Monday, April 23, 2012
Travel And Time?
Please write a critique of The City On The Edge Of Forever using the Traveling Through Time and/or Carl Sagan Ponders Time Travel articles. Challenge at least one idea within your notes that the article seems to debunk or challenge. Please sdefend your response and use quotations to support. This is due during class today.
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According to Carl Sagan, "Maybe backward time travel is possible, but only up to the moment that time travel is invented." In City on the Edge of Forever, Spock and Kirk travel further back in time. If time travel into history were possible, then history would "become an experimental science." This would completely debunk the duo's travel to the 1930's, since it was before time travel existed.
ReplyDeleteSupposedly you have to restore the past to keep the future the way it is. It's like the butterfly affect or you're your own grandfather. You can't do anything you didn't do before and if someone died before they have to die again or the future would be changed.
ReplyDeleteCarl Sagan's article on time travel appears to keep the stance that traveling back in time may be possible, but only to the time in which the time machine was turned on. Once again, we aren't sure completely, but Physicists seem to keep that stance for the time being. The City On The Edge Of Forever appears to go against that idea, and was the first Star Trek episode of many to talk about time traveling. A nice quote from Spock mentions a time machine, or type of time displacement. That quote is as follows, "This single object is the cause of the time displacement." This quote is basically saying that a time machine is there, but in more Vulcan Treky kind of way. But going back to the point highlighted at the beginning, we can't travel back in time to per say 1930, but we may be able to travel back in the future to 2023 for example, if that's the year in which the time machine was turned on and or invented, and even then the universe is supposed to do everything to destroy it. And the article never was opposed to traveling forward in time. Just some food for thought...
ReplyDeleteThe idea that I think is challenging is wouldn't event the small things make for a different future? When Dr. Makoy passed out the man steals his beaming up controller and leaves by beaming out. So cant we ask from there where did he go and how did he change time. Wouldn't he? The possibilities of what happened to him are endless.
ReplyDeleteThe City On The Edge Of Forever is was a good example of time travel because it showed the viewer what would happen if someone changed the path of history. Carl Sagan wrote in an article, "It might be that you can build time machine to go into the future, but not into the past." This quote does not support The City On The Edge of forever because in that show, he went back into time.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of time travel has been expressed through "The City on the Edge of Forever" because it shows that changing anything in the past, can dramatically effect the future and could mean the end of civilization. This is also known as the grandfather paradox and it is shown in this film because the woman has to die in order for the world to be saved. One of the men in this episode even ends up falling in love with her and has to watch her die so that the world can be at peace. I think that it is unwise to mess with time and time travel. Everything happens for a reason and if we are constantly living in our past, we don't live for the future.
ReplyDeleteI think that The City On The Edge Of Forever used interesting concepts regarding time travel and how it can change the course of history. According to "Traveling Through Time", time travel is possible, and we are only a moment in that astronomical time. I don't understand how Mccoy knew which woman he had to keep alive to change history for the worst. He didn't have any technology to figure out what would happen like the captain did.
ReplyDeleteI challenge that if they didn't jump in the time machine after him they would probably be stuck on the planet forever because he would have change the past and the future would have been totally different. If I went to the future today and changed things how much different would life be if I changed a couple of things and how much of a difference it would make.
ReplyDeleteThe City On The Edge of Forever was a good example of the Grandfather Paradox. It showed that with one event the whole world could change. When Doctor McCoy traveled to back in time he saved a girl. The girl then caused havoc making the Nazi's win the war and completely change the time of space travel. The whole concept of time travel though is confusing. As the article, Traveling Through Time, said "Yet we cannot say exactly what time is." So how can we travel through it if we don't even know what it is. We would have to figure out what it is and how it is affected before we can travel through it!
ReplyDeleteIn the Star Trek episode,"The City On The Edge Of Forever," Captain Kirk and Spok go back in time to save the future from ruins when a crewman goes crazy and alters time. The time traveling idea in this episode is different because they followed someone into the past ahead of them and didn't disrupt the future. If someone is suppose to go back time, the future should be altered anyways because someone or something is there that shouldn't be, therefore altering time.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that The City On The Edge of Forever is very accurate because even if you traveled into time, how did captain Kirk, Spock, and Mccoy all travel to the same spot? The article seems to put the idea that time travel is reliable to rest. The show makes it seem like if you jump in at the right time or something like that you will transport perfectly. The article makes it sound a little harder to do though and time travel is unpredictable.
ReplyDeleteIn The City On the Edge of Forever, the main characters travel back in time in search of their friend McCoy. During this time they put all their effort into preventing or aiding in one specific event that could change the future or keep it the same. That event is death of a woman named Edith Keeler. I find it interesting that they are so interested in one specific moment in time because there are so many little things that could have altered the future that they didn't think about. Accidentally killing an animal would result in the butterfly affect and possibly wipe out an entire generation of a species, but they never took that into account.
ReplyDeleteTime travel is often viewed as a really "cool" thing that people only dream of. The reality of it is that things can go very wrong if you go back in time and try to change the way things are. A quote from "Traveling Trough Time" says, "Everything that can be invented has been invented." By saying this I think that people are doubting that time travel will ever be possible, which I agree with. And if time travel ever was possible I think people will take advantage of it and use it in the wrong way, causing history to be permanently messed up.
ReplyDeleteIn the Star Trek episode, the Captain & Spock jumped into a portal and ended up in 1930's America. They were there for like 2 weeks, and resolved an issue that made their ship never exist. But after they resolved this issue, they jumped back through the portal. How did they get back? I think that the director couldn't find out how to show the portal back to the crew.
ReplyDeleteIf one goes back in time, anything that changes, alters the future. Dr. McCoy jumped forward into time and changed an event that ultimately changed the future causing the crew of the star ship Enterprise to never exist. So does every single event that occurs in time happen perfectly to allow us to exist.
ReplyDeleteI though that The City On the Edge of forever did a very good job backing up prior public beliefs about time travel. By having one (what seems like) small event such as one person supposed to die but being saved, could alter the entire course of history, and the lives of the people on thee ship.I thought it was a very good depiction of how time travel may work today, if it was possible. i think with the time/ motion argument with Einstein I think that the way they traveled was unrealistic in relation to the theoreys of how ti e travel could be real today.
ReplyDeleteThe City on The Edge of Forever had a lot of controversial ideas that were brought up. First off, changing the past would ultimately change the future. They brought this up but they didn't see that since they changed the future they wouldn't exist. Therefore, they wouldn't be able to go back and time and try to fix it. None of them would have been stuck on that planet because they would have had a completely different life.
ReplyDeleteIf the past is tampered with then the future can suffer from the back lash, like in The City on the Edge of Forever Dr. Mccoy jumped through the time warp and accidentally caused the future they knew to no longer exist. In the time travel complex the issue that arises that it is easy to change the path future is meant to take by altering on incident as simple as one womans death in the show episode.
ReplyDeleteIn the episode, the main goal of Spock and Kirk is to right the flow of time which McCoy disrupted, but wouldn't Spock and Kirk disrupt the flow of time just by going into the past? Or would that be a permanent loop in time? Another break in the time-space continuum is the homeless man that takes McCoy's device and is beamed we do not know where. What if he was supposed to do something extraordinary that would change the world? Now he was somewhere in space and is stuck there until he dies.
ReplyDeleteA City at the Edge of Forever really demonstrates what people did think time travel was and how it would be in that time era. But according to Angelus Silesius, "the flow of time could be suspended by mental powers". I disagree, it's just that no body can stop time the world and universe is always moving and never stopping and no one can make it stop. Another weird thing is that the year that the episode of Star Trek was placed, time travel didn't exist back then. Weird.
ReplyDeleteThe City on the Edge of Forever handled the concept of the Grandfather paradox very well. The Grandfather paradox deals with what happens when you change events in the past through time travel. This episode has McCoy who goes back in time and must change something because the Enterprise is gone, leaving them stranded. As Kirk stated in the episode, “We are stranded with no past or future.” Kirk and Spock must go back in time to prevent McCoy from changing history. As they go back, they realize that a seemingly harmless mission worker had changed all of history. Kirk must let her die in order to get history back. Overall I thought that it dealt with the Grandfather complex quite well by addressing that the past cannot be changed in order to have the same future.
ReplyDeleteThe City On The Edge Of Forever as a Grandfather Paradox film was successful. I enjoyed their plot and conflict. Although they share the dangers of time travel and McCoy is told that it will be "as though none of you have gone", they sure did alter a lot in the past. It's hard to imagine that any of those small changes didn't alter time. Without re-examining the consequences of the man who took their futuristic gadget, the believability decreased. If the writers examined this as well as they did the death of the social worker than I would have been happier with this film. Overall, I think this was an excellent example of Grandfather Paradox and the concept of time travel.
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