- We have the past, the present and the future,
all stacked on top of each other,
all happening at the same time.
- I'm confused. (laughs)
- I have this very distinct memory of scrolling through
Twitter and Instagram and TikTok
this past New Year's Eve and pretty much every post
went a little something like,
"Look out because 2020 is going to be my year.
Just you wait, it's going A-MA-ZING".
"I'm going to accomplish all the goals
on my vision board and everybody's going to be
shipping my perfect relationship on Instagram
and I'm totally going to crush it at school and"--
(record scratches)
(crying)
- [Isabella] Aw, what innocent babies we were.
We had no idea that 2020 was going to turn into
such a flaming dumpster fire of a year.
Wouldn't it be awesome if we could just skip out
on the rest of the year and spend it in another year?
Sorry, just fantasizing here.
But this brings me to the riddle of last episode.
What's in the future or the past,
but it's also happening now?
I've given you a pretty good hint.
If you know the answer, shout it out on three.
One, two, three, time travel.
(dramatic music)
That's right.
I've always been fascinated with time travel.
A couple months ago, I even made a YouTube video
called, "Is time-travel real?"
And while I encourage you to check it out, spoiler alert,
(siren wails)
"No," at this present moment on Planet Earth,
time travel is not considered possible.
- When it comes to time travel, to me
one of the most exciting parts, and I'm curious to see
if you agree with this, is the inconsistencies,
or as we might say, paradoxes, that occur
because of just the idea of time tracking.
- The idea like, oh, if I go back in time
and kill my grandpa, would I ever like be able
to even go back in time and kill my grandpa?
Meaning that, I wouldn't be there,
but would I be there type of thing?
- Well exactly.
- But even though we're stuck in the here and now
we can still have a super fun escape.
We're visiting some of our favorite
time-travel TV shows and movies.
So fire up the DeLorean and get in, Know it All's,
because I'm taking you back to the future.
- [Isabella] So I wanted to do this episode
because the second season of the Umbrella Academy
just dropped on Netflix.
And I got sucked in so hard.
I'm basically stuck in a time loop.
Here's the crib notes to catch you up
if you haven't seen the show.
- I have adopted six children
(dramatic music)
gifted with abilities
far beyond the ordinary.
I gave you...
the Umbrella Academy
(dramatic music peaks)
(upbeat music)
- [Isabella] And one of these kids, a character named Five,
has the ability to jump through time and space.
Except at the end of the first season,
Five doesn't just travel himself.
He brings his brothers and sisters back to the sixties,
along with him.
- 1963.
- I don't want to tell you any more,
because this really is a must see TV
if you're a Sci-Fi fan like me, but it got me
reminiscing about all my other
favorite time-travel narratives.
I know at the end of my YouTube video I said,
we should all live in the now because our time here
is limited, stop taking the present for granted
and yada, yada, yada.
But that doesn't mean we can't enjoy
a little time-travel fiction.
As science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov famously said,
"Time travel is theoretically impossible,
but I wouldn't want to give it up as a plot gimmick."
Touche.
It's hard to argue with that.
So let's start traveling time, courtesy
of the good old fashioned Hollywood time machine.
(bright music)
So around the same time that movie technology
was just being invented, HG Wells wrote
a science-fiction novella called,
"The Time Machine" in 1895.
This was the story that first popularized
the concept of time travel by mechanical means,
which inspired countless other movies,
TV shows and literary works to riff off this plot device.
Time machines are one of the main plot devices
of the time travel genre.
- But it brings up one of my favorite points
about time travel that they never seem to talk about,
is when you travel through time, let's use the DeLorean
in, "Back to the Future."
It's a machine, it's no longer set on the ground.
It moves and drives, or it flies
depending on which sequel we're talking about.
How do you know where you would end up?
Because time is fixed, - Hm mm.
- but space isn't.
- Let's say there's a dude that goes
into an empty field 200 years ago.
And he shoots forward 200 years.
And then bam, he's just like in the middle of concrete
in New York city, he's inside a building now,
but dead because he is in the wrong spot.
- He's like spinning because the whole,
everything changes around them.
The other is a time slip, which allows a person or people
to travel through time via unknown means.
According to Darrell Schweitzer,
author of the "Fantastic Horizon,"
a major difference from mechanical time machine stories
is that in time slip stories, the protagonist typically
has no idea what's going on and no control
over the time travel process.
They're either left marooned in a past time
and must make the best of it,
or are eventually returned by a similarly
unpredictable process.
Theoretically time slips could be possible via
what physicists referred to as wormholes.
(dramatic chords)
- [Disembodied voice] Word Alert!
- [Isabella] You know what that means, Know-it-All's?
I just got a word alert.
When I say wormholes, I'm not talking
about a garden infestation here.
In this context, a wormhole is defined as the hypothetical
connection between widely separated regions of space-time.
Think of it as a secret passageway
or a sort of secret tunnel where you can
very quickly traverse a large swath of space-time.
Wormholes are consistent with the general
Theory of Relativity, but whether wormholes actually exist
remains to be seen, but we can still enjoy them
for our entertainment.
- I don't, I wish I had a piece of paper next to me,
but you know--
- Do the whole, fold the piece of paper with a pen through.
- Yeah, from "Event Horizon."
That's where I learned it.
But that's my favorite visualization of it,
is that it basically bends point A and point B
and puts them together.
It's a shortcut through time and space.
- [Isabella] Another thing you see a lot in time travel
movies is the time loop.
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction defines a time loop
as a plot device in which periods of time are
repeated and re-experienced by the characters.
Typically these stories end when the protagonist
breaks out of the cycle of repetition,
a time loop could also be called Groundhog Day
in reference to perhaps the most famous time loop movie
of all time, "Groundhog Day," starring Bill Murray.
In this nineties movie, his character is forced
to relive February 2nd, AKA Groundhog Day
over and over until he learns from his mistakes,
becoming less selfish and more caring with each loop.
He has to grow into a better person
in order to break out of the time loop.
This is a popular hallmark in time loop narratives.
- Does he keep going?
Cause again, it's just his memory that's going back in time.
So again, are we stuck on another little loop
and time is still going forward after that day.
It's just that the memory that this Bill Murray has
is from the future.
- But I have to say one of the most intriguing theories
to play out on screen is the butterfly effect.
- [Disembodied voice] Word Alert!
- [Isabella] Whoa, cool.
Double word alert.
The butterfly effect is a term coined by mathematician
Edward Lorenz to describe events observed in chaos theory
where one teeny tiny change in the initial conditions
can result in vastly different outcomes.
This phenomenon has become a popular time travel trope
and even inspired the 2004 movie called,
"The Butterfly Effect," starring Ashton Kutcher.
I've seen the butterfly effect play out
in countless movies and TV shows, but it never gets old.
I think that's because it shows the power of smaller actions
and on a grander scale, I love the genre of time travel
and entertainment because it begs a huge set
of fascinating questions about what would be possible
in a world where time wasn't fixed,
like time tourism, teleportation, and even immortality.
- I guess it'd be more like time voyeurism
instead of tourism, because you can't really
interact with things.
You'd have to specifically not interact.
You could watch, but you can't obviously influence anything.
Cause those implications that we've talked about,
like the butterfly effect,
stuff like that could be far reaching and never ending.
- Maybe someday time travel will be possible.
In fact, a few months ago, a group of NASA scientists
working on an experiment in Antarctica
detected evidence of a parallel universe,
but as long as they keep making good TV about it,
I don't even care.
It's really fun to think about.
But the truth is in reality time travel
would probably be more of a waking nightmare
than a fun escape.
Hit me up on TikTok and Instagram @onlyjayus
or Twitter @notjayus and let me know
what year you would want to travel to if you could,
would it be in the past or in the future?
(dramatic music)
- Let the people know what you have going on?
- Well, you can check out on a youtube.com/vsauce3,
and that's really about all I got.
That's all I have in my life is that YouTube channel.
- Check out Vsauce3,
(sniggers)
Join me again in two weeks for another episode
of Know it All.