Time Traveler Zero, Part 1

we've been chatting. Uh, I guess quite a bit about time travel recently on the show, first probably in our our Weird House Cinema episode about the nineteen seventy nine movie Time After Time, and then more recently during our chat with Daniel Whiteson about astrophysics and time travel, and also a little talk about time travel science fiction as well. That's right. One of the main takeaways was that Daniel is is pretty thoroughly against the idea of the plausibility

of changing the past, right. But um, you know, I think one of the more interesting questions to come back to in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind is, um is not just thinking about okay, is this possible? And what would you know, what assumptions would we have to make about the universe for this sort of time travel to work, or this sort of time travel? What sorts of time travel are we engaging in all the time? Uh? Instead of asking is this possible? Are we doing it too?

Instead look at the question what does this idea reveal about human perspectives of time. Where does the time travel idea even come from? And and how far back in time do we see humans engaging in this sort of imaginative thought. It's a great question, and immediately all kinds of uh secondary questions come to mind, like, Okay, so time travel is one of the most popular plot devices of modern fiction. But can you how far back can

you think of literature and stories that feature time travel? Suddenly, if you go just more than a few hundred years back, examples start getting very sparse at least you know the kind of things you can think of off the top of your head, And it might start to cause you to wonder, like, did something change in in Reese centuries that made this idea more more tangible to people? And are the earlier examples and what would what could we

learn about our conception of time by looking at those? Yeah, I ask yourself the question, what's your favorite ancient myth about time travel? And and it's possible you have an answer, because we will come back to a few possible answers.

But for for many of you out there, you might just be a bit dumbfounded, and you might say well, you know, uh, you know, there are these mythic figures and they're they're traveling all over the place, and they're doing all sorts of amazing things, things that are so outrageous you wouldn't even see it in a comic book today. Um. But traveling through time becomes something of a scarcity. So it leads you to wonder, Yeah, is time travel just

this relatively recent cultural invention, this idea of time travel? Um? And and why would that be? Because you know, as we try to drive home on the show Humans of centuries and millennia past, we're deep thinkers, they were deep dreamers. And yet there there are not, for the most part, uh, you know, large caches of old folk tales about princes going back in time to rescue princesses or traveling into

the future and so forth. Um, there are no tales of God's skipping around in different ages of the universe. So obviously time is an undeniable fact of our of our physical reality. But I was trying to think about, like, how is it that humans first put together a concept of time, a time as a kind of substance that they could talk about and and manipulate with and sort of, you know, turn around and look at within the mind

and uh so, uh so. One really interesting source that came across addressing this is a section in a book called The Unfolding of Language, An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's greatest invention. This is by an author named Guide Deutscher. This book was published by McMillan in two thousand five. Deutscher is an academic linguist. He used to be affiliated

with Cambridge and with the University of leyden Um. I'm not sure if he has any affiliations now, but shout out quickly that I came to this connection to Guy Deutscher's work by way of a mention in a Live Science article by Adam Man, which actually pointed me in the direction of two very interesting sources. So so good on that article. But the reason I wanted to talk about this book by by Guy Deutscher here is that it addresses what we can learn from metaphors in everyday

speech about the way our minds work. And so the entry point here is that he's talking about the contrast between poetic metaphors, metaphors that arouse a sense of strangeness and wonder and utterly mundane metaphors. So a couple of examples we can compare. Imagine you are reading a poem and you come across the line tread softly because you tread on my dreams. This is a famous passage from

a poem by William Butler Yates. Uh. And there's a conceptual leap here that makes this image of treading upon dreams striking. You're asked to imagine physically stepping on a purely mental construct without physical form, And I think it's that gap. It's like exactly to the degree that it doesn't quite fit, and yet you can still understand what

it means that makes the metaphor striking. Yeah, and now I'm just imagining his dreams as just a big old snack, big yellow snack on the ground, and uh no, step on snack. Um. But I'm sure that's not what what the poet originally intended. My dreams are rattling and hissing and bearing fangs. Venom is dripping from the fangs of my dreams. But so anyway, so yeah, this is a

good poetic metaphor, and it strikes us as poetic. It's it's like strange it makes us have that feeling of all you get when you read it and when you read a good poem. But then, uh, deut your contrasts that with reading a news or goal about a senator proposing tough legislation to fight crime. Now, this is not a striking metaphor. It's utterly mundane. And yet if you stop to think about it, the concept of tough legislation is just as much of a leap as treading on dreams.

Like you hear, you're saying that this intangible sort of social thing a law, has the quality of a physical material, like it would be difficult to cut or chew. And so why do these phrases feel so different? Well, Deutscher argues that it's mostly because of familiarity. Tough legislation uses a familiar, even cliche, metaphorical understanding of toughness, so it's not surprising or striking in the way that treading on

dreams is. And he notes that metaphors that are so familiar that they've lost their vitality and they no longer strike us as poetic are sometimes referred to as dead metaphors, which I think the irony there maybe not irony the The interesting thing is that's a literary cliche, dead metaphors, invoking a biological metaphor to describe the effects of words and phrases. Oh. One that comes to mind instantly, and perhaps because we're talking about time, is the idea of

killing time to do that all the time. But it it doesn't really do anything like it doesn't. I feel like the phrase killing time does not really summon any kind of novel image in my mind. It doesn't make me think about time as an organism, or time as the body or anything. It's just this dumb thing people say. But that I think, actually killing time would be an incredibly striking metaphor. If you've never heard that before and you just came across it in a poem. Yeah, the

first person who said it was probably a genius. Yeah, imagining time is a little creature that's being bludgeoned to death by your I don't know, by your youth scrolling your phone. But then jumping off this point, he goes on to make what I think is a really interesting point. So I just want to read from from Deutscher's book here. But there's more familiarity than individual acquaintance. For most to force in ordinary language, are also familiar on a much

deeper level. Suppose, for instance, that during an election campaign, you read in a newspaper that quote critics derided the new election manifesto as nothing more than a sou flay of promises. This phrase is clearly metaphorical, since by anyone's standards, a sou flay is is properly made of egg whites, not promises. But although you may never have heard this particular metaphor before, it is still unlikely to strike you as a great poet at coup or as something entirely

out of the ordinary. The reason must be that sous flay of promises belongs to a larger context, which is familiar. And uh so this is because Deutscher argues, quite strangely, metaphors based in food, eating and cooking are very commonly used to describe mental phenomena such as ideas, thoughts, and emotions. And then he goes on to just give a huge laundry list of examples. You can think of anger, simmering, resentment, boiling, or uh, Johnny is chewing over a new concept. You

need time to digest this information. Uh. You know the people won't swallow these lies or are you just gonna lap up that pablum from those politicians? People devour books and so forth. Um, he says. We can have sweet dreams, bitter hatreds, sour relations, half baked ideas and just goes on and on. Once you notice it. It's astonishing how much of the way we talk about feelings and ideas

is based in food. M m. Yeah, and of course all the most I think most of these examples we've been rolling through here or an over them anyway, have distinct ties to Western cuisine, so of course we can easily imagine that in in various other uh international cuisines and in other languages, you have the same thing going on. Yeah, totally, totally, and in fact, I think we we've even talked about

this to some extent on the show before. Like metaphors, you know, sort of mental content, metaphors based in food. They're common in other cultures, not so much in English speaking ones. I do wonder though, if the sufflet of promises is not lost on folks who haven't themselves made or attempted to make a soufflay, because it seems to me like part of it is the idea that yes, it's it's it's a laborious process to make, and then

it deflates, can easily deflate. It's kind of an empty dish, and in some regard that even though it looks fantastic, it is mostly air. And if you don't actualize that, then then maybe something of the metaphor is lost. You know, honestly, I did not even consciously make that connection. Maybe unconsciously I did, But you've opened my mind to a new new dimension of the super You. Maybe you're too familiar with the souflay and you take it for like me.

I I rarely make sufflay, and when I do, I am intimidated by the process because I know what is involved and what is what is possible, Like I don't trust myself enough. Uh, I'm ever on guard. You are right to fear it. Anyway. To pick back up with the Deutscher, so he summarizes what he's just been talking about by saying, quote, there's a well established link in our mind between the two domains which unites all the individual images into a broader conceptual metaphor. Ideas are food.

And thus, when we hear a phrase like suffle of promises the image does not sound so surprising because it fits neatly into this familiar frame. And so for Deutscher, this is an example of conceptual metaphors. The the quote mappings of one domain onto another, and so uh, for some reason, maybe it might be interesting to speculate on what that reason would be. It's just very easy for us to think about the domain of thoughts and feelings in terms of the domain of food. But this isn't

the only conceptual mapping like this. And here's where we get back to time. Deutscher makes the case that there is a similar natural metaphorical domain overlap between time and space. Now, on one hand, you might think, well, that totally makes sense, because you a twenty one century person who is somewhat literate in the sciences, you know that space and time

are actually linked in modern physics. But the point is that these conventions of language long predate Einstein or any knowledge of general relativity or the concept of space time. Since prehistory, there is clear evidence in language itself that humans have naturally tended to think and talk about time as if time were a type of space, or as if the rules of space applied to it. So once

again Deutscher gives a ton of examples. He writes, quote, consider some of the simplest words we use to describe spatial relations, prepositions such as in at by, from to, behind, within, and through, And then he gives a ton of examples within actual phrases. So the idea of like from London to Paris, you can compare to from Monday to Friday, or in England the same way you would say in January or in the sixteenth century, you can stand at

the door or you can arrive at noon. All these prepositions, He's saying a flow originally from the linguistic domain of space and come to be applied to time. Uh. And beyond this, he argues that this is not just a quirk of English. This is true of literally every language that has ever been studied. There are no exceptions. Every language on Earth talks about time as if it were

a type of space, which suggests something. If that's true, suggests something very ancient and powerful about that link in

our consciousness. I'm reminded of a part of Barry Lopez's book Arctic Dreams, where he's talking about this um conversation between an Arctic Arctic explorer and uh an Inuit uh and the Inuit man has has asked of this pair of binoculars allows him to see into tomorrow and um and in this particular instance, you know, there's a certain amount of you know, perhaps a lot of it's about

the languages here, you know, and uh and uh. But it it kind of gets to this idea too of in a place where you have wide open spaces and uh and and you know a fair amount of moving around and resources are spread out, like you know what the individual is asking like, well, this binoculars allow me to see something that I would not be able to

reach until tomorrow. And that's always just stuck stuck with me because it it gets into this it touches on this spatial idea of of time but also within a realm that in a geography that at least for many of us that you know, it makes it a little easier to comprehend that firm connection like tomorrow is not only um, you know, something that will happen to me, It is also it is also a place I will be because I know where I can see potentially see

where I will be tomorrow. You know what I'm saying, oh yeah, and I think that's a fantastic point that actually connects to something else I wanted to talk about, which is um the idea that, Okay, so the metaphorical overlap between space and time appears to only flow in

one direction. You might find a stray counter example somewhere, but generally the idea is that our human languages take concepts and metaphors that begin as descriptions of space and then apply them to time, not the other way around. So we talk about the present as if it were spatially here, and we visualize the past as if it were physically behind us. And like, if you stop to think about the physicality even the biology of that, the past we imagine usually as in the direction of our butts,

you know, behind us. The future is physically in front of us. And this is one of those great things that like it's so mundane that you don't stop to notice it. But when you pay attention to that, I suspect it's like this and not the other way around. You know, it's not that we imagine the future as behind us, in the past in front of us because

of totally contingent facts about how our bodies move. If you're walking in a straight line, the area in front of you is space that you will occupy in the future, and the space behind you is the place you occupied in the past. And so you can think about alternative biology,

different body morphology leading to different conceptions of time. Like if crabs evolved to possess abstract intelligence as language, I kind of suspect they might visualize the past and future to the left and right since they often walk sideways instead of forwards and backwards. And then now is simply

the heat, I guess. Yeah. It also makes you think about the way you know, eyes are positioned on different organisms, thinking about say, herbivores, whose whose eyes are often positioned more on the sides of the head in a way to per vide more panoramic view of what's happening, so they can have a better idea of where the predators are coming in versus the the eyesight of a predator. That is more about what is directly in front of me,

what is the thing I am after? Right? Yeah, So that makes me wonder if our conception of time is also influenced by our heads being shaped more like carnivore heads. But anyway. To wrap up the section about Guy Deutscher's book, I just want to read one more thing, he says, quote. This link between space and time is so entrenched in our cognition that it is extremely difficult to extricate ourselves from it and appreciate that time cannot literally be long

or short, unlike sticks or pieces of string. Nor can time literally pass unlike a train. Time cannot go forwards and backwards anymore than it goes sideways, diagonally, or downwards. Time doesn't actually go anywhere at all. Uh. And I think this is a great point. The link in our language is so deep it's difficult even to talk about it because we don't really have any language for time that is not a metaphor based on space, except maybe

in pure mathematical expressions. Yeah, we have this, Yeah, like you said, we have this, This entire suite, multiple suites of of terms we used to talk about time, and yet very often we're we're at a lack to to really define time. Um and and certainly it's it's hard to just really settle in on a definition of what it is. What one that I often come back to is the idea of time is the rate of change

in the universe. And if you if you stop yourself and all, if you stop yourself and all of this and start like asking questions about time travel in that, like in regards to the rate of change in the universe, things get silly really quickly, you know, like, like what is time? It's the rate of change in the universe? Well, can I can I do that backwards? Going to do

that in reverse? Uh? Can I like travel back? Like it's like asking is this It's like saying, you know it, I really like wet I would like to travel to wet. What do you mean you would like to travel to? What you want to travel to? Somewhere that is wet because you can't just travel to wet Yeah exactly. I mean, yeah, that's a great metaphor. And even then, I mean it makes you wonder. Okay. So on one hand, I think the rate of change in the universe is a good

way of trying to describe what time is. But does the does the idea of rate not itself in a way kind of assume time Like it's just yeah, there's it's you can't get under it, right, it's it is in it in itself it's also an imperfect definition. UM, but I guess the reason I come back to it is that it is significantly different from this a lot of these metaphors that we end up using. So it kind of it kind of throws a wrench into your your cognitive process, you know, totally. Oh and I guess

one last thing. This isn't strictly about time, but I just thought I would mention it because I thought it was interesting. Deutscher actually does go beyond this. So he goes from talking about how metaphors of space are applied to time, but then they keep being applied to even

deeper levels of uh of other concepts and language. Uh. So he makes this argument about how about how concepts of space flow through metaphorical use to time, and then from time to causes or reasons and all these other things. So you have something you have a preposition like from which originally describes space, so you could be from Tucson, Arizona, and then that can be applied to time, so you can remember something from last Tuesday, and then that can

be applied to causes or reasons for things. So the example he gives is he shivers from the cold Anyway, I love stuff like this because there's so much that's fascinating about the way that we use language. I guess it's fascinating to me because we all do it, and we do it all the time, and we don't notice we're doing it. So just being asked to stop and observe the words you're using and what that reveals about

how you think is is often extremely eye opening. Yeah, I mean this this linear view of things that it falls into everything, like even as we talk about ideas, you know, we we're building things out of sentences. We're talking about uh forming an idea out of this and uh building up to this idea, arriving at this conclusion

and so forth. Yeah. Thank As I was thinking about all this, I started thinking about some of the terms used by Merchia eliade Um, who you know, in in his work, you often have this this separation of time into mythic time and profane time. So mythic time is when gods and heroes experience their victories, defeats, and their dramas you know, at the time of of mythic stories playing out um, during during which these these various exploits

shaped the earth, shaped our culture. But then during profane time, nothing that we do has any value except to the extent that it recreates or in some way connects us with events that occurred during mythic time. Right. So Eliote was a was a scholar of religion, and yeah, I understand this was one of his main points. It was that a lot of what we think of as religion either is or is derived from attempts to recreate or re enact uh, things that allegedly took place in this

other mythic time. Right. And of course this connection that he's talking about between mythic past and propain present, uh, you know, it's not quite like a physical journey, uh, you know, via time machine between two times, though, though I suppose characters who venture into a realm of gods or spirits is in some way they are making a journey into mythic time, a realm where mythic time is either still going on or perhaps is has just happened, or is in some way you know, more present. Um.

You know. Again, it's not nothing like these modern ideas of time travel, but um, but it certainly got me thinking about all of this, oh absolutely. And to stay

on the subject of myth and religion. I mean, one thing that I think is kind of interesting and understanding how humans imagine time throughout history is sort of the difference between myth and legend as generally understood by by scholars of religion, where uh, the idea is that myth is a story that takes place, uh, you know, often telling some kind of origin of something, but it's also a story that takes place, usually in a time that is somehow removed from your own timeline, whereas legend is

something that appears to blur into your own, your own

actual history. So they might both be stories that are not like literal descriptions of things that took place in the past, but myth it's kind of like it would be hard to say when the myth actually took place, whereas you could say a legend is about some thing that allegedly happened a thousand years ago, right, So like a legendary king, a legendary emperor is in many cases the sort of individual that historians and archaeologists can look to and say, like, well, who's the actual person that

this may be based upon. Whereas when you get into the mythic mythic kings mythic emperors. These are figures that are often uh, you know, indecipherable from God's not to say that they don't uh there's not a potential for some connection to actual living humans, but uh, in many cases, yeah, it is about the things that occurred before the stories

that define the world in which we live. I think it's interesting that there are different ways to imagine the past, whether or not what you're imagining is is accurate or not. I mean, that's sort of beside the point right now. Just like if you're imagining what happened long ago, there

are sort of different timelines. You know, is there there's a past that's kind of inaccessible to us, and then the past that you can at least imagine as being accessible, even if you don't think you could say, travel back

to it. And I think in a way that has sort of changed maybe in twentieth century science fiction at least where one thing that seems true may being disagree rob about twentieth century science fiction is that, uh, this imagines there's a leveling effect where okay, no, now there's just there's a timeline, and if you have a time machine, you can go back to anything forward or backward that

actually happened or will actually happen. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um. It reminds me of you know something else that the iliat was was big on this idea of archaic cultures accessing circular sacred time, a time of origins and creations, while modern cultures use a linear sacred time that is essentially bolted onto the timeline of profane time. Um. But but in all of the the you know, the origin

of things was important. Uh. So, like, just thinking again about mythic time, it in some ways it feels like, well, the mythic time is more real, like it's more of a real place than uh, you know, whatever happened last year was whatever happened last year wasn't important at all, at least aside from any ways in which it recreated mythic time. Um. And so I was I was thinking about, like, well, twenty century ideas of all of this, um. And it made me made me think about, well, some of our

our time travel stories are modern time travel stories. And I started thinking about back to the future, which I don't know where this falls in your introduction to time travel, Joe, but I have a feeling that either back to the future or the old adaptation like the nineteen fifties or sixties adaptation of the time Machine. One of those was my first introduction to the idea of time travel, and it was it was probably Back to the Future. Oh yeah, I can't say for sure, but Back to the Future

has got to be up there for me. It was certainly one of the earliest, and it benefits from being the kind of movie that feels can nicle. Um. You know, even when you're a kid, I think you detect some kind of differences in the quality of cinema, even at that age where I liked every movie I saw, there are some movies that feel kind of like, Okay, that's just some weird thing I saw on TV one time, And there are other movies that feel like a part of the canon of of culture and and Back to

the Future felt that way. Yeah, absolutely, And so it got me wondering thinking back on it now, to what extent any time travel story is essentially taking a particular time in the past. Obviously, we're just talking about time travel stories that concerned the past and establishing it is a kind of sacred time, one that explains conditions in our profane present time and m you know, in terms of Back to the Future, Uh, you know, this is this is a story that doesn't just concern the mid

nineteen fifties. It idolizes the mid nineteen fifties, It fetishizes the nineteen fifties. Uh, it's this is a time of great admiration for this film, a period of of iconic and highly sanitized American nostalgia. Um. And it is also the time that defines our characters. You know, this is the this is the age during which Marty McFly's parents were themselves youth. This is the time during which they

would come together and eventually create Marty McFly. Well, in another way, you could almost say that in Back to the Future, Marty McFly travels back to a cinematic nineteen fifties more than a real nineteen fifties, Like he's traveling to a mythic time almost because it's like, yeah, it's sort of what you're because like the stuff he sees when he gets there are not so much based in history, but they're based on the images people remember from like

movies and TV of the nineteen fifties. So you know, the soda shop with the counter and the you know, all that kind of stuff. It is a mythic reality that explains the origins of things and uh and and and and and provides the idea of how things should be. Um. So it's yeah, it's it's kind of interesting to think about the Back of the Future in terms of of Iliades writings. By the way, I had to do the math on this because I always find this kind of

thing um interesting but also um alarming. You know, it makes me feel old to realize this. So this is a movie back to the Future that concerned a jaunt from night five to nineteen fifty five. If you were to take an identical jaunt today from the year one, that would take you back to the year nineteen one, that is the year that Highlander two came out. Christof Lambert goes back thirty years, gives himself a pep talk, uh, you know, like tells him how to stand up for himself.

Ends up with Lambert punching Sean Connery in the face. Like, yeah, I can see it. Also the year of dan Ackroid's nothing but Trouble, pivotal time, mythic time for American culture. They're also cool as Ice, the Vanilla Ice movie. Well, hell, there you go, a time of heroes and gods. Basically, what we're saying was a weird year for films. It's when you try to look for the real standouts. I

mean there are You've got stuff like Barton Faint going on. Um, you know, but you know it's also the year of stuff like Freddie's Dead, the Final Nightmare. Oh, we did have a time travel a movie there. We also had Bill and Ted came out their Bogus Journey. That would be the second one. Okay, well we gotta stop this or we'll just keep going. Okay, the whole episodes. So anyway, just getting back at the basic point, mainstream time travel tropes um are not that old, and we'll explore some

examples of this shortly. Um. While time travel narratives are in some ways like other complex ways of thinking about the past and the present, they're not quite the same. But you can easily get into just a whole argument of like looking back at old things and old stories and saying, to what extent is this time travel? To what extent is it not? Because think about a lot of modern time travel stories. What happens you have Marty McFly, he goes back, what does he do he meets his dad.

You know, uh, there are other tales of this sort. You know where you're it's about connecting with ancestors, and of course communication and connection with ancestors is widespread in religion and myth and folklore, though these generally take on the forum of spirit communication of some sort, not physical

or even holographic journeys. Right, a lot of the time travel stories about interacting with ancestors are either there, uh, to recall some of the language we used in our Weird House Cinema episode about time after time, they're often debugging history stories where you're trying to go back and fix something that went wrong with one of your ancestors, to make the present better, or to undo the mischief of another time traveler who screwed up the future by

doing something with your ancestors. And sometimes there are some stories where they, you know, they try to maintain the consistent timeline by having a person go back and like do something with their ancestors that in turn was necessary for the present to happen the way it did. You know, the stories of paradoxes where somebody goes back and they

become their own grandfather or something creepy. Yeah. Now for some answers, UH, in all of this, I look to a wonderful book came out in two thousand one by Paul J. Nayan, an electrical engineer and science author. It's called Time Travel, Time Machines, Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics and Science Fiction. And it's a it's a real fun, very readable book. You can still get copies of this. I think there's been a couple of at least a couple of editions that have come out over the years.

UM and UH. It deals with everything that's mentioned in the title, but probably focusing more here on just gleaning some of the sci fi references from it, because he does a great job about talking about, uh, the different types of time travel narratives that we have and what are some of the earlier examples of them. Uh. And he identifies a sort of related precursor to tales of ventures into the future UM, as well as I guess into the past in the form of stories and accounts

of visions of the future. So back before the Time Machine by H. D Wells, you had as early as eighteen fifty six popular English language tales that's speculated on the far future, such as an eighteen fifty six Harper's article that pondered what the year three thousand would be like.

It was titled January one a d three thousand, and it was apparently by an anonymous author, but I think it was at least edited by Alfred A. Gern Say, But I'm not not exactly sure if if an actual author has ever been attributed to this piece, or if it remains just anonymous. I bet it was absolutely prophetic. I had to look it up. Harper's magazine still has it, and I think it's in their archives, so you have to be a subscriber. That's probably the best way to see it. I think I was able to find an

exert of it and google books. Uh, it seems pretty farcical, so don't expect any thing to sci fi. Lots of pondering over what sorts of stupid things men of the far future will where. There's some great illustrations from this um. This article included them here for you, Joe. Everybody looks like uh like Scottish warrior dandies. Yes, and in a way you know, I don't know, these aren't too far

off the off the mark. I guess you know, but you know it concerns the very sorts of time travel social commentary you might expect today, like when a time traveler is a gas to learn that individual freedom has been um, you know, has been um violated by state sanctioned diets and actually get your burgers in the future. Right, Yeah, it's it's that sort of thing, so, you know, which is not to say that you know that this art.

You know, I don't mean to criticize this article because again, this is the sort of thing that still goes on today. And as one can imagine, it can be done well, and it can also be done you know, crudely or ineffectually, but anyway, it is a noteworthy example. Now, weirdly, a major nineteenth century example of multidirectional time travel is by

Charles Dickens. You wouldn't have expected him to be one of the pioneers in this area, but we have it in the form of a Christmas carol, which, you know, great story. We often missed some of the finer social points of it, but it's a it's a story that has become a part of Western holiday traditions. Like it's it's a narrative we put up there almost with the you know, the tales of Santa Claus and the Baby Jesus. But it is essentially about time travel visions, you know.

I guess you can you can critique and say, well, it's happening within the context of a dream. And I don't know to what extent he's actually being visited by spirits, But I don't know. I always think of them as actual spirits. I think of these as actual visions that are brought to him by supernatural entities. Yeah. Sure, I mean it's fiction, you know. Yeah, the spirits are coming to him and uh, yeah, he's he gets to see the past, the present, and the future. Yeah, I mean yeah,

I guess that's the great thing about the stories. You can think of it in different ways. It's like, to what extent is Scrooge just simply having this this night of intense dreaming and and and and reflection and pondering about the future. He's engaging in mental time travel, which of course is something that that that that humans have in general, that allows us to form these simulations of

the past that too varying degrees may be correct. Uh, And then compare those two simulations of what the future might hold and and various simulations about how that future situation will affect us, how will respond, etcetera. So you can just say that, or you can go with the more fun idea that like actual beings from beyond the grave came and visited him and took him on journeys, you know, through the through, through the past, and the

president in the future. Right, and so, while a lot of the modern sci fi time travel I think is clearly traceable back to two H. G. Wells and the stories he wrote in the eighteen nineties and uh, mainly the novel The Time the Time Machine in right, this goes back significantly earlier. Christmas Carol came out in eighteen forty three. Yeah, now you have even earlier stories. They get closer to a whole trope or or about to discuss.

There's a Bulgarian tale from eighteen twenty four about a Russian hero who swept overboard at sea and he becomes wrapped in an herb known as the UH is the root of life and UH, and then he comes to in the year four. I love how some of many of these older time travel stories they just go for it.

They just go like a thousand years into the future. Um, you don't seem like you don't see as much of that, and and I don't know many of the stories we were you know, we grow even I guess I fall back to the patterns set by Back to the Future, Like what are you looking at your traveling into the time of your parents, or you're traveling into the time of your children, which I think makes a lot of sense because that's a very human perspective of individual perspective

level of time travel. That's the that's generally the spectrum that we're most concerned about, or should be I guess most concerned about it is like where do we come from? And what sort of world are we leaving for our children? I wonder if the tendency for for time travel journeys to become more modest in scale, you know, people going

a hundred years into the future instead of a thousand. Uh, if that happens in the twentieth century because of the increasing rate of cultural and technological change in the twentieth century, like people living in a time where things see it will seem at least and I don't know if there's an objective way to measure this, but seem at least to be changing faster than ever. Did they start to think, like, I can't set this a thousand years in the future,

because like nothing will even be recognizable. I've got to I've got to pull the pull the reins back a bit. Yeah, getting into the concept of future shock, right, the idea that it just seems like things are moving at such a terrific level, I can't possibly predict what it's going to be like in uh, you know, in just ten years now. One of the interesting things there is, of course, that the concept of future shock, that there could be almost this trauma and anxiety associated with the the rate

of technological advancement. This didn't come about till nineteen seventy. This was American futurist Alvin Toffler and his spouse Adelaide. Uh. They they formulated this concept. So, I don't know, it would be interesting to look at the sci fi. At sci fi from the nineteen seventies, was was it less less um likely to look at near future situations and more likely to gaze into the far future, you know, sort of like the early earlier work of Frank Herbert

looking into the far future Humanity and Dune. Because it seems like by the time we get into the nineteen eighties, you have far more of a tendency with sci fi authors to look into an immediate future. But I could be way off off the path there. I'm just probably cherry picking thinking about various works from different decades that I'm familiar with. Well, we we teased earlier the question of how far back in history the concept of time

travel actually goes. It's clear again that a lot of modern time travel, I think is largely traceable back to H. G. Wells and The Time Machine. Again, that's the eighteen nineties, but there are ideas of time travel from before that.

Like we've been discussing how far before that. So I was looking around for evidence of the oldest stories of time travel and literature, and I came across an interesting claim from a professor, actually a professor at Georgia Tech named Lisa Yazik, who is a professor of science fiction studies.

So I was watching a video lecture that she did in about She actually wrote the preface or introduction to a recent new edition of of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, and she's done a lot of study about the history of time travel stories actually connected her also by a mentioned in that article by by Adam Man in Life Science. But Yesik actually has a lot of of interesting thoughts

about time travel. She argues that it is not as modern a literary concept as we might assume, and in fact, some forms of time travel are as old as literature itself. And so what would be the examples here? Well, she gives the example of the ancient Sanskrit epic the Mahabarita, which describes a form of time travel that yeas it

calls time dilation. So this would be similar to the type of time travel that is quite real a confirmed part of modern physics that we know from general relativity, where say, if you are um, if you are near an object of great mass, or if you are moving at great velocity, then relative to other objects in the universe, your experience of time will slow down. You will age more slowly, as as time sort of zips by in the broader context. But this story is not about physics,

so uh. This story in the Mahabarata probably dates back to sometime in the first millennium b c. E UH, and it is the story of a king named Rivada, who is also known as Kakudman and his daughter Ravati actually found a good text of this story, though it is the version that's told not in the Mahabarata but in the Vishnu Puranha. And so this version is from the Vishnu Puranha, and it's translated into English in the

nineteenth century by Horace Hayman Wilson. So the story begins with this king Ravada, who is the eldest of a hundred brethren. And King Ravada has a surpassingly wonderful daughter named Ravati, and she is just awesome and lovely in every possible way. She's like the best princess ever. And in fact, Ravati is so great that Rivada doesn't know if there are really any men around who are worthy of her hand in marriage. So he gets an idea.

He is going to consult the heads. He will travel to the Brahma realm, the plane of existence where the god Brahma dwells, and he will consult with the great God. He will get the advice of Brahma, because if anybody should be able to find him a suitable match for Ravati, it should be Brahma. But when the two of them get there, Brahma is in the middle of listening to a concert. They're they're a group of of divine singers

who are who are going through a song. And so Ravada and Ravati sit and wait patiently for the song to finish. And here I'm going to quote from the Wilson translation. At the end of their singing, Ravada prostrated himself before Brahma and explained his Errand whom should you wish for a son in law? Demanded Brahma, And the King mentioned to him various persons with whom he could

be well pleased. Nodding his head gently and graciously smiling, Brahma said to him, of those whom you have named, the third or fourth generation no longer survives, for many successions of ages have passed away whilst you were listening to our songsters. Now upon earth, the great age of the present Manu is nearly finished, and the Collie period

is at hand. You must therefore bestow this virgin gym upon some other husband, for you are now alone, and your friends, your minister's servants, wife, kinsman, armies, and treasures have long since been swept away by the hand of time. So the issue here is that time flows at a different rate on Earth than it does in the Brahma realm. It's as if the Brahma realm were like near a

supermassive black hole. So while the two mortals were sitting here listening to this song, presumably the song's only a few minutes long, millions of years have passed on Earth, and everybody they ever knew or knew of is dead. Fortunately, there are some immortal god still around, and so there is a semi happy ending for Ravati because at the end she gets too She gets pared up with one of the avatars of the god Vishnu, who is quite worthy of her hand in marriage, of course, because he's Vishnu.

And then there's a long section of the story in the Vishnu Puranha version that is just a monologue on the nature of Vishnu, who interestingly is in places described sort of like a manifestation of time itself. So I just want to read some some parts of this monologue,

not the whole thing. Quote the being of whose commencement, course and termination we are ignorant, the unborn and omnipresent essence of all things, He who's real and infinite nature and essence we do not know is the supreme Vishnu. He is time, made up of moments and hours and years, whose influence is the source of perpetual change. He is the universal form of all things, from birth to death. He is eternal, without name or shape, and then skipping

ahead of it. He is at once the creator, and that which is created the preserver, and that which is preserved the destroyer, and as one with all things, that which is destroyed, and as the indestructible. He is distinct from these three vicissitudes. In him is the world. He is the world, and he the primeval self born is again present in the world. Wow. Yeah, that that reminds me of some translations of of the Geta. They they translate the words of Ishnu as as I am time

grown old, which I like that. That yeah, that gives me chills. Now. There's another interesting thing that gets mentioned in this story, which is that, though there are some very important differences between this myth and the dystopian sci fi stories of the modern era, Rivada and Ravati do return to a future earth that could be called dystopian, or at least worse off than the one they left at. Don't know if this has to do, it might have to do with um what Brahma says about the Earth

being on the verge of the Collie age. But we are told quote being thus instructed by the Lotus born divinity. Ravada returned with his daughter to Earth, where he found the race of men dwindled in stature, reduced in vigor, and enfeebled in intellect. So they come back and people are like worse than when they left. Things things have

gone downhill. And uh So I want to be clear that the kind of dystopian future described by H. G. Wells in The Time Machine is I believe understood as a contingent consequence of bad social and political trends within linear time. So I think the important point that Wells is trying to make is that if we say, continue tolerating a society in which the rich relentlessly exploit the labor of the poor, here's what you're gonna get. You know, you're gonna get Eloi and morlocks. Um, I don't get

that kind of implication in this ancient Indian epic. It would be good to hear from listeners with more knowledge about ancient Hindu thought. But I think the story about Ravata and Ravati is more consistent with a vision of a kind of cyclical mythic time in which there there are ages of human advancement and then ages of human retreat and it's just that they happen to pop out of the Brahma realm in one of the bad times. Yeah,

that's that's my understanding as well. And of course, this this view of time um that is um matches a very very loosely with with some of the ideas you see in um uh in various Native American tribal cultures and in Mesoamerican cultures, where it's a procession of different ages and catastrophes and we find ourselves and yet another age, and there will be another catastrophe, but then there will

be another age beyond that. Now, of course this raises the question people always want to like pick at logical issues in time travel stories, and and this story has mythic logic, so it's pointless to try to pick at it. But I couldn't help but think, why didn't they just wait a few more minutes with Brahma and maybe like listen to another song, and then they could pop out at a better time on Earth? I don't know. Now.

I love the idea that it involves um listening to to music though, because yeah, I gets into this, like, because what happens when we listen to listen to to music? You know, that's just one of the many human experiences that can alter our perception of time. You know, you get lost in a good song, and I don't know, sometimes that good song doesn't seem to last long enough. You've gotta put it on repeat and listen to it

about six times um. And in other cases, you know, you it seems to stretch on for a very long time and you lose yourself in it. Um. And curiously enough, this pops up in another UH tale. This is a Japanese fairy tale of Urashima Taro Uh. This tale about a fisherman who rescues a turtle and returns it to the dragon palace beneath the sea. While he's there returning said turtle, he's entertained by the princess there as a reward, and you know, there's music and dancing. It's great, uh.

And then he's sent home with a box that he's forbidden to open. And when he returns to his home village, he finds that a hundred years has passed, and when he opens the box that again he was forbidden to open, he immediately ages an entire century. Oh no, don't open the box, dude. Yeah. I mean, if if gods and goddesses and strange ladies under the ocean tell you not to open the box, don't open that box. You know what. We're in the odd situation where I think we need

to call this episode right here. But there's a lot more we want to say about the history of of thinking about time travel, and so what I'm proposing is that on this subject, we sleep into the future. I don't think we're quite ready for the next episode of the show to be part two of this, so maybe this will be an open part one, and who knows when the hands of time will reach out and feed

you the second entry. Yeah, just don't open any strange boxes in the meantime, all right, well, yes, definitely look out for that in the next episode. Uh, we have some we may have. I think we are gonna have some other episodes that have to occur before then, but we will be back to discuss this topic more. In the meantime, you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Will You can find all of them trailing back through time in the Stuff

to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. You can get that wherever you get your podcasts. Uh. We have our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays listener mail. On Mondays we do a short form artifact on Wednesdays. On Friday we do a little something called Weird House Cinema. That's when we set most serious concerns aside and we just talk about some sort of strange film. And we have discussed time travel films and not only time after time, but uh, oh,

what else did we get into? Um uh, Transfers. Transfers is a hell of a time travel movie, The Return of Jack Dad. Yes, TEUs right, we did, we did Transfers to Oh and then on the weekends we do a vault episode that's a rerun from the previous year. Huge Things. As always to our excellent audio producer Seth

Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts for My heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.