Hey everybody. Before I get too involved in the blog post (which, I mean, I already have. I'm about two paragraphs down right now, but I wanted to come up to give you an important message from the future, which is somewhat appropriate for reasons that may become apparent if you continue reading, which you should not do if you do not meet the criteria that I will be setting out shortly), I want to say that there may be some spoilers below. Specifically, there will be spoilers for Interstellar, which is a pretty good movie. You should see it if you get a chance, if only for the visuals. However, if you have not seen it yet and are planning to do so and would prefer to not have things spoiled for you, please stop reading after the Indiana Jones gif below. I know it doesn't really look like Indiana Jones, but that just shows that you haven't seen Raiders of the Lost Ark and really have no business saying what does and does not look like Indiana Jones.
It has been a whirlwind. So, to start- the fair was wonderful. Despite the hour and change of traffic (which I'm sure could lead to a joke about how South Carolina doesn't have anything better to do than go to the Coastal Carolina Fair ha ha you're so hip and edgy, because South Carolina (or the South in general) is such a novel target of comedy and wow did you write for Seinfeld? Maybe Friends? You should. Hey, you could write an episode called "The One Where Charleston Is The Number Two Travel City In The World According to Condé Nast." Or you could just fuck off, because fairs are wonderful and, as has been pointed out previously, a veritable smorgasbord), there were crafts (including a painting of Dick Grayson and Jason Todd that won first place, indicating that comic books are becoming part of the artistic pantheon, as well they should (aside from Chuck Austen's run on X-Men which, despite having Havok, who is woefully underused, was awful), as well as a 5-year old's "more interesting" newspaper, which apparently consists of coloring an ad page with blue and orange crayons), there were animals (such as New Zealand white rabbits, which we use in the lab, so that was interesting), and there was food. God, was there food. Yes, there was a steak sandwich, which was okay, but mostly, there was the Sampler Combo from the fried goods... stand? Trailer? Van? I don't know. Whichever noun you prefer to use, it was amazing. There were two: fried cheesecakes (cheesecake batter, but deep fried), fried cookie doughs (chocolate chip cookie dough, but deep fried), fried brownie bites (brownie batter, but deep fried), and fried Oreos (Oreos, but deep fried). I'm... I still don't know which was the best. My pancreas still hates me and is currently in unofficial diplomatic talks with my arteries to foment rebellion throughout my body. It was still totally worth it.
Today, I went with The Lady to a local plantation, where there was free admission for county residents, which I guess is somewhat off? I mean, plantations are a big part of history in the South, which is not great, but they are also very pretty and do a decent job of maintaining some of the history (even if they don't acknowledge some of the worst parts, because then how would you get weddings to rent the places out for exorbitant prices?). Anyhoo, it was nice, and we got to see some animals, because there's a quasi-petting zoo. You know, free roaming chickens and ducks and peacocks and deer, which I guess are really pretty out of the ordinary for petting zoos? I haven't been to one in about 10 to 15 years (what with serving a dime for straight up shanking someone who wouldn't let me share my fruit cup), so my standards for petting zoos are a bit warped.
Anyhoo, after that, we saw Interstellar with a group of friends. It was very good, as all Christopher Nolan movies are, and the visuals are astounding. Go see it in IMAX, and bring earplugs, because our theater was shaking. Seriously. Hans Zimmer found an organ. If you're still reading, just go ahead and find tracks from the soundtrack on Youtube, because it's phenomenal. Of course, if you're heeding any of these warnings, you have ignored my previous warning about spoilers, and you should really stop reading about now. No, this won't spoil everything, but it will spoil some rather important plot points (even if they're pretty easy to figure out, honestly).
You're still reading. Stop that.
Okay, now that they're all gone, let's talk about time travel. Yep. Interstellar has time travels. Hope that was worth spoiling the movie for yourself. Good work. At the beginning of the movie, Murphy (the daughter who is later played by Jessica Chastain and Ellen Burstyn) is talking about a ghost who is knocking things off of bookshelves. The ghost leads to the plot of the whole movie, and we find out that something has been using gravity to send messages to people at the time of the movie to lead them to the wormhole that takes them to the distant planets. At the end, holy shit, it was Matthew McConaughey the whole time, because future fifth dimensional people (maybe) set this whole thing up as a stable time loop. I know this sounds like a brag (because it somewhat is), but I figured that out when they mentioned that the ghost sent them to the NASA headquarters, because that just made sense, you know? Stable time loop, it's a pretty well established trope, having seen play in Lost, Superman: Red Son, Futurama, The Terminator (well, sorta), Doctor Who, Bill and Ted, and Harry frickin' Potter. Yeah, the movie leaves questions at the end, but the time loop, I felt, was pretty cut and dry.
Then I went to trivia with the folks with whom I watched the movie. I guess I think about time travel WAY more than average people (making me wonder if I'm making efficient use of my time), because two people (who are, of course, wonderful and awesome) were contesting that it made no sense. Their point was that it made no sense that future people would be able to generate the conditions necessary to set forth the plot of the movie without the events of the movie already having happened, to which I say, yes. Yes. That is what happened. The events of the movie happened, being caused by the interference of fifth dimensional beings, at a point in time before our perception of the generation of such fifth dimensional beings which was in turn caused by the prior interference of said fifth dimensional beings.
Despite my potentially overly verbose wording, this makes sense. The events that led to leaving Earth and the survival of the human race are of pretty substantial note, even in the lifetimes of the effectors of such events. As a result, it is not unreasonable to assume that these events would be well recorded by historians and biographers, leaving a substantial paper trail of what exactly happened. This paper trail, then, provides a blueprint for the future, fifth dimensional beings to do what they need to do to generate the past necessary.
BUT! That doesn't even have to be the explanation. That's a long, overly complicated plan with way too many moving parts (maybe) to be feasible. That's because the plan is being explained and perceived by third dimensional beings (namely, us). We perceive time as being linear and, more importantly, as a one way street. You can't go back, you can't stop and look for a while at what exactly happened at the moment something occurs, because that moment has past. Everything is the past. The video I'm linking here is a pretty decent explanation (as far as I'm aware, having abandoned physics basically as soon as matrices started rearing their ugly, square, inverse generating heads) of how dimensions beyond the third one would work.
From what I've gleaned from the video above (again, not being a physicist, so feel free to correct me), once you're fifth dimensional, you're free to travel throughout a given timeline and affect outcomes at earlier points. You can't just hop between them, though, because that would be sixth dimensional space.
So, from our perspective, it's just a stable time loop. At Year X, fifth dimensional beings set up a wormhole, which is discovered at Year Y. At Year Z, humanity moves on from Earth (due to earlier exploration efforts using the aforementioned wormhole), leading to its continued survival and (possible) evolution to fifth-dimensional beings at Year A. For fifth dimensional beings, though, it's basically, "Okay, I need to go to Wormhole Mart and pick up Matthew McConaughey by the black hole and let him do his thing. Why don't I do the latter and the former?" Yeah, it's hard to write that without temporal descriptors, because we don't think that way. They would be able to.
What's more, even if I'm wrong about the historical relevance hypothesis (the thing from three paragraphs above), then all it takes is for two fifth-dimensional beings to meet at Year X (wormhole day). Both started in our universe and observed previous moments in time, but one went ahead to see what would happen if the wormhole wasn't set up (or if any number of other events hadn't occurred). Things go bad (because, well, we'll assume that things go bad without those events) and lead to a lack of fifth-dimensional beings. That doesn't matter, because there's at least the one who saw it who can go back to Year X and tell others/ensure the wormhole (and/or other necessary events) happen to make certain that things go as planned.
I may think too much about time travel, but because this is Chris Nolan, I'd say I'm thinking just enough about time travel.
It has been a whirlwind. So, to start- the fair was wonderful. Despite the hour and change of traffic (which I'm sure could lead to a joke about how South Carolina doesn't have anything better to do than go to the Coastal Carolina Fair ha ha you're so hip and edgy, because South Carolina (or the South in general) is such a novel target of comedy and wow did you write for Seinfeld? Maybe Friends? You should. Hey, you could write an episode called "The One Where Charleston Is The Number Two Travel City In The World According to Condé Nast." Or you could just fuck off, because fairs are wonderful and, as has been pointed out previously, a veritable smorgasbord), there were crafts (including a painting of Dick Grayson and Jason Todd that won first place, indicating that comic books are becoming part of the artistic pantheon, as well they should (aside from Chuck Austen's run on X-Men which, despite having Havok, who is woefully underused, was awful), as well as a 5-year old's "more interesting" newspaper, which apparently consists of coloring an ad page with blue and orange crayons), there were animals (such as New Zealand white rabbits, which we use in the lab, so that was interesting), and there was food. God, was there food. Yes, there was a steak sandwich, which was okay, but mostly, there was the Sampler Combo from the fried goods... stand? Trailer? Van? I don't know. Whichever noun you prefer to use, it was amazing. There were two: fried cheesecakes (cheesecake batter, but deep fried), fried cookie doughs (chocolate chip cookie dough, but deep fried), fried brownie bites (brownie batter, but deep fried), and fried Oreos (Oreos, but deep fried). I'm... I still don't know which was the best. My pancreas still hates me and is currently in unofficial diplomatic talks with my arteries to foment rebellion throughout my body. It was still totally worth it.
 |
| They might try to enlist my oh who are we kidding, I just wanted to put this gif in here. |
Today, I went with The Lady to a local plantation, where there was free admission for county residents, which I guess is somewhat off? I mean, plantations are a big part of history in the South, which is not great, but they are also very pretty and do a decent job of maintaining some of the history (even if they don't acknowledge some of the worst parts, because then how would you get weddings to rent the places out for exorbitant prices?). Anyhoo, it was nice, and we got to see some animals, because there's a quasi-petting zoo. You know, free roaming chickens and ducks and peacocks and deer, which I guess are really pretty out of the ordinary for petting zoos? I haven't been to one in about 10 to 15 years (what with serving a dime for straight up shanking someone who wouldn't let me share my fruit cup), so my standards for petting zoos are a bit warped.
Anyhoo, after that, we saw Interstellar with a group of friends. It was very good, as all Christopher Nolan movies are, and the visuals are astounding. Go see it in IMAX, and bring earplugs, because our theater was shaking. Seriously. Hans Zimmer found an organ. If you're still reading, just go ahead and find tracks from the soundtrack on Youtube, because it's phenomenal. Of course, if you're heeding any of these warnings, you have ignored my previous warning about spoilers, and you should really stop reading about now. No, this won't spoil everything, but it will spoil some rather important plot points (even if they're pretty easy to figure out, honestly).
You're still reading. Stop that.
Okay, now that they're all gone, let's talk about time travel. Yep. Interstellar has time travels. Hope that was worth spoiling the movie for yourself. Good work. At the beginning of the movie, Murphy (the daughter who is later played by Jessica Chastain and Ellen Burstyn) is talking about a ghost who is knocking things off of bookshelves. The ghost leads to the plot of the whole movie, and we find out that something has been using gravity to send messages to people at the time of the movie to lead them to the wormhole that takes them to the distant planets. At the end, holy shit, it was Matthew McConaughey the whole time, because future fifth dimensional people (maybe) set this whole thing up as a stable time loop. I know this sounds like a brag (because it somewhat is), but I figured that out when they mentioned that the ghost sent them to the NASA headquarters, because that just made sense, you know? Stable time loop, it's a pretty well established trope, having seen play in Lost, Superman: Red Son, Futurama, The Terminator (well, sorta), Doctor Who, Bill and Ted, and Harry frickin' Potter. Yeah, the movie leaves questions at the end, but the time loop, I felt, was pretty cut and dry.
Then I went to trivia with the folks with whom I watched the movie. I guess I think about time travel WAY more than average people (making me wonder if I'm making efficient use of my time), because two people (who are, of course, wonderful and awesome) were contesting that it made no sense. Their point was that it made no sense that future people would be able to generate the conditions necessary to set forth the plot of the movie without the events of the movie already having happened, to which I say, yes. Yes. That is what happened. The events of the movie happened, being caused by the interference of fifth dimensional beings, at a point in time before our perception of the generation of such fifth dimensional beings which was in turn caused by the prior interference of said fifth dimensional beings.
Despite my potentially overly verbose wording, this makes sense. The events that led to leaving Earth and the survival of the human race are of pretty substantial note, even in the lifetimes of the effectors of such events. As a result, it is not unreasonable to assume that these events would be well recorded by historians and biographers, leaving a substantial paper trail of what exactly happened. This paper trail, then, provides a blueprint for the future, fifth dimensional beings to do what they need to do to generate the past necessary.
 |
| You get right the hell out of here. We don't serve your kind. |
From what I've gleaned from the video above (again, not being a physicist, so feel free to correct me), once you're fifth dimensional, you're free to travel throughout a given timeline and affect outcomes at earlier points. You can't just hop between them, though, because that would be sixth dimensional space.
So, from our perspective, it's just a stable time loop. At Year X, fifth dimensional beings set up a wormhole, which is discovered at Year Y. At Year Z, humanity moves on from Earth (due to earlier exploration efforts using the aforementioned wormhole), leading to its continued survival and (possible) evolution to fifth-dimensional beings at Year A. For fifth dimensional beings, though, it's basically, "Okay, I need to go to Wormhole Mart and pick up Matthew McConaughey by the black hole and let him do his thing. Why don't I do the latter and the former?" Yeah, it's hard to write that without temporal descriptors, because we don't think that way. They would be able to.
What's more, even if I'm wrong about the historical relevance hypothesis (the thing from three paragraphs above), then all it takes is for two fifth-dimensional beings to meet at Year X (wormhole day). Both started in our universe and observed previous moments in time, but one went ahead to see what would happen if the wormhole wasn't set up (or if any number of other events hadn't occurred). Things go bad (because, well, we'll assume that things go bad without those events) and lead to a lack of fifth-dimensional beings. That doesn't matter, because there's at least the one who saw it who can go back to Year X and tell others/ensure the wormhole (and/or other necessary events) happen to make certain that things go as planned.
I may think too much about time travel, but because this is Chris Nolan, I'd say I'm thinking just enough about time travel.
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| "I'm going to take your mind home tonight and then never call." |
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