Time Travel in Science Fiction: A Thrilling Guide into the unbelievably expansive Multiverse!

Time travel has been around in fiction since the beginning of time. Join us as we discuss the vast nature of the multiverse and how incredible it would be to explore.

Time Travel – It’s been featured across many mediums, from Fantasy to Science Fiction. Shows like Star Trek and Doctor Who feature the concept of Time Travel as integral to their plots. But for the average viewer of science fiction media, the mere idea of it has become convoluted and confusing as differing ideas of how Time Travel works cause significant overlap.

Time Travel is confusing. It’s supposed to be. It’s a cliché made to give the plot of stories a new twist as well as forward momentum. But as many different shows and films have shown, it can also be integral to understanding the story. Join me as I attempt to make it easier to understand the Multiverse concepts.

What is Time Travel?

Most people assume that Time Travel involves going forward or backward in time, specifically to precise moments of historical significance. For many people, the concept is seen as a way to go back in time and fix mistakes or to go forward in time to find out where they end up in the future. Each pathway in time has its consequences.

One of the earliest examples of the consequences of going back in time was featured in the Ray Bradbury short story A Sound Of Thunder in which a man has the opportunity to go back in time and hunt dinosaurs on the condition that he doesn’t step off a designated path. In the end, the man steps off the path and crushes a butterfly, which creates a wave of change that completely alters history. This is the origin of the “Butterfly Effect”.

It also introduces another challenge of traveling to the past: The Grandfather Paradox. The paradox states that if one were to go back in time and kill their grandfather before their mother or father was born, then they would then cease to exist and therefore wouldn’t have existed to kill their grandfather in the first place. It is this theory that has made the mere concept of traveling to the past a thing of pure fiction: it can’t happen. Or can it?

As far as traveling to the future to learn more about your present, it can alter decisions you make in the modern day would lead to a future drastically different than the one that you would be on already, making going into the future for personal gain a challenge in of itself.

So, how do you time travel?

Time Travel is an incredibly convoluted concept in the world of physics and Chaos Theory. Chaos Theory, put simply, is a field of mathematics that studies small changes and the enormous consequences that come from them. A prominent example of this is seen in Jurassic Park, through the lens of Chaos Theorist Dr. Ian Malcom (Jeff Goldblum) states that the seemingly small change of bringing dinosaurs back to life could lead to irreparable changes in modern-day society.

To put it in incredibly simple terms, Time Travel is possible, but only in one direction: Forward. As depicted in the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) loses 23 years of his life due to a concept known as “Time Dilation”, otherwise known as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, in which the gravity of the black hole Gargantua causes time to slow down on the water planet about time on earth. Cooper experienced time faster than anyone else on Earth. Three hours for him was 23 years on Earth.

Every moment, we are all experiencing Time Travel because we are always moving forward with time. Think of it like swimming in a river that’s moving from left to right. Going forward means riding the current while going back is swimming against the current. It’s impossible without assistance.

How does the multiverse factor into Time Travel?

Recently, thanks in major part to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and featured heavily in Avengers: Endgame), the concept of the multiverse has become a part of modern-day science fiction stories and has heavily influenced films and media. While most media tend to depict separate universes in the most outlandish ways (see Everything, Everywhere, All At Once), for this article, we’re going to focus on similar universes.

Let me explain Multiverse Theory before we discuss Time Travel. See, Multiverse Theory theorizes that in every decision we make, such as choosing whether or not to buy a candy bar, a new universe is made. One universe for when you bought the candy bar and one where you did not. An infinite number of universes for an equally infinite number of decisions.

Most media depicts this mostly through the idea that in one universe you can have a normal life except with a significantly different physical quality (hot dog fingers is one example).

Time Travel and the Multiverse

Once again, I have to champion the MCU for depicting the Multiverse and Time Travel excellently. This time, we’re going to focus on Loki. This show depicts time travel as the Time Variance Authority travels to different points in time in an attempt to “prune” variants. Variants are defined as individuals or events that could significantly alter time and cause a ripple effect (the butterfly effect) that could alter the entire multiverse.

Time Travel and the Multiverse go hand in hand. The modern depiction of time travel in media is essentially where the characters go into a separate worldline and alter events in that worldline instead of the prime worldline. Okay, so what is a worldline? It’s another name for a timeline but specifically features different worlds designated by different names. For example, Marvel Comics designates their different worldlines as “Earth-616” (Prime Continuity) or “Earth-1666” (Ultimates Continuity).

So you want to travel through time. The easy answer here is that to travel through time, you have to travel to a different worldline. See, time is permanent in our worldline, which we’ll call “Earth 1” in that we cannot go back in time and alter the past due to the Grandfather Paradox. However, we could, theoretically, go to a specific point in time on an extremely similar worldline. This worldline would only have one incredibly minor change, such as picking a Hershey’s Bar instead of a Kit-Kat.

Theoretically, you should be able to then alter Earth 2 as much as you want without causing any consequences to our worldline since you aren’t technically influencing our worldline. This idea is presented in Avengers: Endgame as the Avengers travel into alternate versions of their timeline. While they attempt to avoid causing anything to change drastically, they do alter the history of Loki (as depicted in Loki).

How do we time travel now?

Sadly, we can’t. Without the power of a Black Hole or another gravitational anomaly, we will never be able to travel in time. In real life, as of now, the only way to travel through time is to go forward in time. And if we were capable of time travel, it would cost an unbelievable amount of money and energy, both of which we do not have.

That doesn’t mean that we aren’t able to continue to enjoy time travel through media. I really hope that this article was able to help you understand the concept of Time Travel and the Multiverse so that you can enjoy the media I mentioned in this article. Here’s a list of media you can indulge yourself with to further enjoy time travel.

Avengers: Endgame – Available on Streaming Services and Disney+
Loki – Season 1 and Season 2 exclusive to Disney+
Steins;Gate and Stein’s;Gate 0 – Available on Crunchyroll and anime streaming services
Everything, Everywhere, All At Once – Currently available on Hulu
Star Trek – Available on Paramount+
Interstellar – Available on Paramount+

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