A lot of time travel films feature a time traveler bringing an object back in time and giving it to their past self. While this can be useful for story development, this type of antic can get you in trouble. It is easy to assume that there is no question as to how the older self got the object -- the younger self has it and kept it until the time came to bring it back. However, there is a flaw in this reasoning. If the younger self got it from the older self and kept it all that time, then where did it come from?
Everything must have an origin, but this object seems to originate from nowhere. It is taken into the future, and taken back to the past, but is never found or created.
To resolve this little issue, the object must be lost by the younger self at some point on the timeline and the version of the object that hasn’t yet traveled back in time must be found or created. For this to occur, the object must exist twice at the same time -- either it always existed and wasn’t discovered until after it had been received from the future, or it was created while in possession of or after having been discarded by the past-becoming-future self.
Of course, to alleviate the concerns of the pedantic, I will point out that it is possible to destroy the object before its creation to avoid the double existence. However, I would counter that the matter it was made of still exists twice (and also existed twice in the time period between the younger self receiving it and its creation).
There is a better way to avoid double existence. Since you are already time traveling, you can time travel to a period between the discarding of the object by your younger self and the creation of the object and take it farther into the future beyond the time that you originally went back with the object.
That solves it once and for all, right? Not quite. Since the matter the object is created out of still exists twice before its creation while the object has been taken back in time, you actually need to go back in time yourself to before the object had been taken back and procure it and get it to your past self. Of course, at this point you aren’t bringing it back from the future anymore so the whole idea seems a bit absurd. Let’s stop being pedantic and get back on track.
But wait, that’s not how we roll. There’s still something bothering me. If we are so worried about the matter the object is made of not existing twice, why don’t we care about the times where it now doesn’t exist at all? In order to fix this, at each moment that it is being transported to, we need to collect the version that exists and transport it out of that time at the precise moment and transport it to the precise moment in another time that it was taken from.
It seems like everything is coming together, until we remember that we ourselves are made of matter that we are transporting back in time. So really, if you are trying to avoid altering the matter that exists at any time, there isn’t really a way to do so if you want to be traveling yourself.
Since we can’t avoid altering the matter that exists while time traveling, why don’t we instead try to abuse it instead and make the same object exist as many times as possible.
Let’s say we have a currency unit of specific value that we want to duplicate. Since we have a time machine, we can just wait until some point in the future and bring the currency unit of specific value back in time so there are now two at the same time. Now, by doing this there are now two currency units of specific value in the future. So, can our future self just take both currency units of specific value back to the past instead of just the one? If so, this loop would instantaneously escalate.
But I don’t think this would work out. Since we only start with one currency unit of specific value, our future self can only take one back. However, bringing the one currency unit of specific value back means that there are now two in the future. But it doesn’t mean that there are now two in the future, it means that there have always been two in the future. And even though there were two in the future, we for some reason decided only to take one back to the past.
So how do we get to more than two currency units of specific value? We have to go back to the future. Now, we could wait until we are future enough and then come back with the extra currency unit of specific value. But there ain’t nobody who got time for that, and since we are time travelers we don’t got time for nothing. So instead of waiting around, we will streamline the process and time travel to the time we want to retrieve the currency unit of specific value and immediately travel back again with it.
Now, you might be asking, “well, can we just travel to a time before the original currency unit of specific value was taken and grab both?” I see what your line of thinking is there. If we could do that, we could increase our currency units of specific value exponentially rather than linearly.
I am sorry to say that we need not attempt that. Since we remember there being three currency units of specific value from the last time we brought one to the past, we know that the seventeen currency units of specific value will still be there in the future. Since it is a fact that all forty two currency units of specific value are still there, that means they cannot have been taken already. This means that there will be something physically stopping us from retrieving the hundred fifty seven currency units of specific value -- either they won’t exist there at the time we attempt to go to, we won’t be able to access them, or there will be some other barrier that will prevent us from transporting them. Perhaps that barrier is nothing more than our knowledge that it is impossible preventing us from making the attempt.
Now that we all agree that we have to retrieve the currency units one at a time, this is where things get interesting. We could easily time our travels so that we arrive in the future just as the previous self went back in time. However, I prefer to think that we arrive at the same each iteration and form some sort of a line up to get to the currency units of specific value.
Whether we take the boring route of timing things properly or the interesting route of becoming a line at an amusement park
Whether we take the boring route of timing things properly or the interesting route of becoming a line at an amusement park, we still have to make sure that each iteration gets the correct currency unit of specific value. If we go back in time and haphazardly throw each new currency unit on the pile, that means our first iteration will have to dig through the pile each time to get the correct currency unit. This will cause huge backlogs that will add up more and more with each iteration added. This is no good.
The line, which is now longer than the line to Space Mountain, is now causing all sorts of issues. Since we are still aging at each iteration, the long waits in the line severely limit the number of iterations we can go through in one lifetime. Of course, we can outsource the actual traveling through time with currency units, but then we’d have to trust others not to run off with the money, not to blab about our scheme, not to request a fair cut for their efforts. I just don’t like the idea, we need something better.
Even if we back off from our line idea and go back to traveling to the exact time that the last iteration left, we still have several issues. First, each iteration is still taking a while to search through the pile of currency units of specific value which still puts a limit to the number of iterations we can do. But the even more pressing issue we have is the inconsistency due to each prior iteration taking longer to find the correct currency unit as more iterations are added. This means that the time we’d have to travel to in the future to avoid a line-up changes every iteration thus making it impossible to avoid the line up.
Let us now take the opportunity to revisit the fact that the first iteration is now seeing an enormous pile of currency units when we clearly began with only 216. The whole idea of the pile getting bigger at each iteration has become full of inconsistencies. Let’s go back to the idea of each iteration travelling to just before the previous iteration instead of just after.
At this point I would like to interject that clearer minds have pointed out that we spent so much time going through the time loop to transport currency units that we lost sight of the fact the we began with just a single currency unit of specified value.
Now that we have been reminded that the first iteration only saw one currency unit of specified value, let’s see what we can do in the second iteration. We have just traveled to the time just before the first iteration grabbed the solitary currency unit and we see that there are actually two currency units of specified value. We have already concluded that we cannot take both currency units back with us. But what we can do is take one back and leave the other for the first iteration to find.
This solves a lot of our issues. Now that we are taking the currency units in the reverse order that they were added to the pile, we can always just take the top one off. As long as the pile is kept organized, there should not be any issue finding the correct currency unit. In addition, each iteration is now seeing exactly the same thing no matter how many iterations we add, removing any inconsistencies we were seeing with piles getting larger for previous iterations.
Now, all we have to do is travel far enough into the future that we can insert the number of iterations we need to get our desired number of currency units.
Now that we have all of these currency units of specified value, what are we going to do with them? Optimally, we would be exchanging these currency units of specified value for goods and services. This seems simple, right? Just grab the pile and head to an establishment that facilitates such an exchange. Not so.
The first issue we will run into if we are not careful is that many currency units of value have identifying features. If our chosen currency unit of value has such features, it will be discovered upon an attempt to exchange them for goods and services and such a transaction will be rejected. This should not be a problem so long as we considered this condition up front and ensured that we have selected a currency unit that does not have such a deficiency.
That’s not the real issue though. The real issue with an attempt to exchange these currency units for goods and services is that we would then no longer have access to them in the future to bring them back in time. In order to make such a transaction work, we would have to get the currency units back at some point after the transaction has completed and before our final iteration arrives to pick up the first currency unit. We can do this by exchanging goods and services of our own for the same currency units, but now the entire effort seems meaningless because we could have just exchanged our goods and services for the goods and services that we wanted without going through all of the trouble. We could also take the currency units back via illegitimate methods, but once again that is something we could have done without the extra effort.
So what can we do with all of our currency units of specific value if it is useless for us to exchange them for goods and services?
I guess we can show them off.
