KNOWLEDGE IS RELATIVE

Last year I wrote a little something about Back to the Future Day. People here in Australia were all very excited about it and celebrating Marty’s arrival from 1985, even though time-zones mean we're a day ahead or behind. But for most of us in Australia and the US, it was like he was arriving from the future because we have governments that seem hell-bent on returning us to the 1950's with all the economic mess and bad attitudes of 1985 to 2015 just too really make things even more unpleasant. More so for the US in the last year of their most recent 'Presidential' election.

  

It really makes no difference. Marty would arrive regardless of our timezone, but if you applied the logic used in that movie… well, things get hinky pretty quick. The flawed political and social attitudes and behaviours aside, there were so many things wrong with that movie it wasn’t funny, and yet the interaction between the characters was hilarious and the whole premise inspired an entire generation, albeit not enough. “Where’s my hover board?” and “where’s my floaty-Jetsons car?” appeared to be the most common of the responses to news that Marty and the Doc would be arriving, but since most of us can’t afford a ‘stupid’, ‘lame’, ‘primitive’ internal combustion land-car now it makes you wonder why that mattered.

But while there are brilliant minds at work on making those things a reality, and nerds everywhere speak of rumours concerning actual hover-type boards and Nike ‘self-tying’ shoes, there are also science-geeks waging a silent war over time travel and the inevitable spin-off debates regarding M-theory with all its fantastic (probably from the original meaning) tiny, microscopic strings or loops.

Admittedly, we should all be grateful that the vast majority of us know so little about those topics – and care even less – as well as for the fact that so many of those who do are safely locked away as a Brains Trust for some obscure Think Tank that isolates them from the rest of society in some shadowy government facility, or their mum’s basement. But for those of you who find yourself cornered by some tech who is supposed to be fixing your laptop, here’s the skinny.

Time, so we have been taught, is relative. According to your boss, it’s money. Your dad will often tell you it is “of the essence”, though he never says of what and so we can assume it’s probably vanilla. Money, as we all know, is power, but so too is knowledge. Therefore, logic dictates that time, money, knowledge, of the essence (probably vanilla), power and your relatives are all the same thing: a pain in the arse.

Once you get your head around that little slice of insanity, you can focus on the actual debate. Some claim that you cannot change the past and others point out the Grandfather Paradox to disprove that and support the whole parallel time-lines slash alternate realities theory.

For those of you who don’t know what the Grandfather Paradox is, be grateful. It suggests that if you go back in time and meet your grandfather, you will be so disillusioned by the fact that he was as monumentally stupid as you were as a young person you would kill yourself in a fit of depression and, no, wait, that’s not right. Anyway, the whole thing gets kind of creepy and has something to do with you fornicating with your own grandmother and causing yourself to be not born or become inbred or some other weird crap that explains how society fell apart and how so many politicians managed to get themselves elected. Wait, that doesn't sound right either, although it would explain a lot of things. 

Anyway, Back to the Future is the simplified version of The ‘WTF was that all about’ Matrix series that seems like a lot of fun on the surface (assuming you managed to get your fat-fingered weird looking hands on some medicinal grade Mary Jane or licked the smiley face sticker you found in a box of trinkets your parents saved from the 60's) but is filled with inconsistencies which can end in Online flame wars that result in as much green-on-blue, red-on-purple, black-on-white, red-neck-on-pink-or-rainbow collateral damage as blue-on-red intended targets.

Basically, it comes down to this. If Marty goes back in time and messes with the past, then the future changes. As the Doc explains, it creates a point where time skews off course and creates a parallel timeline where things are different. Case-in-point, he comes back and his original white-trash family is gone and replaced with a wealthy, successful one that allows the ‘White Privilege’ allegations to be applicable rather than offensive (although it’s a little unclear if impoverished white folk are allowed to be offended by these kinds of generalised, bigoted stereotypes because them being offended might somehow be racist). He’s fine with this, by the way, because he gets a big-arse 4x4 from the arrangement and Biff gets what he should have had coming. Hoo-rah!

But then everything goes to hell as future Biff car-jacks the Delorean and screws with the time-line in a way that changes everyone’s future. He’s able to do this because the Doc and Marty are busy messing with the future to change it but screw everything up by deciding that chicks are – apparently – unable to handle the complexities of time-travel and anathema to the timeline on account of they ask too many questions and won't shut-up. When they return to the past or present (it’s kind of confusing, it’s like going somewhere and ‘there’ becomes ‘here’, so we’ll just say 1985), and dump his ‘mind-altered’ gf on the porch of a house where she lives in their 1985 in the past, they have no idea that it may not actually be her home anymore since old Biff changed the timeline and it’s an alternate 1985.  

Aside from the fact that it becomes abundantly clear that the ‘don’t ask questions’ and ‘don’t listen to females’ approach to getting stuff done used by males is actually the problem here, let’s focus on the issues. If they – any of them – go back in time and mess with it to the point that the Doc is committed or otherwise doesn’t create the time machine or actually use the time machine to go into the future with Marty, then nobody can go back to mess with time in the first place. 

Then there’s the paradox issue. If they ditch Marty’s gf in a parallel timeline, then reset the timeline to what it’s meant to be, then involuntary narcolepsy gf doesn’t magically reappear in the reset timeline; an alternate gf is created in it and the marooned one remains in alternate even worse shit-hole 1985. Bummer. Still, Marty and the Doc don’t appear to get this (all the more reason they should stay the hell out of the timeline), so it’s all good. Not so much for original gf.

Oh, what? Seriously, someone just said “spoiler alert”?! Dude, it’s been thirty years! If you haven’t watched it by now then that’s on you. Besides, if you got this far into what I’ve written, you know I’m writing about the movie so you’re clearly too stupid to even understand the basics of the movie and will get so confused by the first fifteen minutes you’ll probably suffer a spontaneous nose-bleed and pass out.

Anyway, back to the movie and complexities of time-travel. This is the fun bit. If anybody has watched the Red versus Blue Halo series, they will get most of what I’m about to say. If you haven’t seen it, you really need to do that as soon as possible. Oh, spoiler alert. I’m about to give away some of the content. As you will discover a couple of series into Red versus Blue, Church learnss that not only was it him all along that’s the ‘team-killing fugtard’, and not his dullard associate Caboose, but that the past is set and nothing you do there changes anything because it has already happened and, chances are, all the horrible stuff that happened is your own fault.

For example, if you go back and gank your grandad and shack-up with your grandma, then not only are you a tool but a seriously sick puppy. More to the point, you’re either your own grandfather or your grandma had a less rigid approach to moral values that you thought and spent a lot of time with men who shared the same attitudes, any one of which is probably your real grandad. The point is, no matter what you do, or how much you mess with the past, it has already happened and what you believe was real based on what you were told is often a load of bull. Heads up, that’s generally the way it goes anyway.

You’re like a skipping stone that bounces across the water in a real random pattern from how others perceive time, but a straight line for you. The future, as a result, is also set. Whatever is going to happen, will, and did, because it is the past to those who have already experienced it, including you if you’re stupid enough to skip ahead and mess with it.

It’s one of those science things. Everyone has faith in the things they think are correct. Some folk believe the Out of Africa theory taught in schools is absolute fact, but others insist it is wrong and the Multi-regional theory is right. How do they know? Were they there at the time? Such hubris. A time-machine might be useful there. According to another theory, you cannot travel faster than the speed of light because even if you run the length of a spaceship travelling at that speed, the vehicle will automatically slow to accommodate this.

Weird yet? It gets better. A black hole is not actually a hole at all, but something so large and so massively heavy it collapses under its own mass to become something so dense and tiny it occupies no space at all but continues to suck, like the people that cancelled Firefly. This spawns all manner of stupid math created for the express purpose of proving the insanity of this kind of illogical theory. Unlike the light speed theory, there’s no magical brake pedal to avoid giving geeks tenure and billions of dollars to build potentially universe destroying things in order to study wild, insane theories that nobody will ever conclusively prove, few will (at least claim to) understand, and the majority of us won’t care about.

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” a scientist once said. Another claimed, according to the math, that there was a parallel universe out there where we are all made of spaghetti. But nowhere do these claims provide any room for a God, of any type. Indeed, the very notion the universe could be created in six days is dismissed as superstition and mass insanity. Science, we are told, proves the Big Bang theory, in which it all occurred in the space of 30 seconds by sheer happenstance. Fanatics from that faction want religion removed from schools and society altogether, providing ample evidence that religion isn't the only social construct afflicted by extremism.

Again, there is no way to conclusively prove or disprove any of it. None of us was there. Science is a very weird place that is comprised of multiple (sometimes conflicting) realities all existing in the head of every individual who (like everyone else) creates a belief system to interpret and function in the world, in which they place absolute faith that the reality they experience, and believe in is right, and everyone who disagrees with their personal insanity is wrong. What has this got to do with Back to the Future? Everything, nothing, and more importantly, who friggin’ cares?!

Here’s the simple facts. There could never have been an ‘alternate’ 1985. Marty couldn’t have changed the past to create a future where he was an over-privileged douche. What happened in the past was set in stone, otherwise he’d have been raised by his obnoxious ‘alternate reality’ parents. He wasn’t. It’s the same reason why he didn’t return from the past to 1985 to find the ‘alternate reality’ where Biff is an evil overlord who made his fortune using the gambling almanac from the future. His future-self stopped Biff from ever doing this in the past after future-Biff went back in time to give the almanac to past-young Biff. 

Assuming the Doc was able to build a time-machine at all, and Marty went back in time, it would have made no difference to his future conception and mother being married to the man he was raised to believe was his father. He could billy his mother in the past with no repercussions other than serious mental health issues because, no matter what he did, she ended up with George. The story about how George and Marty’s mother met would be reduced to a fabrication to cover-up the unsavoury details of his mother’s younger years, fornicating willy-nilly with random idiots. Spolier alert: it happens more often than you would think, so free advice, don't pressure people to answer questions if you're likely to be unhappy with the answers.

It’s not hard to believe given she seemed happy to bounce with some guy she didn’t know that her father had hit with a car and turned out to be her own son, and the excuse that she didn’t know doesn’t really fly given she never bothered to ask anything about him. Seriously, that chick was a classic example of folks who make bad decisions that lead to a lifetime of regrets and misery impacting on them and the children they conceived, often as teenagers. Regardless of circumstance, it wouldn’t matter what Marty did. His mother and father (whoever he was) obviously hooked up, otherwise he couldn’t have gone back in time to get his mother all hot, bothered and up for it in the first place.

Then there’s Biff. Old Biff from the future (2015) could never have car-jacked the Delorean and gone back in time with the almanac to give young Biff in the past (1955) if the alternate 1985 came to pass. The Doc wouldn’t have made the time-machine, Marty would not have gone back into the past or future, and old Biff (2015) could not have gone back into the past to give young Biff the almanac. Old Biff would certainly not have returned to the timeline where he took the Delorean because he would have returned to an alternate 2015, stranding Marty and the Doc. Whoops. Clearly, if old Biff did go back then young Biff screwed up or Marty stopped him.

It was a movie about the science fiction of time travel that has not yet been made into science fact and probably never will. If it ever is, it won’t matter because it will have zero impact on any of us one way or another, and even if it did, we’d never know because the timeline wouldn’t change and our past remains a constant. Plus, every one of us exists in our own little - in some cases insulated from - reality bubble. It’s what allows some of us to just watch the movie, have a laugh, and not think things through. Like voting into office our next Plutocratic Fascists.

More importantly, if you’re anything like me, you'll just be grateful your half-wit relatives can’t go back in time and mess with your grandparents because what they did in the past – from decades ago to just the last few years – was bad enough, and no matter what you try to do to change things, it won’t matter. Nothing will change. We will still be disappointed with Star Wars Episodes 1 to 3, Samsung will still try to incinerate our homes and access pass to the gene-pool, and that over-sexed nutjob Trump will still run for President of the (formerly) US.

The point of this blog entry is, obviously, about time. We only get to move forward. We don’t get to go back. We can’t jump forward and skip over things to see how it all works out so we can make changes to avoid any mess we may cause. If we insist on trying, we will find the world has moved on without us, and we are lost, alone, floating in space with sod-all chance of getting traction to reach 88 miles and extricate ourselves. We must make smart choices in the moment. We must learn from our mistakes, live with them, and do our best to make amends while we still have time, because in space… nobody can hear you scream.

The last picture in this blog post is a metaphor for the US election. The US was once a beacon of hope and the utopian ideal of modern Western Civilization with its ideological-foundations of freedom, equality, justice, and liberty, and by default meritocracy, accountability and democracy. All that came to an end with Trump's election. That former super-power has become an easily avoidable car wreck that was caused by individuals with serious intellectual and mental health problems and it will leave those at fault not only covered in the shit mess they created, but will continue to impact on future generations for decades to come. That one picture really proves my point rather well. You can't go back in time to change the past, so think before you act like a tool, and get it right the first time, because you only get one shot.

Note: This blog entry was originally published on the 14^th of September 2016 under a different blog post I’d been making but seemed more appropriate added to this one due to the nature of the points it raised about flawed socio-cultural attitudes.