02 August 4705 - Harry Potter Spoilers, Secret Ending to Lost, Booster Gold Tells All

There was a sequence from 52 where Skeets finds Booster Gold's living ancestor in the modern (they call it "golden") age so that he can use the shlub for a genetically encoded door.

Coding sequences that require DNA match, cool.
Finding the ancient ancestor of a friend of yours and taking him to tea or something, pretty cool.
Incorporating time travel into your comic as a fact of life with consideration to the physical and philosophical applications, splendidly cool (more on this in a bit).

But don't bullshit me.
I'm going to presume that Booster is not inbred. He shows none of the typical signs of lengthy inbreeding. This means we can presume that all of his sires are of independent, unrelated stock, and that no genetic manipulation or malfeasance went on in the meantime. Now, far be it from me to trace the genealogy of Booster Gold, but these are the facts. Booster comes from the 25th century. That means the 2400s, which is around four hundred years from now. Assuming an average generational distance of 20 years (which is common enough), that's around 20 solid generations of forebears. Well, guess what, your mom and your pop each donate half a genome pair unless you're a genetic freak (which, again, I'm presuming that neither Booster nor any of his forebears is), like someone who ends up xyy for instance. The point is, spanning 20 generations, this theoretical dude that Skeets finds has 1/2²⁰ genetic material in common with Booster. That is a 0.0000095% genetic match. Or about one in one million. Apparently, this is enough to fool the genetic encoding on the lock.

Don't get me wrong, it stands as an interesting and relevant plot point, but I just can't support the fake science behind this one. I bought the time travel angle wholesale, because it is done presuming that no one really understands how it works, but they all seem to know how it doesn't. The only time travelers available are all gone off somewhere, and causality seems not to mind a few paradoxical transgressions, my guess is because temporal distortions result in causal bifurcation of substantive temporal bodies. Essentially, that if you hop back in time, you're part of something new and no amount of killing your ancestors or uninventing time travel will establish a causal paradox.

Matter of fact, let me lay down the laws about time travel in case any of this ever comes up again. I like time travel. I often like how different writers execute the idea. I more often find I dislike the execution, or otherwise think the attempt ill-considered. I have a vested interest in good application of time travel because it comes up in my own roleplaying game a lot. I had not originally planned this, but I now have a whole advanced class dedicated to the demonstration and recurring use of temporal distortion for fun and profit. Consider this a primer.

In physics, space and time are related. Like the way a chemical is related to its chemical properties, or an atom related to its constituent subatomic particle count. You can't have one without the other in our universe, or so the theory goes. In science fiction, though, why not? If you're willing to swallow something like the inertial damper from Star Trek, which is a device that wrests a material object free of its associated momentum, rendering it effectively massless to a chosen direction of impulse but not to other directions (the artificial gravity still works, for instance, so peeps still have mass, or at least something like mass that keeps gravity working on them). So if you ever have an issue with time travel systems seeming to ignore partially or completely the relationship between space and time, I say lump it (this is going to be a theme).
Temporal is a fancy word for "of time." A temporal transducer would be a device that changes one system of time to another, or something like DST. A temporal fluctuation measurement apparatus would be an atomic or otherwise self-correcting clock. A temporal fissure would be a time-hole, sortof like a quantum leap, which is actually a commonly occurring and quite boring phenomenon. Don't get bogged down in the fancy words. Writers will use things like this all the time in place of an actual explanation of what is supposed to be happening. I take delight in translating sciency gibberish, but this doesn't make me hate the writers, or moreover, the concept they're writing about.
The grandfather clause is the most common paradox that contradicts the very nature of time travel plausibility. The idea is that the time traveler goes back in time and kills his grandfather, thereby in effect killing himself because there would be none to sire him, so there would be no one to kill his grandfather in the first place, and so on in loop. There are a number of ways to shrug this off, as indeed anyone needs to do because of certain other phenomena I would be happy to describe.
1) Time-stamp displacement. This is the idea that, when you go back to the past, you're an entirely new entity to this universe, brought into being by the energy of the rift that brought you here (as matter cannot be created or destroyed). So whatever you do is subject to no retroactive temporal laws or undiscovered properties of space-time, but only the regular physical laws you're used to. Kill your grandfather and you've killed your grandfather, nothing more or less. The time traveler is independent of his destination. I rather like this approach, but it is, in ways, the biggest cop-out.
2) Protective equipment. This presumes that everything has a time-stamp on it, and the universe knows when something has been displaced from its time-stamp and has mechanisms to correct the anomaly. There is some physical evidence for this being the case, but it too is terribly boring. If you are displaced in time, the universe bumps you back to your proper place and undoes the change. You take a mechanism with you that surrounds you in a protective field of your own time, like a diving suit. If the thing is broken or runs out of batteries or whatever, you're popped back into place. I've seen this done a few times, with mixed results. Not sure if I like this approach much better, but it does carry a little more of the onus of explaining exactly why we don't have a paradox wrecking the place and raiding the fridge.
3) No comment. This is the idea that something keeps everything from blowing up in the face of a causal paradox, but we don't know what. This leaves the writer free to express some time travel changes but not others as he sees fit. Best used to tell jokes. Probably the most realistic scientific approach at that. Maybe I should explain what I mean by causal paradox.

A logical paradox is a construction of statements that is either recursive, or suggests opposite outcomes at the same time as the valid conclusion. They are cool and mind-building and generally pointless as a rhetorical tool, and fantastically powerful as a didactic one.
A causal paradox is when a logical paradox is tested in life. The most common presumption of the causal paradox is that when you create one, the universe blows up. What a cop-out. How vulgar! How conceited! Let me tell you a little something about the universe. It's pretty big.
Bigger than anything in it. In some ways it can be characterized as itself a massive explosion. It is really really big. I would be willing to let it rest with "the universe is way to big to care about your petty life and the petty life of your grandfather you've just gone back in time to kill," but I'll give it another go. It would take a lot of energy to blow up the universe in any sense, one could even postulate it would take all of it, all the energy that there is, to blow it up. Come to think of it, I'm not even sure what it would look like. People who like to blow up the universe are the kind who imagine it is a marble floating on a lake, standing on a turtle's back, marching toward oblivion. To just say it blows up is to rob yourself of the fun experience of imagining what exactly that means. I much prefer the on-scale evocation of causal paradoxes, and those can be anything at all, so go nuts and have fun with it.
Okay, so you want another taste. Howabout this? Given that there can occur some causal paradox, no matter how, that would result in existence blowing up or fading away or unmaking itself or whatever, let us assume that it can happen with some nontrivial probability X, where X is a number between 0 and 1 that represents the likelihood that this event will occur in any given second. Aside from presuming that X is very small, we can't really assume it is both obliviated by common sense and still existing. So X can be nontrivial. This means, that given the very long number of seconds that the universe has been around, something like this should have happened by now, or put another way, before time stretches thin, this should happen an unlimited number of times, unless the one causes it to unmake itself, which I suppose would be a kind of meta-causal paradox. Anyway, here we are. The one exception is that X is infinitesimally small, that is, defined on the order of infinities by some limiting arrangement. This would require an infinite amount of time to transpire before any finite number of Xs occur. Actually depending on the rate of infinities you're comparing, it could come up zero, infinite, or some nonzero finite number of times for a nonlinear system, for a linear system, only 0, 1, or infinity are allowable, but there's nothing to say that the underlying mathematics are nonlinear or linear in the first place, so who knows. The point is that this gets into specifics about the problem that are unavailable. Don't hold your breath. Similar arguments are available for your use for anyone who wants to plan an event that unmakes existence. It is much more useful to attack whatever it is you hate that is observing existence, races of creatures or spy cameras, for instance. You will spend less energy.

Why so concerned about the grandfather clause? Well, really you can't avoid it. There is no such thing as a temporal occlusion if any semblance of practical physics is to be applied to your story. By "temporal occlusion" I mean someone going back in time and not changing anything significant. If you've ever heard of chaos dynamics (or simple nonlinear dynamics for that matter) you'll know that this is a proper load. If you go back, and your changes can affect your current state, they will. Period. If you so much as exist in space where before you didn't, particles will change course, your gravity will subtly change the system, your motion will echo through the air and modify future weather systems. The further you go, the greater the difference will be. Many natural systems are grounded in chaos, which has equations that vary based on an infinite number of initial conditions. Not near-infinite or semi-infinite. Actually infinite. They vary based on more initial conditions than can actually exist, which is, I'm guessing, more than you can account for. There is no change subtle enough to avoid this, so don't bullshit me about going back in time and "not changing anything significant" or "setting things the way they should be." That is the surest way to make me call shenanigans on your plot and make me hate your show. Some writers at least give this idea lip service. Seldom enough, though.

So when you go having a discussion about time travel, you'll be well prepared to sluice the meat from the bullshit. Although it hasn't always helped me.
I've always been willing to accept the stories as using time travel for the expression of an idea, considered the idea, and moved on. I don't get caught up on establishing concrete rules for all time travel in all shows, nor even hold them responsible for the myriad contradictions it brings up. I have the couple of things I keep, and just take in anything else. Whatever the writer says works, works. That's suspension of disbelief, and barring the feeding of an absolute load like the bit about Booster above, I accept it with joy. The first and most important rule of understanding science fiction is that you can't know everything about the scientific systems within, so be willing to accept other people's explanations.
This hasn't kept me from trouble with other people's ideas about time travel, though. To wit:
One morning, a friend of mine asks me why not all time travelers are in space ships, and what would happen to those without. For example, if you move in time, there's no guarantee that the Earth will be in the same place it was, and in fact it is more likely that it will be elsewhere, and you'll be stranded entirely. I have a number of problems with this, which I tried to explain.
Unless the writer has given you a reason to presume that moving in time is independent from moving in space, or otherwise suggested that this could be the case, then you have no ground to stand on at all with this argument. You may as well ask why you can see laser beams or why you hear stuff in space movies. Go on with it. It is a neat idea, though, and one that could be explored. Maybe you need a kind of anchor in the future or past if you want to change location as well as time. Maybe there's some natural system that underpins time travel to keep to the same relative coordinates you had before. Ah, which reminds me.
You can't have it both ways. My friend's thought was that if you time traveled in a space ship floating above New York city, for instance, you would end up wherever that had been and the Earth would be a little further along in its orbit and so on. This actually presumes you have still moved somewhat with respect to the center of the universe, as our solar system is moving within our galaxy and our galaxy itself spinning and moving in some direction. If time travel doesn't account for one kind of relative motion, why should it account for any of the others?
More importantly, why presume this is the case anyway? Having no reason to presume that it would be the case other than a semi-logical guess at the functioning of an imaginary system, what ground is there to stand on? Where is your argument even coming from?

And no longer talking about time travel, be careful in your arguments, my children, to establish the ground, and do not be to complete in getting rid of seeming contradictions. A lot of times, something will only be contradictory because of a restriction or system that you or someone else have put in place out of nowhere at all. Maria Rosa Menocal and F. Scott Fitzgerald appreciated the ability to hold contradictory ideas in the mind.
Mind how you argue, and to what end. The time may come when your argumentative dexterity can bring you fortune. And then come again. And then revert in on itself to make a causal paradox.

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