I’ll be Back... to the Future

Hi, and welcome to Studious. I’m your host, Stuart Byers. Each week on Studious, we try and parse out life’s greatest riddles. We’ll talk about topics of particular interest to me, and hopefully to you the listener as well. If not, consider this one of those great podcasts to fall asleep to.

This week on Studious, we’re going to explore the concept of time travel, particularly through the lens of the film narrative. As we previously discussed in our two-part PK Dick episode, some theorize that time doesn’t exist at all, or better put, that our linear concept of time might be illusory at best and that our discernment of how time actually works is forever tainted by our experiential relation to it.

Like our talk about free will and determinism, we will frequently be exploring the concept of causality in relation to time travel. This is probably of the greatest theoretical importance when we discuss the manipulation of time, for why would we even discuss this theoretical concept if our primary reason for traveling in time wasn’t to somehow change it. Seldom do people wish to travel in time for purely academic purposes. Archaeologists and historians wouldn’t benefit from an ability to time travel, they’d be put out of a job, or better put, the nature of their work would be radically transformed. They’d become less detectives and more observers. Any speculative acumen required for the job would be removed. The only deductive reasoning required would be in ascertaining the “when” and “what” to observe.

So, when we discuss causality in relation to time travel, we will cover a few key concepts like time paradoxes and the butterfly effect. The butterfly effect is fairly well known to everyone, but I’ll quickly summarize anyway:

The term "butterfly effect" was coined by Edward Lorenz, an American mathematician and meteorologist. Lorenz introduced the term during a presentation titled "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?" at the 1972 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

His concept is used to illustrate how small changes in initial conditions can have significant and far-reaching effects on a complex system over time. It is often associated with nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory, which entered our cultural lexicon with Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park: a film which depicts no real time travel, but instead examines the juxtaposition of species forever separated by time.

In the context of time travel and alternate histories, the Butterfly Effect suggests that even minor alterations to the past could result in major changes in the future. This concept implies that seemingly insignificant actions or events in the past may have amplified consequences as they ripple through time, potentially leading to significant differences in the future timeline.

The Butterfly Effect emphasizes the sensitivity of complex systems to initial conditions and highlights the challenges and uncertainties of predicting long-term outcomes. It suggests that even the smallest changes can cause unpredictable and amplified effects, making it difficult to control or predict the consequences of altering the past.

Our second major problem with altering time comes in the form of the logical paradox. Of these time paradoxes, the one people are perhaps the most familiar with is the Grandfather Paradox:

The Grandfather Paradox can be explained relatively simply by anecdote: A man travels back in time and inadvertently causes his grandfather’s death or affects time, so his grandparents never conceive. This is akin to Marty McFly cockblocking his old man, George before the infamous Enchantment Under the Sea dance. The paradox here creates a future where the time traveler is never conceived, and therefore cannot exist to go back in time to affect these events. There’s speculation that changes in time create subsequent alternate time streams or alternate universes, but we’ll get to that later.

All the other paradoxes follow a similar suit of interfering with causality, such as the Ontological Paradox: This paradox involves an object or information having no clear origin or creator because it is a result of time travel. It questions the concept of cause and effect, as something seems to exist without a logical explanation for its existence. Let’s go Back to the Future once again. Young Martin McFly is tasked with Barry Whiting his parents together with the sweet serenade of electric arpeggios. Replacing the band’s guitarist, he stumbles through a rendition of Earth Angel as he fades in and out of existence in a ploy for dramatic tension. His father comes through in the end, and finally courts Marty’s momma proper. Delving into his limited knowledge of golden oldies, Marty selects Chuck Berry’s Johnny Be Good to celebrate their union as sort of an encore performance, of which no one was asking for. In a bizarre twist of fate and astronomical coincidence, Marvin Berry (Chuck’s cousin) just happens to be the lead singer for this school formal set in pastoral Hill Valley, California. He proceeds to call his cousin Chuck on a land line and is fortunate enough to get ahold of him.

Here's where the ontological paradox happens: if Chuck Berry hears his own song before he writes it, he now no longer needs to create it himself. Sure, in that other reality he writes it, but in this one, he no longer is the author. Or consider Bill and Ted: would they be able to just travel into the future to listen to their song that unites humanity without having to write it themselves? The ontological paradox happens when an object or some information has no clear creator because its inception relies upon some future action affecting the past.

Another ontological paradox is the Bootstrap Paradox. Also known as a causal loop, this paradox involves an object or information being sent back in time and becoming its own cause. For example, Let's say a person named Englebert discovers a book called "Time Travel for Beginners" in a library. The book has no author listed and contains advanced knowledge of time travel technology. Intrigued, Englebert takes the book and travels back in time to meet his younger self. He gives the book to his past self, who eventually becomes the author of the book after studying its contents extensively.

Another paradox of causality is the Predestination Paradox. This paradox occurs when events in the past are determined or predestined by the time traveler's actions. In this scenario, the time traveler's actions in the past are what ultimately lead to the events that prompted their time travel in the first place, creating a loop without a clear origin or cause. This immediately reminds me of 12 Monkeys where our Protagonist, Bruce Willis is sent back in time to uncover the reasons behind a viral apocalypse. His character Cole’s actions in the past and the interactions he has with other characters lead to a loop where cause and effect become intertwined. The events that Cole tries to prevent end up being influenced or caused by his own actions, creating a closed loop with no clear beginning.

So, what is our real-world basis for time travel? When we look at Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, Published in 1905, it revolutionized our understanding of space and time. It introduced the concept of spacetime, where space and time are intertwined. One of the key ideas of this theory is that the laws of physics remain the same for all observers in uniform motion relative to each other. The theory also introduced the concept of time dilation, which states that time can pass differently for objects that are moving relative to each other. According to special relativity, as an object approaches the speed of light, time slows down relative to a stationary observer. This is when an astronaut enters an experimental vessel and travels round trip from the Earth to the stars at some elevated fraction of lightspeed. Though the astronaut is only in his ship traveling for a half hour, when he returns, he finds that time on Earth has passed 500 years. This is basically the scenario that lands Charlton Heston on that planet of damn, dirty apes.

Quick side note: we talked last week about Chimp Empire on Netflix. Having studied the behavior of our primate cousins, Planet of the Apes initially got their roles in simian society entirely wrong. The docile, pacifist scientists in Planet of the Apes are the chimpanzees. Aggressive Behavior observed by orangutans in the wild is far less, with Gorillas also being noticeably less aggressive compared to chimps. It’s easier to cast Gorillas as “the muscle” given their size. Now as the narrative continued post Heston, we find chimpanzee Caesar leading the revolution against its human oppressors, which incorporates chimpanzee organizational intellect and natural aggression to perceived enemies.

According to Einstein's theory of relativity, time moves at different rates depending on the strength of the gravitational field and the relative motion between observers. Near massive objects or in stronger gravitational fields, time appears to pass slower compared to a location with weaker gravitational influence.

For astronauts on the ISS, the effects of time dilation are relatively small but still measurable. Since the ISS orbits the Earth at a high speed, around 28,000 kilometers per hour (17,500 miles per hour), the relative velocity causes time to move slightly slower for the astronauts compared to people on the Earth's surface. This effect is known as "velocity time dilation."

The time dilation experienced by astronauts aboard the ISS is on the order of microseconds or milliseconds over extended periods. Although it is not noticeable on a day-to-day basis, precise measurements using atomic clocks aboard the ISS have confirmed these relativistic effects.

Einstein developed his general theory of relativity in 1915. It expanded on the ideas of special relativity by incorporating gravity. According to this theory, gravity is not a force acting at a distance but rather a curvature of spacetime caused by massive objects. In other words, massive objects like stars and planets warp the fabric of spacetime, and this curvature influences the motion of other objects nearby. The general theory of relativity predicted the existence of phenomena such as gravitational time dilation, where time runs slower in stronger gravitational fields.

This comes into play with event horizons and black holes. As an object approaches the huge gravitational pull of the event horizon or the point of no return, time passes normally for the object, however, time would pass slower in relation for an observer a considerable distance from this gravitational pull.

So, our practical understanding of time dilation all has to do with the linear travel of time from past to future, only changing the rates of which this time passes for the observer. In layman’s terms, time travel exists… only unidirectionally into the future. You and I are time travelers. We do it every waking moment of our lives.

Our stories of time travel that have to do with travel into the future are perhaps the most realistic, since this is what we have theoretically proven thus far. And if that is a one-way trip, it avoids the logical paradoxes found with travel to and from past and future respectively.

Many studies have polled people on their preference for whether they would travel to the future or the past. The data is widespread and inconclusive given factors such as cultural background and age. Curiosity of the unknown seems to be the engine for future travel, whereas historical interest and nostalgia fuel desires for adventures into the past. These preferences are more telling about the individual in question than a discernable, objective “correct” preference.

In fiction, there seems to be only really 2 major categories of time travel: the fixed timeline theory and dynamic timeline theory. When we think of dynamic in fiction, we simply are thinking about change. Dynamic characters are the ones that change throughout the narrative.

Let’s discuss The Fixed Timeline Theory aka, the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle: The Novikov self-consistency principle was proposed by physicist Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov in the 1980s. It aims to avoid paradoxes and contradictions that may arise from changes made through time travel. According to this theory, time travel is possible, but any actions taken by time travelers are already part of the established timeline and cannot change history. In other words, events in the past have already happened in a way that is consistent with the future. This theory suggests that time travelers are essentially "fulfilling" the events they traveled back in time to influence, without the possibility of altering the timeline or creating paradoxes. Any actions taken by the time traveler were always meant to happen and were predestined.

The Dynamic Timeline Theory aka :Multiverse Theory or Many-Worlds Interpretation proposes that time travel creates alternate timelines or parallel universes. According to this view, when a time traveler alters the past, they create a new branch of reality that exists alongside the original timeline. Essentially, any changes made in the past result in a separate timeline or universe, rather than modifying the traveler's own timeline. This theory allows for the possibility of altering events in the past without causing paradoxes, as the original timeline remains intact while new timelines are created.

Although H.G. Wells’ Time Machine is often referenced as the first novel about time travel, a short story, "The Clock That Went Backward” by Edward Page Mitchell predates it by 14 years.

However, if we examine temporal displacement as a narrative device, we have Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle in 1819. Here the central character falls asleep, only to reawaken Philip J. Fry style years into the future.

And only if that was the original story of temporal displacement… "The Tale of Urashima Taro" is often considered one of the earliest examples of a narrative featuring temporal displacement. While the exact origin and dating of the tale are not definitively known, it is believed to have been written down in the early 8th century in Japan. The story follows the protagonist, Urashima Taro, who saves a turtle and is rewarded by being taken to the underwater palace of the Dragon God. After what seems like a few days, Urashima Taro returns to the surface world only to discover that centuries have passed. That seems like one bummer of a reward.

The first film that is widely recognized as exploring the concept of time travel is "A Trip to the Moon" or in its native French: "Le Voyage dans la Lune", directed by Georges Méliès in 1902. While the primary focus of the film is an adventure to the moon rather than time travel per se, it contains a notable sequence where the main character's capsule is struck by a comet and subsequently falls back to Earth. In this sequence, the capsule is shown traveling backward in time, landing in an earlier era.

Clips from this seminal work have been used in media for the past century ad nauseum; it is also the primary inspiration for the video for Smashing Pumpkins’ Tonight, Tonight.

The late 50’s and early 60’s gives us Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone which features many episodes that use time travel as a plot device. Serling will also pen the screenplay adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes. 1963 is not only the year Boulle’s novel is launched, but it is also the year the longest running sci-fi show, Doctor Who debuts.

 In 1960, we get a film adaptation of Wells’ The Time Machine. 18 years later, it gets adapted as a movie of the week. A year after in 1979, Time After Time is released, which follows the exploits of author HG Wells using a time machine of his own design to follow Jack the Ripper to Swingin’, Seventies San Francisco.

Also of note, 1972 produced a film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, which features a World War II soldier who gets “unstuck from time” and experiences his life in a non-linear fashion.

The 80’s is where we see time travel really ramp up as a device, starting with 1980’s Somewhere in Time featuring super man, Christopher Reeves as the central protagonist. This movie is of particular note because it expands the plot device to the romance genre. For those unfamiliar, a man uses a period specific wardrobe, a totem a la Inception, and sheer force of will, to transport himself back to 1912.  This will redefine our notion of a long-distance love affair, and the tragedy of it will be mirrored years to come within the MCU and man out of time, Captain America.

Monty Python Alum, Terry Gilliam releases Time Bandits in 1981. It’s mirth and fatalistic tone will inform his later works, Brazil and 12 Monkeys. Time travel is dealt with from a fantastical standpoint, as opposed to the technological machinations we’ve grown accustomed to.

Our modern blueprint for the time travel saga begins with 2 films: James Cameron’s Terminator is released in October, 1984. The following summer, Spielberg and Robert Zemekis launch Back to the Future in July of 85.

With Terminator, you get this fixed time perspective. Michael Beign’s character is given a picture of Linda Hamilton when he is a young recruit of the resistance by leader, John Connor.

Now, it’s kinda weird to give Polaroids of your mom to your grunts, but I guess a little less if you assume they’re your future estranged, deceased, father? You know those evil machines aren’t giving everyone their Pornhub back with their Skynet. That photo is gonna ease the pain of a lot of lonely nights for that soldier.

And now the tale becomes fatalistic and deterministic. A man sends an underling back in time to ensure he’s conceived. How do the chickens and eggs work in this scenario? Regardless of the ontological paradox there, this fixed perspective relies on this destined view of time travel. John Connor was always going to send a man on a mission to save his mother, and that man would become his father. The story can’t even begin without our reliance on this key element.

If you remember the hero’s journey from our previous podcast, we have the belly of the beast, which is this pivotal moment in the tale where our hero is reborn. In The Terminator, we get this rebirth for both the hero and the machine, as they both need to enter this world naked, like we all did the day we were born. What a bizarre plot device, here. I still wonder if it was purposefully meant to be symbolic, or a goofy reason to get ol’ Arnie in biker leathers.

Much in the way these fixed perspective narratives seem fatalistic and bleak, the dynamic timeline tale seems whimsical by comparison. This multiple world interpretation is the perfect vehicle for the lighthearted, comedic tale we find with Robert Zemekis’ Back to the Future. It takes the concept of the grandfather paradox and makes it an integral plot point. Our protagonist isn’t shackled to a deterministic loop. Young Marty is free and has agency, to not only change his own life for the better, but his family’s as well through the advent of time travel.

Instead of a Merlin or Gandalf, our wizard that will transport our young hero through time is eccentric sage, Doctor Emmet Brown. The tale is epic, and almost Greek with its Oedipal nature. It also introduces a clear-cut theory of divergent timelines. The inadvertent changes a hero can make just by being a present bystander are illustrated from the moment Marty goes back in time, most notably in that in-joke, easter-egg moment where he runs over the pine tree escaping the farmhouse in the DeLorean, permanently changing the future Twin Pines Mall into the Lone Pine Mall upon his return.

This movie will pave the way for many others to consider all the ramifications and paradoxes of messing with the time stream. What is never answered in Back to the Future is what happens to the old divergent timelines? We can only assume that they disappear like Marty would have if he never got his folks back together. As a child, this always rubbed me the wrong way, particularly when they drop the recast Elizabeth Shue Jennifer on Marty’s Porch in the alternate Biff Vegas ’85. We are supposed to suspend our disbelief, which by the way has been thoroughly stretched up to this point, and just accept that the new changed timeline will replace the old once Marty gets the Sports Almanac back from Biff. And furthermore, that Jennifer will remain, unchanged. It’s like the magic trick where the magician pulls the tablecloth off the table and the place settings all remain. Maybe this would make more sense to PK Dick, since he thought all of time was overlapping on top of itself.

So particularly in Back to the Future II we get this idea introduced of how detrimental it would be to the timestreams and potential paradoxes by interacting with oneself. In the first movie, we see the potential for paradox by interacting with your bloodline through time. The second introduces this notion of interacting with oneself as potential for paradox, primarily I think, because of the biggest logical conundrum, and it may take a second to explain.

Let’s imagine a time traveler going into the future and confronting his future self. Since it is his future self, would the future version immediately have recall of this encounter? For the time traveler, this event hasn’t happened yet, and is all happening in real time. For the future version, he’s also from a timeline that existed before the time traveler traveled. Would any knowledge gained from the time traveler change his future in real time? We could only assume that this future is the result of his travels in time, and not a divergent time stream, or that the divergent stream happens around him in real time as he changes it.

We also now must assume that the round-trip is happening for the time traveler. For this future to become a possibility where the two versions interact, he must return to his own past.

This conundrum is quite often repeated throughout the entirety of Doctor Who, as former Doctors interact with the present Doctor on his many adventures. They cleverly write around the encounters as some sort of time amnesia, a biproduct of the paradoxical encounter. This way both Doctors have to put their minds together to solve a task, as opposed to the ontological paradox of one having the foresight to solve everything, since they would have previously lived through the encounter. These insights in problem solving would have no true author, since the information would just be borrowed from a never-ending loop of future doctors solving problems from encountering their future selves previously.

While we are examining this ontological paradox that hinges upon our time traveler performing a future act, in this case, returning to his own timeline, or for the Doctor, simply resuming his adventures through space-time, I want to speak briefly about the logical leap that is Bill and Ted.

In keeping with the success of the time traveling teen found in the BTTF series, a few years later, the world is exposed to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. We don’t just assume the inexperienced teen will get into some hijinks with time travel, with Bill and Ted, the bumbling duo will most assuredly get into trouble. It’s very Raymond Chandler how the pair err into success. Particularly with their absence of logic and deductive reasoning.

In particular, there is a scene where Bill and Ted are arrested and end up in Ted’s father’s police station. In order to get out of their handcuffs, the boys decide to later travel into the past after their history report is complete to drop of Ted’s Dad’s keys so they can free themselves presently. This all hinges upon their success with the history report, and one of the greatest foils to that report is their current incarceration. Their ability to pull off their escape hinges upon their escaping, so we are left again with this ontological paradox.

The only thing that saves this faulty logic is the deterministic view of the fixed timeline perspective. It is previously established in the film that Ted’s dad lost his keys earlier in the day, and now we know how he lost them, by future Bill and Ted making off with them for their escape now. So the fixed timeline perspective in many ways acts like a magic bullet, or in this case a magic bulletproof vest, saving our story from a barrage of paradoxes. Perhaps this should illustrate to our collective conscious that if we become too fatalistic, we surrender to giving up on trying to solve our ability to change our personal trajectories. Because at the end of the day, we need to believe in agency, because it is that lifeboat of hope in a vast and scary ocean of existence.

So, back to the Back to the Future… it is this Novikov self-consistency principle guiding self-interaction in time travel scenarios. This is what lands Jennifer on the Porch in Biff Vegas ’85. Her encounter with 2015 Jennifer makes the pair lose consciousness, presumably because it breaks the realities within their own minds. Doc and Marty must leave this Jennifer behind as they race back to 1955 to fix the timestream. Might I quickly add, that dumping off unconscious girlfriends on strangers’ porches probably some of the most reckless behavior performed by a PG protagonist. Mind you, Marty just broke into this house previously, through a young girl’s window, and was not received well by the shotgun wielding occupants.

Now there is this established paradox of encountering oneself out of time. It will become now a plot point for future time travel movies, in particular 1994’s Timecop, with the muscle from Brussels: Jean Claude Van Damme. In the film, we explore the concept of temporal integrity. Invoking some bizarre law of thermal dynamics, the film supposes that two objects of like matter cannot occupy the same space. So our villain, excellent character actor and director of NASA, Ron Silver meets his demise when he touches his future self and the two physically morph together into a grotesque human soup.

Now if you listened to our first podcast about the Ship of Theseus, you may take umbrage with the two Rons being of the same matter. Clearly after 20 years, the human body would change on a cellular level, especially in regard to degradation. I’m sure the writers probably weren’t expecting the youth of America to later scrutinize this paradox 3 decades later and were just happy to be penning a script for a wildly successful action star.

Another time travel vehicle of note in the 90’s is Freejack with Emilio Estevez, Rene Russo, Sir Anthony Hopkins, and Mick Jagger. In the film, we are introduced to this concept of body snatching perilously doomed individuals from the past. Wealthy magnate Hopkins is in love with Russo, who is forever haunted by the death of her previous boyfriend, who was an unfortunate fiery formula one fatality.

Since his death was televised, those in the future had a precise time and place to extract a body out of time and a cataclysmic event that wouldn’t leave much of a corpse behind. It is the perfect scenario for the aged Hopkins to take the body of Estevez to Frankenstein his own brain into, also transferring his wealth to his new meat vessel. He now has everything he needs to come a courtin’ the unsuspecting Russo. This plotline was later shamelessly parroted by the movie Self/less starring Ryan Reynolds and Ben Kingsly in 2015, where a wealthy industrialist wishes to transfer his consciousness into one of those good lookin’, infernal poors that don’t know how to appreciate their young bodies.

This is an interesting take on time travel and introduces the concept of the time heist… securing an object or artifact, in this case a human, for use in the future. Some would argue Bill and Ted already time heisted a group of historical figures to aide in their school presentation, but a crucial part of any heist is the planning, of which we saw very little from either Bill or Ted.

With a time-heist, we of course must worry about creating paradoxes by interfering with time, but we’ve now created an illusion of precision to our interference, somehow minimizing our ability to create grand paradoxes. And that’s just it, isn’t it? It’s an illusion, because almost always, the time heist will present a challenge in the form of a paradox or simply creating more problems for our protagonists at a later date.

One time heist that helped define our ideas about fun and fatalism is 2009’s Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel starring Chris O’Dowd of IT Crowd fame and House Bunny, Anna Farris. We get all this fun interplay with timeloops, and the heist element of fringe cults determined to assassinate great authors after completion of their best works. It also nods to Bill and Ted with this notion of some unlikely dipshits saving the entirety of humanity.

And speaking of timeloops, we also must acknowledge Looper with Joseph Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis. It would seem Bruce Willis was always doomed to be stuck in fatalistic loops after his performance in 12 Monkeys. In Looper, younger Bruce is tasked by a criminal syndicate to assassinate targets through time. For this assignment, he must assassinate his greatest foe, himself: the older, wiser version in the future. Another film of note that explores vicious timeloops is 2016’s Doctor Strange, where our titular character uses the Eye of Agamotto or better still, the time stone to imprison Dormammu in an infinite loop. Weirdly, it presupposes cosmic awareness for Dormammu, as the villain must be conscious that time is repeating itself, instead of being the same Dormammu at the beginning of each loop.

But the time heist really hits its stride with Marvel’s Endgame in 2019. There’s this Ocean’s 11 feel of getting the old team back together to pull off one big job. Here the Avengers must go back in time to steal the infinity stones before Thanos retrieves them, but not in a ploy to keep them from getting in the hands of Thanos. No, to preserve the timestream, our heroes are simply borrowing them to battle the all-powerful Thanos and to undo some of the cataclysmic events the totalitarian villain enacted.

But here, we are similarly presented with the Bill and Ted scenario. To avoid a paradox, our heroes must be successful in conquering Thanos in order to return the stones to their rightful place in time. With Bill and Ted, we have this fixed perspective and fatalistic approach to time travel, so we can forgive this ontological oversight. However, in Endgame, though they preach against divergent or dynamic timestreams a la Back to the Future, the entire Marvel Universe, both cinematic and canonical, hinge upon dynamic timestreams and multiple world theory; indeed, it is the very direction their subsequent narratives will take, with our introduction to the Time Variance Authority in Loki, as well as follow up tales Multiverse of Madness and Quantum Mania.

If that was a mouthful, or too much to process… long-story short: it’s sloppy writing. World building is an art, as we learned previously with PK Dick and how he builds universes. Sure, Dick wants his universes to fall apart, but I don’t think he wants his reader’s relationship to the material to fall apart in the process.

And don’t get me started again about Captain America ditchin’ everyone to play house. Sheesh. That was a tough pill to swallow.

Look the topic of time travel is huge, and pretty hard to sum up in a half hour podcast. I mean, I basically just breezed past Doctor Who, and that could very well be its own episode about time travel. So, don’t hate a player for passing over your favorite tales of adventure into time.

Speaking of time, it seems we’ve once again run out of it here on Studious… or have we? If you ever get your hands on a time machine, maybe you can go back in time to help improve this episode. Until then, I’ll see you next week. Thanks again, for listening to Studious.

(wait 5 seconds) play rewind sound effect

Speaking of time, it seems we’ve once again run out of it here on Studious… or have we? If you ever get your hands on a time machine, maybe you can go back in time to help improve this episode. Until then, I’ll see you next week. Thanks again, for listening to Studious.

(wait 5 seconds) play rewind sound effect

Speaking of time, it seems we’ve once again run out of it here on Studious… or have we? If you ever get your hands on a time machine, maybe you can go back in time to help improve this episode. Until then, I’ll see you next week. Thanks again, for listening to Studious.

Sorry guys, it seems we’re encountering one of those infernal time loops. I’ll get my crack team of engineers on it right away.

If you get an opportunity after the episode, please like, rate, review, and comment. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the episode or any logical fallacies you’ve discovered with time travel tales.

One last thing: can we bring back the Back to the Future ride to Universal Studios? No offence to you Simpson fans, but the animation simulation only results in invoking extreme vertigo and nausea.

I remember the first time I climbed into one of those Deloreans… it was pure magic. I thought it was the death of the roller coaster, all subsequent theme park rides would be simulators like that one. Star Tours was bogus, it barely moved. Everything else was a conveyor belt of some sort. With the exception of the Harry Potter Rides at Universal which seem to blend the conveyor belt with the motion simulator, the belt rides are novel at best, with minimal thrills and excitement. The only strong successor of the original Back to the Future ride at Universal is the Avatar ride at Disney World. Alright, I gotta ramble for real this time. See you next week on Studious.