We didn’t kill our grandfather
- Graham Hancock
- Uncategorized
- Oct 20, 2010
- Boing, DMT, guestblog, JFK, post, Stone Age, Time Machine
The most common objection to science ever developing any form of time travel is called “the grandfather paradox” — i.e. the ability to travel in time would mean, theoretically that you could kill your own ancestors, thus preventing your own birth. Indeed — so the argument goes — by altering any of the ingredients of the past, even by so much as the flutter of a butterfly’s wing, you would inevitably change the present. Since the present manifestly exists, and is as it is, then obviously time-travel cannot occur.
In a recent (July 2010) paper at arXiv.org, Seth Lloyd of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology notes that fiction has been grappling with these problems for far longer than science, but that even most fictional accounts, going at least as far back as the Mahabarata epic of ancient India, deal with travel into the future. “Perhaps because of the various paradoxes to which it gives rise, the concept of travel to the past is a more recent invention,” says Lloyd, pointing to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. “The contemporary notion of time travel, together with all its attendant paradoxes, did not come into being until H.G. Wells masterpiece The Time Machine, which is also the first book to propose an actual device that can be used to travel back and forward in time.”
To get around the grandfather paradox Lloyd and his co-authors suggest quantum teleportation and strict “post-selection” of what a time traveler could and could not do — i.e. killing your own grandfather would be ruled out from the post-selected options and if you did succeed in killing the person who you thought was your grandfather this would have to mean that he was not after all your grandfather and that your grandmother had perhaps had an illicit affair!
Another
recent paper (18 August 2010), published by Robert
Lanza MD in the Huffington Post, draws on the latest research
in quantum physics to go even further. We live in “a world of
illusions” Lanza suggests: “Physics tells us that objects exist
in a suspended state until observed when they collapse into
just one outcome. Paradoxically, whether events happened in the
past may not be determined until sometime in your future — and
may even depend on actions that you haven’t yet taken.”
In other words events in the past are in a suspended
state, with infinitely flexible outcomes, until they are
observed. Only then do they collapse into fixed and firm
historical “facts.” Lanza illustrates his point with reference
to the assassination of JFK: “There’s enough uncertainty that
it could be one person in one set of circumstances, or another
person in another. Although JFK was assassinated, you only
possess fragments of information about the event. But as you
investigate you collapse more and more reality…”
(Video
Link to trailer for Graham Hancock’s novel, Entangled.)
I follow weird research like this because time-travel
— specifically to the Stone Age around 24,000 years ago — is
a central element of Entangled: The Eater
of Souls, my first work of fiction. Unlike Jules
Verne, however, I do not propose a time-machine as the vehicle.
Rather my modern characters gain access to the remote past
during out-of-body experiences induced by the consumption of
psychoactive drugs such as DMT, psilocybin and Ayahuasca (see
my
previous essays here on Boing Boing).
At
stake is the fate of the Neanderthals, an extinct human species
and – through them – of mankind as a whole.
As I
reported in Friday’s essay we know that the last Neanderthals
died out around 24,000 years ago but we don’t yet know why this
happened. There are indications that our own anatomically
modern ancestors who co-existed with them may have wiped them
out — perhaps the first example of ethnic-cleansing in history
— but we don’t know for sure. In other words, the fate of the
Neanderthals has not yet been observed, is indeed surrounded by
even more uncertainty and even more “uncollapsed” reality than
the JFK story, and therefore may still be influenced by actions
we take now.
This is the central dilemma and jeopardy
of Entangled. In my story the Neanderthals
are highly-evolved spiritual beings, pure innocence and love.
Their goodness is a raw cosmic power that has attracted the
attentions of a terrible demon. If he can persuade our own
anatomically modern ancestors to exterminate them, then
the psychic charge he gains from their mass murder will allow
him to manifest physically in the twenty-first century and
weave the doom of all mankind. To prevent that my modern
characters must travel through time to confront the demon and
ensure that our ancestors do not make this terrible mistake.
As the latest in a long line of storytellers to
grapple with such problems it’s good to know that science fact
and science fiction have never been closer together. In the lab
as well as in novels we may yet hope to rewrite our own
past.