci or Angels & Demons is no longer the old religion but common sense.
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