From the Vault: Time Traveler Zero, Part 1

Today, time travel fiction is everywhere – and we understand the cosmos enough to even speculate what is and isn’t possible. But how old is the notion of travel through time? What sorts of attitudes and ideas concerning the nature of time were seemingly necessary before humans first imagined firing up a time machine? (originally published 12/14/2021)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time for an episode from the Vault. Today we're airing
Time Traveler zero, Part one, which originally published on December. Uh.
This was I think when we were trying to see
how far back we could trace the idea of time

(00:28):
travel in speculative fiction, mythology and so forth. Yeah, how
far back does the idea of the time traveler go?
And what did we have before that? This is a
real fun two parter that we put together. And this
is part one. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind
production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to

(00:55):
Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick. And we've been adding. 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

(01:17):
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
you know, I think one of the more interesting questions
to come back to in this episode of Stuff to
put your mind is um is not just thinking about okay,

(01:38):
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 and come from? And

(02:01):
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

(02:23):
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 recent centuries
that made this idea more more tangible to people? And

(02:46):
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 im 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

(03:09):
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?

(03:30):
And why would that be? Because you know, as we
try to drive home on the show, humans of centuries
and millennia past were 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

(03:52):
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

(04:14):
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 Guy Deutscher.
This book was published by McMillan in two thousand five.

(04:37):
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

(04:59):
on 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

(05:23):
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.

(05:48):
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, a big

(06:09):
yellow snack on the ground, and U no step on snack.
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

(06:32):
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 article 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

(06:54):
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

(07:17):
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 they're maybe not irony.

(07:39):
The the interesting thing is that's a literary cliche, dead metaphors,
invoking a biological metaphor to describe the effects of words
and phrases. One that comes to mind instantly, and perhaps
because we're talking about time, is the idea of killing
time that all the time, but it it doesn't really
do anything like it doesn't like the phrase killing time

(08:01):
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

(08:24):
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 metaphors in ordinary
language are also familiar on a much deeper level. Suppose,

(08:46):
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 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,

(09:09):
it is still unlikely to strike you as a great
poetic coup or as something entirely out of the ordinary.
The reason must be that su 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

(09:34):
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

(09:54):
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

(10:15):
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 a number of them anyway, have distinct ties to
Western cuisine. So of course, you know, 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,

(10:38):
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 in
English speaking ones. I do wonder, though, if the promises
is not lost on folks who haven't themselves made or
attempted to make a sufflay, because it seems to me

(10:59):
like part of it. It's the idea that yes, it's
it's it's a laborious process to make, and then it deflat,
It 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

(11:21):
I did, But you've opened my mind to a new
new dimension of the super you. Maybe you're too familiar
with the sou fla and you take it for like me.
I I rarely make suffla, 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, so I'm ever on guard. You
are right to fear it. But anyway, to pick back

(11:42):
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
su flay of promises, the image to do is not
sounds so surprising because it fits neatly into this familiar frame.

(12:05):
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.

(12:29):
But this isn't the only conceptual mapping like this, And
here is 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,

(12:50):
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

(13:14):
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.

(13:35):
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

(13:57):
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,

(14:18):
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 Artic Arctic
explorer and uh, an Inuit Uh. And the Inuit man

(14:38):
has has asked if 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
you know a lot of it 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 space is and uh and

(15:01):
and you know a fair amount of moving around and
resources are spread out, like you know what the individual
was 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

(15:26):
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

(15:48):
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 ideas that
our human languages take concepts and metaphors that begin as
descriptions of space and then apply them to time, not

(16:09):
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

(16:30):
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,

(16:54):
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

(17:16):
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 eat 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

(17:39):
of the head in a way to provide 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 so influenced by

(18:00):
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

(18:24):
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

(18:47):
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, 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

(19:09):
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 and
that like that 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

(19:30):
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 what 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.

(19:53):
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 is in it in itself. It's
also an imperfect definition. Um, but I guess the reason

(20:16):
I come back to it is that it is significantly
different from this a lot of these metaphors 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

(20:38):
of space are applied to time, but then they keep
being applied to even deeper levels of 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

(21:00):
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

(21:20):
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

(21:43):
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're building things out
of sentences. We're talking about uh forming an idea out
of this and uh building up to this idea or
riving at this conclusion and so forth. Yeah. Thank as

(22:10):
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

(22:32):
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.

(22:52):
So Eliot was a it 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
his religion either is or is derived from attempts to
recreate or re enact things that allegedly took place in
this other mythic time. Right. And of course this connection

(23:15):
that he's talking about between mythic past and p paining present. Uh,
you know, it's not quite like a physical journey, uh
that 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,

(23:38):
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 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

(24:03):
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

(24:23):
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 something that allegedly happened
a thousand years ago, right, So like a legendary king,

(24:46):
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 emperor's, Uh,
these are figures that are often uh, you know, indecipherable
from God's not to say that they don't there's not

(25:07):
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

(25:28):
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

(25:52):
that seems true maybeing 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

(26:13):
you know something else that the Iliote 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 has essentially bolted onto the
timeline of profane time. Um. But but in all of
the the you know, the origin of things was important.

(26:34):
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.

(26:56):
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

(27:18):
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

(27:39):
the kind of movie that feels canonical. 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 culture and and Back to the

(28:00):
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 as a
kind of sacred time, one that explains conditions in our

(28:21):
profane present time. And um, you know, in terms of
Back to the Future, Uh, you know, this is this
is a story that 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

(28:42):
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 youths. 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

(29:04):
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

(29:27):
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 this 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

(29:48):
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 nineteen eighty five to nineteen fifty five. If you
were to take an identical jaunt today from the year

(30:09):
one that would take you back to the year nineteen.
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

(30:30):
year of dan Ackroyd's Nothing but Trouble, a pivotal time,
mythic time for American culture. They're also cool as Ice,
the Vanilla Ice movie Health 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

(30:51):
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. There. Oh, we did have a time
travel uh 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

(31:15):
getting back at the basic point. Mainstream time travel tropes
um are not that old, and will explore some examples
of this shortly. UM. While time travel narratives are in
some ways like other complex ways of thinking about the
past in 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

(31:37):
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 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 only take on

(32:00):
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,

(32:22):
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

(32:43):
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 this, I look to A
wonderful book came out in two thousand one by Paul J.
Nayan and all electrical engineer and science author. It's called
Time Travel, Time Machines, Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and

(33:06):
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

(33:29):
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.

(33:51):
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

(34:12):
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

(34:32):
be a subscriber that's probably the best way to see it.
I think I was able to find an expert of
it and google books. Uh, it seems pretty farcical, So
don't expect anything 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

(34:55):
uh like Scottish warrior dandies. Yes, and anyway, 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 uh

(35:16):
you know, has been um violated by state sanctioned diets
as 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,

(35:40):
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,

(36:00):
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,

(36:22):
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,

(36:43):
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 reflection and pondering about
the future. He's engaging in mental time travel, which of
course is something that that that that humans have of
in general, that allows us to form these simulations of

(37:04):
the past that two 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,

(37:27):
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 mainly the
novel The Time the Time Machine, and that right, this

(37:47):
goes back significantly earlier. Christmas Carol came out in eighteen
forty three. Yeah, now you have even earlier stories that
get closer to um a whole trope or or about
to discuss. There's a Bulgarian tale from eighteen twenty for
about a Russian hero who swept overboard at sea and
he becomes wrapped in an herb known as the uh

(38:07):
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.
I guess I fall back to the the pattern set

(38:29):
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, 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

(38:51):
are we leaving for our children. I wonder if the
tendency for for time travel journeys to become more modest
in scale, you know, 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

(39:14):
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

(39:36):
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 nine. This
was American futurist Alvin Toffler and his spouse Adelaide Uh.

(39:59):
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

(40:20):
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 than than well. We we teased earlier

(40:45):
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 they're our ideas of time
travel from before that. Like we've been discussing how far
before that? So I was looking around for evidence of

(41:07):
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

(41:29):
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 mention in
that article by by Adam Man in Life Science. But
Yasick actually has a lot of uh of interesting thoughts

(41:50):
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 Mahabarata,
which describes a form of time travel that yeas it

(42:12):
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

(42:35):
more slowly as as time sort of zips by in
the broader context. But this story is not about physics.
So this story in the Mahabarta 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

(42:55):
found a good text of the story, though, it is
the version that's told not in the mahabar Rita 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

(43:20):
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 Ravada 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 heavens. He will travel

(43:42):
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

(44:04):
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

(44:27):
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 they great age of

(44:48):
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 friend is 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

(45:12):
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
songs 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,

(45:38):
and so there is a semi happy ending for Ravati
because at the end she gets to she gets paired
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

(46:00):
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
in omnipresent essence of all things. He who is real
and infinite nature and essence we do not know, is

(46:21):
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

(46:45):
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.

(47:11):
They they they translate the words of Vishnu 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

(47:32):
Ravati do return to a future Earth that could be
called dystopian, or at least worse off than the one
they left. I 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. Rivada returned with his daughter to Earth,

(47:55):
where he found the race of men dwindled in stature,
reduced in vigor, enfeebled in intellect. So they come back
and people are like worse than when they left. Think
things have gone downhill. And uh so, I want to
be clear that the kind of dystopian future described by H. G.
Wells and the Time Machine is I believe, understood as

(48:18):
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 more locks. Um. I don't

(48:40):
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 this 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 than ages of

(49:00):
and 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 matches matches up very very loosely
with with some of the ideas you see in um
uh in various Native American tribal cultures and in Mesoamerican

(49:20):
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

(49:42):
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 music though,
because yeah, I gets into this, like, because what happens
when we listen to listen to music? You know, that's
just one of the many human experiences that can all
to our perception of time. You know, you get lost

(50:02):
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

(50:22):
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 uh. And then
he's sent home with a box that he's forbidden to open.

(50:44):
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 God's 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

(51:07):
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

(51:29):
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 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. If you would like to check out
other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, well you

(51:51):
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 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

(52:12):
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 transfers,
transfers to the Hell of the time travel movie, The
Return of Jack Dad. Yes, tell you it's right. We
did what we did Transers too. Oh and then on

(52:33):
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

(52:58):
to Blow Your Mind. It's production I Heart Radio. For
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