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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My

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Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

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Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and

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Speaker 1: we've been chatting. Uh, I guess quite a bit about

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Speaker 1: time travel recently on the show, first probably in our

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Speaker 1: our Weird House Cinema episode about the nineteen seventy nine

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Speaker 1: movie Time After Time, and then more recently during our

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Speaker 1: chat with Daniel Whiteson about astrophysics and time travel, and

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Speaker 1: also a little talk about time travel science fiction as well.

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Speaker 1: That's right. One of the main takeaways was that Daniel

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Speaker 1: is is pretty thoroughly against the idea of the plausibility

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Speaker 1: of changing the past, right. But um, you know, I

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Speaker 1: think one of the more interesting questions to come back

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Speaker 1: to in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind is,

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Speaker 1: um is not just thinking about okay, is this possible?

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Speaker 1: And what would you know, what assumptions would we have

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Speaker 1: to make about the universe for this sort of time

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Speaker 1: travel to work, or this sort of time travel? What

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Speaker 1: sorts of time travel are we engaging in all the time? Uh?

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Speaker 1: Instead of asking is this possible? Are we doing it too?

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Speaker 1: Instead look at the question what does this idea reveal

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Speaker 1: about human perspectives of time. Where does the time travel

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Speaker 1: idea even come from? And and how far back in

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Speaker 1: time do we see humans engaging in this sort of

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Speaker 1: imaginative thought. It's a great question, and immediately all kinds

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Speaker 1: of uh secondary questions come to mind, like, Okay, so

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Speaker 1: time travel is one of the most popular plot devices

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Speaker 1: of modern fiction. But can you how far back can

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Speaker 1: you think of literature and stories that feature time travel? Suddenly,

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Speaker 1: if you go just more than a few hundred years back,

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Speaker 1: examples start getting very sparse at least you know the

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Speaker 1: kind of things you can think of off the top

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Speaker 1: of your head, And it might start to cause you

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Speaker 1: to wonder, like, did something change in in Reese centuries

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Speaker 1: that made this idea more more tangible to people? And

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Speaker 1: are the earlier examples and what would what could we

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Speaker 1: learn about our conception of time by looking at those? Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I ask yourself the question, what's your favorite ancient myth

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Speaker 1: about time travel? And and it's possible you have an answer,

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Speaker 1: because we will come back to a few possible answers.

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Speaker 1: But for for many of you out there, you might

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Speaker 1: just be a bit dumbfounded, and you might say well,

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Speaker 1: you know, uh, you know, there are these mythic figures

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Speaker 1: and they're they're traveling all over the place, and they're

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Speaker 1: doing all sorts of amazing things, things that are so

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Speaker 1: outrageous you wouldn't even see it in a comic book today. Um.

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Speaker 1: But traveling through time becomes something of a scarcity. So

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Speaker 1: it leads you to wonder, Yeah, is time travel just

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Speaker 1: this relatively recent cultural invention, this idea of time travel? Um?

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Speaker 1: And and why would that be? Because you know, as

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Speaker 1: we try to drive home on the show Humans of

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Speaker 1: centuries and millennia past, we're deep thinkers, they were deep dreamers.

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Speaker 1: And yet there there are not, for the most part, uh,

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Speaker 1: you know, large caches of old folk tales about princes

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Speaker 1: going back in time to rescue princesses or traveling into

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Speaker 1: the future and so forth. Um, there are no tales

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Speaker 1: of God's skipping around in different ages of the universe.

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Speaker 1: So obviously time is an undeniable fact of our of

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Speaker 1: our physical reality. But I was trying to think about, like,

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Speaker 1: how is it that humans first put together a concept

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Speaker 1: of time, a time as a kind of substance that

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Speaker 1: they could talk about and and manipulate with and sort of,

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Speaker 1: you know, turn around and look at within the mind

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Speaker 1: and uh so, uh so. One really interesting source that

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Speaker 1: came across addressing this is a section in a book

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Speaker 1: called The Unfolding of Language, An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's

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Speaker 1: greatest invention. This is by an author named Guide Deutscher.

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Speaker 1: This book was published by McMillan in two thousand five.

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Speaker 1: Deutscher is an academic linguist. He used to be affiliated

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Speaker 1: with Cambridge and with the University of leyden Um. I'm

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Speaker 1: not sure if he has any affiliations now, but shout

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Speaker 1: out quickly that I came to this connection to Guy

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Speaker 1: Deutscher's work by way of a mention in a Live

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Speaker 1: Science article by Adam Man, which actually pointed me in

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Speaker 1: the direction of two very interesting sources. So so good

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Speaker 1: on that article. But the reason I wanted to talk

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Speaker 1: about this book by by Guy Deutscher here is that

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Speaker 1: it addresses what we can learn from metaphors in everyday

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Speaker 1: speech about the way our minds work. And so the

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Speaker 1: entry point here is that he's talking about the contrast

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Speaker 1: between poetic metaphors, metaphors that arouse a sense of strangeness

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Speaker 1: and wonder and utterly mundane metaphors. So a couple of

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Speaker 1: examples we can compare. Imagine you are reading a poem

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Speaker 1: and you come across the line tread softly because you

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Speaker 1: tread on my dreams. This is a famous passage from

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Speaker 1: a poem by William Butler Yates. Uh. And there's a

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Speaker 1: conceptual leap here that makes this image of treading upon

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Speaker 1: dreams striking. You're asked to imagine physically stepping on a

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Speaker 1: purely mental construct without physical form, And I think it's

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Speaker 1: that gap. It's like exactly to the degree that it

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Speaker 1: doesn't quite fit, and yet you can still understand what

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Speaker 1: it means that makes the metaphor striking. Yeah, and now

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Speaker 1: I'm just imagining his dreams as just a big old snack,

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Speaker 1: big yellow snack on the ground, and uh no, step

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Speaker 1: on snack. Um. But I'm sure that's not what what

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Speaker 1: the poet originally intended. My dreams are rattling and hissing

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Speaker 1: and bearing fangs. Venom is dripping from the fangs of

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Speaker 1: my dreams. But so anyway, so yeah, this is a

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Speaker 1: good poetic metaphor, and it strikes us as poetic. It's

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Speaker 1: it's like strange it makes us have that feeling of

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Speaker 1: all you get when you read it and when you

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Speaker 1: read a good poem. But then, uh, deut your contrasts

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Speaker 1: that with reading a news or goal about a senator

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Speaker 1: proposing tough legislation to fight crime. Now, this is not

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Speaker 1: a striking metaphor. It's utterly mundane. And yet if you

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Speaker 1: stop to think about it, the concept of tough legislation

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Speaker 1: is just as much of a leap as treading on dreams.

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Speaker 1: Like you hear, you're saying that this intangible sort of

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Speaker 1: social thing a law, has the quality of a physical material,

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Speaker 1: like it would be difficult to cut or chew. And

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Speaker 1: so why do these phrases feel so different? Well, Deutscher

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Speaker 1: argues that it's mostly because of familiarity. Tough legislation uses

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Speaker 1: a familiar, even cliche, metaphorical understanding of toughness, so it's

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Speaker 1: not surprising or striking in the way that treading on

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Speaker 1: dreams is. And he notes that metaphors that are so

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Speaker 1: familiar that they've lost their vitality and they no longer

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Speaker 1: strike us as poetic are sometimes referred to as dead metaphors,

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Speaker 1: which I think the irony there maybe not irony the

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Speaker 1: The interesting thing is that's a literary cliche, dead metaphors,

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Speaker 1: invoking a biological metaphor to describe the effects of words

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Speaker 1: and phrases. Oh. One that comes to mind instantly, and

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Speaker 1: perhaps because we're talking about time, is the idea of

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Speaker 1: killing time to do that all the time. But it

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Speaker 1: it doesn't really do anything like it doesn't. I feel

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Speaker 1: like the phrase killing time does not really summon any

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Speaker 1: kind of novel image in my mind. It doesn't make

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Speaker 1: me think about time as an organism, or time as

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Speaker 1: the body or anything. It's just this dumb thing people say.

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Speaker 1: But that I think, actually killing time would be an

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Speaker 1: incredibly striking metaphor. If you've never heard that before and

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Speaker 1: you just came across it in a poem. Yeah, the

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Speaker 1: first person who said it was probably a genius. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: imagining time is a little creature that's being bludgeoned to

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Speaker 1: death by your I don't know, by your youth scrolling

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Speaker 1: your phone. But then jumping off this point, he goes

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Speaker 1: on to make what I think is a really interesting point.

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Speaker 1: So I just want to read from from Deutscher's book here.

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Speaker 1: But there's more familiarity than individual acquaintance. For most to

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Speaker 1: force in ordinary language, are also familiar on a much

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Speaker 1: deeper level. Suppose, for instance, that during an election campaign,

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Speaker 1: you read in a newspaper that quote critics derided the

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Speaker 1: new election manifesto as nothing more than a sou flay

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Speaker 1: of promises. This phrase is clearly metaphorical, since by anyone's standards,

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Speaker 1: a sou flay is is properly made of egg whites,

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Speaker 1: not promises. But although you may never have heard this

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Speaker 1: particular metaphor before, it is still unlikely to strike you

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Speaker 1: as a great poet at coup or as something entirely

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Speaker 1: out of the ordinary. The reason must be that sous

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Speaker 1: flay of promises belongs to a larger context, which is familiar.

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Speaker 1: And uh so this is because Deutscher argues, quite strangely,

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Speaker 1: metaphors based in food, eating and cooking are very commonly

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Speaker 1: used to describe mental phenomena such as ideas, thoughts, and emotions.

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Speaker 1: And then he goes on to just give a huge

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Speaker 1: laundry list of examples. You can think of anger, simmering, resentment, boiling,

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Speaker 1: or uh, Johnny is chewing over a new concept. You

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Speaker 1: need time to digest this information. Uh. You know the

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Speaker 1: people won't swallow these lies or are you just gonna

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Speaker 1: lap up that pablum from those politicians? People devour books

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Speaker 1: and so forth. Um, he says. We can have sweet dreams,

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Speaker 1: bitter hatreds, sour relations, half baked ideas and just goes

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Speaker 1: on and on. Once you notice it. It's astonishing how

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Speaker 1: much of the way we talk about feelings and ideas

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Speaker 1: is based in food. M m. Yeah, and of course

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Speaker 1: all the most I think most of these examples we've

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Speaker 1: been rolling through here or an over them anyway, have

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Speaker 1: distinct ties to Western cuisine, so of course we can

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Speaker 1: easily imagine that in in various other uh international cuisines

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Speaker 1: and in other languages, you have the same thing going on. Yeah, totally, totally,

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Speaker 1: and in fact, I think we we've even talked about

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Speaker 1: this to some extent on the show before. Like metaphors,

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Speaker 1: you know, sort of mental content, metaphors based in food.

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Speaker 1: They're common in other cultures, not so much in English

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Speaker 1: speaking ones. I do wonder though, if the sufflet of

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Speaker 1: promises is not lost on folks who haven't themselves made

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Speaker 1: or attempted to make a soufflay, because it seems to

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Speaker 1: me like part of it is the idea that yes,

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Speaker 1: it's it's it's a laborious process to make, and then

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Speaker 1: it deflates, can easily deflate. It's kind of an empty dish,

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Speaker 1: and in some regard that even though it looks fantastic,

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Speaker 1: it is mostly air. And if you don't actualize that,

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Speaker 1: then then maybe something of the metaphor is lost. You know, honestly,

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Speaker 1: I did not even consciously make that connection. Maybe unconsciously

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Speaker 1: I did, But you've opened my mind to a new

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Speaker 1: new dimension of the super You. Maybe you're too familiar

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Speaker 1: with the souflay and you take it for like me.

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Speaker 1: I I rarely make sufflay, and when I do, I

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Speaker 1: am intimidated by the process because I know what is

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Speaker 1: involved and what is what is possible, Like I don't

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Speaker 1: trust myself enough. Uh, I'm ever on guard. You are

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Speaker 1: right to fear it. Anyway. To pick back up with

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Speaker 1: the Deutscher, so he summarizes what he's just been talking

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Speaker 1: about by saying, quote, there's a well established link in

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Speaker 1: our mind between the two domains which unites all the

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Speaker 1: individual images into a broader conceptual metaphor. Ideas are food.

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Speaker 1: And thus, when we hear a phrase like suffle of

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Speaker 1: promises the image does not sound so surprising because it

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Speaker 1: fits neatly into this familiar frame. And so for Deutscher,

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Speaker 1: this is an example of conceptual metaphors. The the quote

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Speaker 1: mappings of one domain onto another, and so uh, for

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Speaker 1: some reason, maybe it might be interesting to speculate on

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Speaker 1: what that reason would be. It's just very easy for

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Speaker 1: us to think about the domain of thoughts and feelings

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Speaker 1: in terms of the domain of food. But this isn't

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Speaker 1: the only conceptual mapping like this. And here's where we

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Speaker 1: get back to time. Deutscher makes the case that there

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Speaker 1: is a similar natural metaphorical domain overlap between time and space. Now,

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Speaker 1: on one hand, you might think, well, that totally makes sense,

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Speaker 1: because you a twenty one century person who is somewhat

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Speaker 1: literate in the sciences, you know that space and time

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Speaker 1: are actually linked in modern physics. But the point is

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Speaker 1: that these conventions of language long predate Einstein or any

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Speaker 1: knowledge of general relativity or the concept of space time.

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Speaker 1: Since prehistory, there is clear evidence in language itself that

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Speaker 1: humans have naturally tended to think and talk about time

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Speaker 1: as if time were a type of space, or as

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Speaker 1: if the rules of space applied to it. So once

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Speaker 1: again Deutscher gives a ton of examples. He writes, quote,

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Speaker 1: consider some of the simplest words we use to describe

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Speaker 1: spatial relations, prepositions such as in at by, from to, behind, within,

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Speaker 1: and through, And then he gives a ton of examples

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Speaker 1: within actual phrases. So the idea of like from London

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Speaker 1: to Paris, you can compare to from Monday to Friday,

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Speaker 1: or in England the same way you would say in

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Speaker 1: January or in the sixteenth century, you can stand at

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Speaker 1: the door or you can arrive at noon. All these prepositions,

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Speaker 1: He's saying a flow originally from the linguistic domain of

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Speaker 1: space and come to be applied to time. Uh. And

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Speaker 1: beyond this, he argues that this is not just a

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Speaker 1: quirk of English. This is true of literally every language

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Speaker 1: that has ever been studied. There are no exceptions. Every

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Speaker 1: language on Earth talks about time as if it were

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Speaker 1: a type of space, which suggests something. If that's true,

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Speaker 1: suggests something very ancient and powerful about that link in

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Speaker 1: our consciousness. I'm reminded of a part of Barry Lopez's

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Speaker 1: book Arctic Dreams, where he's talking about this um conversation

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Speaker 1: between an Arctic Arctic explorer and uh an Inuit uh

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Speaker 1: and the Inuit man has has asked of this pair

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Speaker 1: of binoculars allows him to see into tomorrow and um

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Speaker 1: and in this particular instance, you know, there's a certain

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Speaker 1: amount of you know, perhaps a lot of it's about

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Speaker 1: the languages here, you know, and uh and uh. But

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Speaker 1: it it kind of gets to this idea too of

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Speaker 1: in a place where you have wide open spaces and

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Speaker 1: uh and and you know a fair amount of moving

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Speaker 1: around and resources are spread out, like you know what

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Speaker 1: the individual is asking like, well, this binoculars allow me

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Speaker 1: to see something that I would not be able to

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Speaker 1: reach until tomorrow. And that's always just stuck stuck with

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Speaker 1: me because it it gets into this it touches on

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Speaker 1: this spatial idea of of time but also within a

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Speaker 1: realm that in a geography that at least for many

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Speaker 1: of us that you know, it makes it a little

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Speaker 1: easier to comprehend that firm connection like tomorrow is not

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Speaker 1: only um, you know, something that will happen to me,

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Speaker 1: It is also it is also a place I will

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Speaker 1: be because I know where I can see potentially see

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Speaker 1: where I will be tomorrow. You know what I'm saying,

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Speaker 1: oh yeah, and I think that's a fantastic point that

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Speaker 1: actually connects to something else I wanted to talk about,

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Speaker 1: which is um the idea that, Okay, so the metaphorical

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Speaker 1: overlap between space and time appears to only flow in

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Speaker 1: one direction. You might find a stray counter example somewhere,

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Speaker 1: but generally the idea is that our human languages take

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Speaker 1: concepts and metaphors that begin as descriptions of space and

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Speaker 1: then apply them to time, not the other way around.

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Speaker 1: So we talk about the present as if it were

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Speaker 1: spatially here, and we visualize the past as if it

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Speaker 1: were physically behind us. And like, if you stop to

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Speaker 1: think about the physicality even the biology of that, the

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Speaker 1: past we imagine usually as in the direction of our butts,

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Speaker 1: you know, behind us. The future is physically in front

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Speaker 1: of us. And this is one of those great things

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Speaker 1: that like it's so mundane that you don't stop to

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Speaker 1: notice it. But when you pay attention to that, I

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Speaker 1: suspect it's like this and not the other way around.

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Speaker 1: You know, it's not that we imagine the future as

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Speaker 1: behind us, in the past in front of us because

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Speaker 1: of totally contingent facts about how our bodies move. If

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Speaker 1: you're walking in a straight line, the area in front

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Speaker 1: of you is space that you will occupy in the future,

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Speaker 1: and the space behind you is the place you occupied

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Speaker 1: in the past. And so you can think about alternative biology,

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Speaker 1: different body morphology leading to different conceptions of time. Like

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Speaker 1: if crabs evolved to possess abstract intelligence as language, I

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Speaker 1: kind of suspect they might visualize the past and future

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Speaker 1: to the left and right since they often walk sideways

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Speaker 1: instead of forwards and backwards. And then now is simply

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Speaker 1: the heat, I guess. Yeah. It also makes you think

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Speaker 1: about the way you know, eyes are positioned on different organisms,

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Speaker 1: thinking about say, herbivores, whose whose eyes are often positioned

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Speaker 1: more on the sides of the head in a way

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Speaker 1: to per vide more panoramic view of what's happening, so

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Speaker 1: they can have a better idea of where the predators

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Speaker 1: are coming in versus the the eyesight of a predator.

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Speaker 1: That is more about what is directly in front of me,

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Speaker 1: what is the thing I am after? Right? Yeah, So

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Speaker 1: that makes me wonder if our conception of time is

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Speaker 1: also influenced by our heads being shaped more like carnivore heads.

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Speaker 1: But anyway. To wrap up the section about Guy Deutscher's book,

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Speaker 1: I just want to read one more thing, he says, quote.

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Speaker 1: This link between space and time is so entrenched in

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Speaker 1: our cognition that it is extremely difficult to extricate ourselves

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Speaker 1: from it and appreciate that time cannot literally be long

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Speaker 1: or short, unlike sticks or pieces of string. Nor can

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Speaker 1: time literally pass unlike a train. Time cannot go forwards

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Speaker 1: and backwards anymore than it goes sideways, diagonally, or downwards.

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Speaker 1: Time doesn't actually go anywhere at all. Uh. And I

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Speaker 1: think this is a great point. The link in our

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Speaker 1: language is so deep it's difficult even to talk about

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Speaker 1: it because we don't really have any language for time

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Speaker 1: that is not a metaphor based on space, except maybe

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Speaker 1: in pure mathematical expressions. Yeah, we have this, Yeah, like

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Speaker 1: you said, we have this, This entire suite, multiple suites

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Speaker 1: of of terms we used to talk about time, and

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Speaker 1: yet very often we're we're at a lack to to

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Speaker 1: really define time. Um and and certainly it's it's hard

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Speaker 1: to just really settle in on a definition of what

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Speaker 1: it is. What one that I often come back to

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Speaker 1: is the idea of time is the rate of change

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Speaker 1: in the universe. And if you if you stop yourself

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Speaker 1: and all, if you stop yourself and all of this

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Speaker 1: and start like asking questions about time travel in that,

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Speaker 1: like in regards to the rate of change in the universe,

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Speaker 1: things get silly really quickly, you know, like, like what

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Speaker 1: is time? It's the rate of change in the universe? Well,

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Speaker 1: can I can I do that backwards? Going to do

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Speaker 1: that in reverse? Uh? Can I like travel back? Like

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Speaker 1: it's like asking is this It's like saying, you know it,

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Speaker 1: I really like wet I would like to travel to wet.

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Speaker 1: What do you mean you would like to travel to?

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Speaker 1: What you want to travel to? Somewhere that is wet

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Speaker 1: because you can't just travel to wet Yeah exactly. I mean, yeah,

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Speaker 1: that's a great metaphor. And even then, I mean it

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Speaker 1: makes you wonder. Okay. So on one hand, I think

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Speaker 1: the rate of change in the universe is a good

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Speaker 1: way of trying to describe what time is. But does

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Speaker 1: the does the idea of rate not itself in a

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Speaker 1: way kind of assume time Like it's just yeah, there's

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Speaker 1: it's you can't get under it, right, it's it is

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Speaker 1: in it in itself it's also an imperfect definition. UM,

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Speaker 1: but I guess the reason I come back to it

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Speaker 1: is that it is significantly different from this a lot

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Speaker 1: of these metaphors that we end up using. So it

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Speaker 1: kind of it kind of throws a wrench into your

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Speaker 1: your cognitive process, you know, totally. Oh and I guess

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Speaker 1: one last thing. This isn't strictly about time, but I

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Speaker 1: just thought I would mention it because I thought it

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Speaker 1: was interesting. Deutscher actually does go beyond this. So he

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Speaker 1: goes from talking about how metaphors of space are applied

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Speaker 1: to time, but then they keep being applied to even

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Speaker 1: deeper levels of uh of other concepts and language. Uh.

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Speaker 1: So he makes this argument about how about how concepts

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Speaker 1: of space flow through metaphorical use to time, and then

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Speaker 1: from time to causes or reasons and all these other things.

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Speaker 1: So you have something you have a preposition like from

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Speaker 1: which originally describes space, so you could be from Tucson, Arizona,

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Speaker 1: and then that can be applied to time, so you

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Speaker 1: can remember something from last Tuesday, and then that can

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Speaker 1: be applied to causes or reasons for things. So the

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Speaker 1: example he gives is he shivers from the cold Anyway,

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Speaker 1: I love stuff like this because there's so much that's

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Speaker 1: fascinating about the way that we use language. I guess

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Speaker 1: it's fascinating to me because we all do it, and

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Speaker 1: we do it all the time, and we don't notice

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Speaker 1: we're doing it. So just being asked to stop and

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Speaker 1: observe the words you're using and what that reveals about

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Speaker 1: how you think is is often extremely eye opening. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I mean this this linear view of things that it

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Speaker 1: falls into everything, like even as we talk about ideas,

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Speaker 1: you know, we we're building things out of sentences. We're

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Speaker 1: talking about uh forming an idea out of this and

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Speaker 1: uh building up to this idea, arriving at this conclusion

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Speaker 1: and so forth. Yeah. Thank As I was thinking about

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Speaker 1: all this, I started thinking about some of the terms

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Speaker 1: used by Merchia eliade Um, who you know, in in

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Speaker 1: his work, you often have this this separation of time

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Speaker 1: into mythic time and profane time. So mythic time is

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Speaker 1: when gods and heroes experience their victories, defeats, and their

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Speaker 1: dramas you know, at the time of of mythic stories

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Speaker 1: playing out um, during during which these these various exploits

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Speaker 1: shaped the earth, shaped our culture. But then during profane time,

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Speaker 1: nothing that we do has any value except to the

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Speaker 1: extent that it recreates or in some way connects us

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Speaker 1: with events that occurred during mythic time. Right. So Eliote

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Speaker 1: was a was a scholar of religion, and yeah, I

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Speaker 1: understand this was one of his main points. It was

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Speaker 1: that a lot of what we think of as religion

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Speaker 1: either is or is derived from attempts to recreate or

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Speaker 1: re enact uh, things that allegedly took place in this

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Speaker 1: other mythic time. Right. And of course this connection that

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Speaker 1: he's talking about between mythic past and propain present, uh,

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Speaker 1: you know, it's not quite like a physical journey, uh,

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Speaker 1: you know, via time machine between two times, though, though

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Speaker 1: I suppose characters who venture into a realm of gods

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Speaker 1: or spirits is in some way they are making a

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Speaker 1: journey into mythic time, a realm where mythic time is

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Speaker 1: either still going on or perhaps is has just happened,

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Speaker 1: or is in some way you know, more present. Um.

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Speaker 1: You know. Again, it's not nothing like these modern ideas

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Speaker 1: of time travel, but um, but it certainly got me

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Speaker 1: thinking about all of this, oh absolutely. And to stay

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Speaker 1: on the subject of myth and religion. I mean, one

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Speaker 1: thing that I think is kind of interesting and understanding

404
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Speaker 1: how humans imagine time throughout history is sort of the

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Speaker 1: difference between myth and legend as generally understood by by

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Speaker 1: scholars of religion, where uh, the idea is that myth

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Speaker 1: is a story that takes place, uh, you know, often

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Speaker 1: telling some kind of origin of something, but it's also

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Speaker 1: a story that takes place, usually in a time that

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Speaker 1: is somehow removed from your own timeline, whereas legend is

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Speaker 1: something that appears to blur into your own, your own

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Speaker 1: actual history. So they might both be stories that are

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Speaker 1: not like literal descriptions of things that took place in

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Speaker 1: the past, but myth it's kind of like it would

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Speaker 1: be hard to say when the myth actually took place,

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Speaker 1: whereas you could say a legend is about some thing

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Speaker 1: that allegedly happened a thousand years ago, right, So like

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Speaker 1: a legendary king, a legendary emperor is in many cases

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Speaker 1: the sort of individual that historians and archaeologists can look

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Speaker 1: to and say, like, well, who's the actual person that

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Speaker 1: this may be based upon. Whereas when you get into

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Speaker 1: the mythic mythic kings mythic emperors. These are figures that

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Speaker 1: are often uh, you know, indecipherable from God's not to

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Speaker 1: say that they don't uh there's not a potential for

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Speaker 1: some connection to actual living humans, but uh, in many cases, yeah,

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Speaker 1: it is about the things that occurred before the stories

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Speaker 1: that define the world in which we live. I think

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Speaker 1: it's interesting that there are different ways to imagine the past,

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Speaker 1: whether or not what you're imagining is is accurate or not.

430
00:24:45,160 --> 00:24:46,760
Speaker 1: I mean, that's sort of beside the point right now.

431
00:24:46,920 --> 00:24:50,520
Speaker 1: Just like if you're imagining what happened long ago, there

432
00:24:50,560 --> 00:24:53,000
Speaker 1: are sort of different timelines. You know, is there there's

433
00:24:53,000 --> 00:24:55,920
Speaker 1: a past that's kind of inaccessible to us, and then

434
00:24:55,920 --> 00:24:59,360
Speaker 1: the past that you can at least imagine as being accessible,

435
00:24:59,400 --> 00:25:01,639
Speaker 1: even if you don't think you could say, travel back

436
00:25:01,680 --> 00:25:04,880
Speaker 1: to it. And I think in a way that has

437
00:25:04,960 --> 00:25:08,879
Speaker 1: sort of changed maybe in twentieth century science fiction at

438
00:25:08,960 --> 00:25:12,400
Speaker 1: least where one thing that seems true may being disagree

439
00:25:12,440 --> 00:25:16,560
Speaker 1: rob about twentieth century science fiction is that, uh, this

440
00:25:16,680 --> 00:25:20,040
Speaker 1: imagines there's a leveling effect where okay, no, now there's

441
00:25:20,080 --> 00:25:23,000
Speaker 1: just there's a timeline, and if you have a time machine,

442
00:25:23,040 --> 00:25:25,760
Speaker 1: you can go back to anything forward or backward that

443
00:25:25,840 --> 00:25:30,080
Speaker 1: actually happened or will actually happen. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um.

444
00:25:30,720 --> 00:25:33,399
Speaker 1: It reminds me of you know something else that the

445
00:25:33,400 --> 00:25:37,119
Speaker 1: iliat was was big on this idea of archaic cultures

446
00:25:37,160 --> 00:25:42,280
Speaker 1: accessing circular sacred time, a time of origins and creations,

447
00:25:42,280 --> 00:25:45,280
Speaker 1: while modern cultures use a linear sacred time that is

448
00:25:45,359 --> 00:25:49,960
Speaker 1: essentially bolted onto the timeline of profane time. Um. But

449
00:25:49,960 --> 00:25:51,880
Speaker 1: but in all of the the you know, the origin

450
00:25:51,920 --> 00:25:55,120
Speaker 1: of things was important. Uh. So, like, just thinking again

451
00:25:55,160 --> 00:25:58,840
Speaker 1: about mythic time, it in some ways it feels like, well,

452
00:25:59,160 --> 00:26:01,840
Speaker 1: the mythic time is more real, like it's more of

453
00:26:01,840 --> 00:26:05,520
Speaker 1: a real place than uh, you know, whatever happened last

454
00:26:05,600 --> 00:26:08,480
Speaker 1: year was whatever happened last year wasn't important at all,

455
00:26:09,600 --> 00:26:13,160
Speaker 1: at least aside from any ways in which it recreated

456
00:26:13,560 --> 00:26:17,199
Speaker 1: mythic time. Um. And so I was I was thinking about, like, well,

457
00:26:17,320 --> 00:26:21,159
Speaker 1: twenty century ideas of all of this, um. And it

458
00:26:21,200 --> 00:26:23,040
Speaker 1: made me made me think about, well, some of our

459
00:26:23,080 --> 00:26:26,199
Speaker 1: our time travel stories are modern time travel stories. And

460
00:26:26,240 --> 00:26:29,920
Speaker 1: I started thinking about back to the future, which I

461
00:26:30,200 --> 00:26:33,680
Speaker 1: don't know where this falls in your introduction to time travel, Joe,

462
00:26:33,680 --> 00:26:37,000
Speaker 1: but I have a feeling that either back to the

463
00:26:37,040 --> 00:26:41,679
Speaker 1: future or the old adaptation like the nineteen fifties or

464
00:26:41,680 --> 00:26:44,959
Speaker 1: sixties adaptation of the time Machine. One of those was

465
00:26:45,040 --> 00:26:48,160
Speaker 1: my first introduction to the idea of time travel, and

466
00:26:48,240 --> 00:26:50,800
Speaker 1: it was it was probably Back to the Future. Oh yeah,

467
00:26:50,840 --> 00:26:52,320
Speaker 1: I can't say for sure, but Back to the Future

468
00:26:52,320 --> 00:26:54,080
Speaker 1: has got to be up there for me. It was

469
00:26:54,359 --> 00:26:57,840
Speaker 1: certainly one of the earliest, and it benefits from being

470
00:26:57,840 --> 00:27:01,600
Speaker 1: the kind of movie that feels can nicle. Um. You know,

471
00:27:02,040 --> 00:27:04,159
Speaker 1: even when you're a kid, I think you detect some

472
00:27:04,280 --> 00:27:06,879
Speaker 1: kind of differences in the quality of cinema, even at

473
00:27:06,960 --> 00:27:09,760
Speaker 1: that age where I liked every movie I saw, there

474
00:27:09,760 --> 00:27:12,040
Speaker 1: are some movies that feel kind of like, Okay, that's

475
00:27:12,040 --> 00:27:14,120
Speaker 1: just some weird thing I saw on TV one time,

476
00:27:14,160 --> 00:27:16,520
Speaker 1: And there are other movies that feel like a part

477
00:27:16,640 --> 00:27:19,560
Speaker 1: of the canon of of culture and and Back to

478
00:27:19,600 --> 00:27:22,840
Speaker 1: the Future felt that way. Yeah, absolutely, And so it

479
00:27:23,160 --> 00:27:26,280
Speaker 1: got me wondering thinking back on it now, to what

480
00:27:26,440 --> 00:27:30,720
Speaker 1: extent any time travel story is essentially taking a particular

481
00:27:30,760 --> 00:27:33,200
Speaker 1: time in the past. Obviously, we're just talking about time

482
00:27:33,240 --> 00:27:36,520
Speaker 1: travel stories that concerned the past and establishing it is

483
00:27:36,560 --> 00:27:40,280
Speaker 1: a kind of sacred time, one that explains conditions in

484
00:27:40,320 --> 00:27:44,800
Speaker 1: our profane present time and m you know, in terms

485
00:27:44,800 --> 00:27:46,919
Speaker 1: of Back to the Future, Uh, you know, this is

486
00:27:47,000 --> 00:27:49,360
Speaker 1: this is a story that doesn't just concern the mid

487
00:27:49,480 --> 00:27:53,480
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties. It idolizes the mid nineteen fifties, It fetishizes

488
00:27:53,520 --> 00:27:56,959
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties. Uh, it's this is a time of

489
00:27:57,119 --> 00:28:01,440
Speaker 1: great admiration for this film, a period of of iconic

490
00:28:01,520 --> 00:28:05,359
Speaker 1: and highly sanitized American nostalgia. Um. And it is also

491
00:28:05,440 --> 00:28:08,520
Speaker 1: the time that defines our characters. You know, this is

492
00:28:08,560 --> 00:28:12,600
Speaker 1: the this is the age during which Marty McFly's parents

493
00:28:12,800 --> 00:28:16,399
Speaker 1: were themselves youth. This is the time during which they

494
00:28:16,400 --> 00:28:21,119
Speaker 1: would come together and eventually create Marty McFly. Well, in

495
00:28:21,119 --> 00:28:23,080
Speaker 1: another way, you could almost say that in Back to

496
00:28:23,160 --> 00:28:27,920
Speaker 1: the Future, Marty McFly travels back to a cinematic nineteen

497
00:28:28,000 --> 00:28:31,560
Speaker 1: fifties more than a real nineteen fifties, Like he's traveling

498
00:28:31,560 --> 00:28:35,240
Speaker 1: to a mythic time almost because it's like, yeah, it's

499
00:28:35,240 --> 00:28:37,760
Speaker 1: sort of what you're because like the stuff he sees

500
00:28:37,800 --> 00:28:41,280
Speaker 1: when he gets there are not so much based in history,

501
00:28:41,320 --> 00:28:45,640
Speaker 1: but they're based on the images people remember from like

502
00:28:45,800 --> 00:28:48,440
Speaker 1: movies and TV of the nineteen fifties. So you know,

503
00:28:48,480 --> 00:28:51,840
Speaker 1: the soda shop with the counter and the you know,

504
00:28:51,960 --> 00:28:54,960
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff. It is a mythic reality

505
00:28:55,000 --> 00:28:58,720
Speaker 1: that explains the origins of things and uh and and

506
00:28:58,720 --> 00:29:02,920
Speaker 1: and and and provides the idea of how things should be. Um.

507
00:29:03,000 --> 00:29:04,840
Speaker 1: So it's yeah, it's it's kind of interesting to think

508
00:29:04,840 --> 00:29:07,400
Speaker 1: about the Back of the Future in terms of of

509
00:29:07,480 --> 00:29:10,880
Speaker 1: Iliades writings. By the way, I had to do the

510
00:29:10,880 --> 00:29:12,440
Speaker 1: math on this because I always find this kind of

511
00:29:12,480 --> 00:29:16,440
Speaker 1: thing um interesting but also um alarming. You know, it

512
00:29:16,480 --> 00:29:19,080
Speaker 1: makes me feel old to realize this. So this is

513
00:29:19,200 --> 00:29:21,480
Speaker 1: a movie back to the Future that concerned a jaunt

514
00:29:21,520 --> 00:29:25,080
Speaker 1: from night five to nineteen fifty five. If you were

515
00:29:25,080 --> 00:29:28,520
Speaker 1: to take an identical jaunt today from the year one,

516
00:29:28,840 --> 00:29:31,480
Speaker 1: that would take you back to the year nineteen one,

517
00:29:31,920 --> 00:29:34,800
Speaker 1: that is the year that Highlander two came out. Christof

518
00:29:34,880 --> 00:29:38,880
Speaker 1: Lambert goes back thirty years, gives himself a pep talk, uh,

519
00:29:39,600 --> 00:29:42,280
Speaker 1: you know, like tells him how to stand up for himself.

520
00:29:43,080 --> 00:29:46,480
Speaker 1: Ends up with Lambert punching Sean Connery in the face. Like, yeah,

521
00:29:46,520 --> 00:29:49,960
Speaker 1: I can see it. Also the year of dan Ackroid's

522
00:29:50,000 --> 00:29:57,520
Speaker 1: nothing but Trouble, pivotal time, mythic time for American culture.

523
00:29:57,560 --> 00:30:01,160
Speaker 1: They're also cool as Ice, the Vanilla Ice movie. Well, hell,

524
00:30:01,240 --> 00:30:05,960
Speaker 1: there you go, a time of heroes and gods. Basically,

525
00:30:06,000 --> 00:30:08,840
Speaker 1: what we're saying was a weird year for films. It's

526
00:30:09,160 --> 00:30:11,200
Speaker 1: when you try to look for the real standouts. I

527
00:30:11,200 --> 00:30:14,840
Speaker 1: mean there are You've got stuff like Barton Faint going on. Um,

528
00:30:14,880 --> 00:30:16,720
Speaker 1: you know, but you know it's also the year of

529
00:30:16,720 --> 00:30:20,360
Speaker 1: stuff like Freddie's Dead, the Final Nightmare. Oh, we did

530
00:30:20,480 --> 00:30:23,280
Speaker 1: have a time travel a movie there. We also had

531
00:30:23,480 --> 00:30:26,360
Speaker 1: Bill and Ted came out their Bogus Journey. That would

532
00:30:26,360 --> 00:30:29,320
Speaker 1: be the second one. Okay, well we gotta stop this

533
00:30:29,440 --> 00:30:33,960
Speaker 1: or we'll just keep going. Okay, the whole episodes. So anyway,

534
00:30:34,120 --> 00:30:36,360
Speaker 1: just getting back at the basic point, mainstream time travel

535
00:30:36,400 --> 00:30:39,440
Speaker 1: tropes um are not that old, and we'll explore some

536
00:30:39,520 --> 00:30:43,160
Speaker 1: examples of this shortly. Um. While time travel narratives are

537
00:30:43,160 --> 00:30:45,840
Speaker 1: in some ways like other complex ways of thinking about

538
00:30:45,880 --> 00:30:47,720
Speaker 1: the past and the present, they're not quite the same.

539
00:30:48,160 --> 00:30:51,000
Speaker 1: But you can easily get into just a whole argument

540
00:30:51,000 --> 00:30:52,960
Speaker 1: of like looking back at old things and old stories

541
00:30:52,960 --> 00:30:55,560
Speaker 1: and saying, to what extent is this time travel? To

542
00:30:55,640 --> 00:30:59,040
Speaker 1: what extent is it not? Because think about a lot

543
00:30:59,080 --> 00:31:02,560
Speaker 1: of modern time travel stories. What happens you have Marty McFly,

544
00:31:02,720 --> 00:31:04,760
Speaker 1: he goes back, what does he do he meets his dad.

545
00:31:05,160 --> 00:31:07,480
Speaker 1: You know, uh, there are other tales of this sort.

546
00:31:07,520 --> 00:31:11,040
Speaker 1: You know where you're it's about connecting with ancestors, and

547
00:31:11,080 --> 00:31:15,280
Speaker 1: of course communication and connection with ancestors is widespread in

548
00:31:15,360 --> 00:31:19,400
Speaker 1: religion and myth and folklore, though these generally take on

549
00:31:19,440 --> 00:31:22,920
Speaker 1: the forum of spirit communication of some sort, not physical

550
00:31:23,080 --> 00:31:26,280
Speaker 1: or even holographic journeys. Right, a lot of the time

551
00:31:26,280 --> 00:31:30,120
Speaker 1: travel stories about interacting with ancestors are either there, uh,

552
00:31:30,400 --> 00:31:32,720
Speaker 1: to recall some of the language we used in our

553
00:31:32,880 --> 00:31:35,800
Speaker 1: Weird House Cinema episode about time after time, they're often

554
00:31:35,960 --> 00:31:38,720
Speaker 1: debugging history stories where you're trying to go back and

555
00:31:38,760 --> 00:31:41,680
Speaker 1: fix something that went wrong with one of your ancestors,

556
00:31:41,680 --> 00:31:45,360
Speaker 1: to make the present better, or to undo the mischief

557
00:31:45,400 --> 00:31:48,040
Speaker 1: of another time traveler who screwed up the future by

558
00:31:48,240 --> 00:31:51,840
Speaker 1: doing something with your ancestors. And sometimes there are some

559
00:31:51,880 --> 00:31:55,120
Speaker 1: stories where they, you know, they try to maintain the

560
00:31:55,160 --> 00:31:58,239
Speaker 1: consistent timeline by having a person go back and like

561
00:31:58,320 --> 00:32:01,800
Speaker 1: do something with their ancestors that in turn was necessary

562
00:32:01,880 --> 00:32:04,880
Speaker 1: for the present to happen the way it did. You know,

563
00:32:04,960 --> 00:32:07,480
Speaker 1: the stories of paradoxes where somebody goes back and they

564
00:32:07,600 --> 00:32:11,720
Speaker 1: become their own grandfather or something creepy. Yeah. Now for

565
00:32:11,800 --> 00:32:14,360
Speaker 1: some answers, UH, in all of this, I look to

566
00:32:14,480 --> 00:32:17,160
Speaker 1: a wonderful book came out in two thousand one by

567
00:32:17,240 --> 00:32:20,800
Speaker 1: Paul J. Nayan, an electrical engineer and science author. It's

568
00:32:20,880 --> 00:32:25,360
Speaker 1: called Time Travel, Time Machines, Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics

569
00:32:25,360 --> 00:32:28,960
Speaker 1: and Science Fiction. And it's a it's a real fun,

570
00:32:29,240 --> 00:32:31,240
Speaker 1: very readable book. You can still get copies of this.

571
00:32:31,480 --> 00:32:32,720
Speaker 1: I think there's been a couple of at least a

572
00:32:32,720 --> 00:32:34,600
Speaker 1: couple of editions that have come out over the years.

573
00:32:35,240 --> 00:32:38,720
Speaker 1: UM and UH. It deals with everything that's mentioned in

574
00:32:38,760 --> 00:32:42,480
Speaker 1: the title, but probably focusing more here on just gleaning

575
00:32:42,480 --> 00:32:44,760
Speaker 1: some of the sci fi references from it, because he

576
00:32:44,800 --> 00:32:47,600
Speaker 1: does a great job about talking about, uh, the different

577
00:32:47,640 --> 00:32:50,320
Speaker 1: types of time travel narratives that we have and what

578
00:32:50,400 --> 00:32:53,040
Speaker 1: are some of the earlier examples of them. Uh. And

579
00:32:53,080 --> 00:32:57,120
Speaker 1: he identifies a sort of related precursor to tales of

580
00:32:57,200 --> 00:33:00,080
Speaker 1: ventures into the future UM, as well as I guess

581
00:33:00,080 --> 00:33:03,520
Speaker 1: into the past in the form of stories and accounts

582
00:33:03,520 --> 00:33:08,600
Speaker 1: of visions of the future. So back before the Time

583
00:33:08,640 --> 00:33:11,840
Speaker 1: Machine by H. D Wells, you had as early as

584
00:33:11,960 --> 00:33:16,480
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty six popular English language tales that's speculated on

585
00:33:16,520 --> 00:33:20,040
Speaker 1: the far future, such as an eighteen fifty six Harper's

586
00:33:20,280 --> 00:33:23,760
Speaker 1: article that pondered what the year three thousand would be like.

587
00:33:23,840 --> 00:33:27,600
Speaker 1: It was titled January one a d three thousand, and

588
00:33:27,640 --> 00:33:30,680
Speaker 1: it was apparently by an anonymous author, but I think

589
00:33:30,680 --> 00:33:34,880
Speaker 1: it was at least edited by Alfred A. Gern Say,

590
00:33:35,320 --> 00:33:38,040
Speaker 1: But I'm not not exactly sure if if an actual

591
00:33:38,080 --> 00:33:40,080
Speaker 1: author has ever been attributed to this piece, or if

592
00:33:40,120 --> 00:33:44,000
Speaker 1: it remains just anonymous. I bet it was absolutely prophetic.

593
00:33:45,720 --> 00:33:49,360
Speaker 1: I had to look it up. Harper's magazine still has it,

594
00:33:49,440 --> 00:33:51,280
Speaker 1: and I think it's in their archives, so you have

595
00:33:51,320 --> 00:33:53,480
Speaker 1: to be a subscriber. That's probably the best way to

596
00:33:53,520 --> 00:33:55,240
Speaker 1: see it. I think I was able to find an

597
00:33:55,240 --> 00:33:59,080
Speaker 1: exert of it and google books. Uh, it seems pretty farcical,

598
00:33:59,160 --> 00:34:02,239
Speaker 1: so don't expect any thing to sci fi. Lots of

599
00:34:02,280 --> 00:34:04,760
Speaker 1: pondering over what sorts of stupid things men of the

600
00:34:04,760 --> 00:34:08,640
Speaker 1: far future will where. There's some great illustrations from this um.

601
00:34:09,120 --> 00:34:14,040
Speaker 1: This article included them here for you, Joe. Everybody looks

602
00:34:14,080 --> 00:34:19,239
Speaker 1: like uh like Scottish warrior dandies. Yes, and in a

603
00:34:19,280 --> 00:34:21,560
Speaker 1: way you know, I don't know, these aren't too far

604
00:34:21,680 --> 00:34:25,480
Speaker 1: off the off the mark. I guess you know, but

605
00:34:26,080 --> 00:34:28,040
Speaker 1: you know it concerns the very sorts of time travel

606
00:34:28,080 --> 00:34:30,799
Speaker 1: social commentary you might expect today, like when a time

607
00:34:30,840 --> 00:34:34,120
Speaker 1: traveler is a gas to learn that individual freedom has

608
00:34:34,160 --> 00:34:39,400
Speaker 1: been um, you know, has been um violated by state

609
00:34:39,480 --> 00:34:43,879
Speaker 1: sanctioned diets and actually get your burgers in the future. Right, Yeah,

610
00:34:43,880 --> 00:34:46,120
Speaker 1: it's it's that sort of thing, so, you know, which

611
00:34:46,120 --> 00:34:47,920
Speaker 1: is not to say that you know that this art.

612
00:34:48,320 --> 00:34:50,319
Speaker 1: You know, I don't mean to criticize this article because again,

613
00:34:50,320 --> 00:34:52,280
Speaker 1: this is the sort of thing that still goes on today.

614
00:34:52,560 --> 00:34:54,760
Speaker 1: And as one can imagine, it can be done well,

615
00:34:54,840 --> 00:34:58,239
Speaker 1: and it can also be done you know, crudely or ineffectually,

616
00:34:59,120 --> 00:35:04,480
Speaker 1: but anyway, it is a noteworthy example. Now, weirdly, a

617
00:35:04,520 --> 00:35:11,160
Speaker 1: major nineteenth century example of multidirectional time travel is by

618
00:35:11,280 --> 00:35:13,640
Speaker 1: Charles Dickens. You wouldn't have expected him to be one

619
00:35:13,680 --> 00:35:16,680
Speaker 1: of the pioneers in this area, but we have it

620
00:35:16,760 --> 00:35:19,239
Speaker 1: in the form of a Christmas carol, which, you know,

621
00:35:19,360 --> 00:35:22,280
Speaker 1: great story. We often missed some of the finer social

622
00:35:22,320 --> 00:35:24,560
Speaker 1: points of it, but it's a it's a story that

623
00:35:24,640 --> 00:35:29,000
Speaker 1: has become a part of Western holiday traditions. Like it's

624
00:35:29,320 --> 00:35:31,319
Speaker 1: it's a narrative we put up there almost with the

625
00:35:31,320 --> 00:35:34,560
Speaker 1: you know, the tales of Santa Claus and the Baby Jesus.

626
00:35:35,320 --> 00:35:38,920
Speaker 1: But it is essentially about time travel visions, you know.

627
00:35:38,960 --> 00:35:40,759
Speaker 1: I guess you can you can critique and say, well,

628
00:35:40,760 --> 00:35:43,520
Speaker 1: it's happening within the context of a dream. And I

629
00:35:43,560 --> 00:35:46,560
Speaker 1: don't know to what extent he's actually being visited by spirits,

630
00:35:46,560 --> 00:35:48,120
Speaker 1: But I don't know. I always think of them as

631
00:35:48,120 --> 00:35:50,719
Speaker 1: actual spirits. I think of these as actual visions that

632
00:35:50,760 --> 00:35:53,840
Speaker 1: are brought to him by supernatural entities. Yeah. Sure, I

633
00:35:53,840 --> 00:35:56,919
Speaker 1: mean it's fiction, you know. Yeah, the spirits are coming

634
00:35:56,920 --> 00:35:59,279
Speaker 1: to him and uh, yeah, he's he gets to see

635
00:35:59,320 --> 00:36:02,319
Speaker 1: the past, the present, and the future. Yeah, I mean yeah,

636
00:36:02,320 --> 00:36:03,719
Speaker 1: I guess that's the great thing about the stories. You

637
00:36:03,719 --> 00:36:05,520
Speaker 1: can think of it in different ways. It's like, to

638
00:36:05,600 --> 00:36:09,080
Speaker 1: what extent is Scrooge just simply having this this night

639
00:36:09,120 --> 00:36:12,640
Speaker 1: of intense dreaming and and and and reflection and pondering

640
00:36:12,640 --> 00:36:15,279
Speaker 1: about the future. He's engaging in mental time travel, which

641
00:36:15,400 --> 00:36:18,600
Speaker 1: of course is something that that that that humans have

642
00:36:19,760 --> 00:36:23,200
Speaker 1: in general, that allows us to form these simulations of

643
00:36:23,239 --> 00:36:26,960
Speaker 1: the past that too varying degrees may be correct. Uh,

644
00:36:27,000 --> 00:36:29,920
Speaker 1: And then compare those two simulations of what the future

645
00:36:30,000 --> 00:36:33,560
Speaker 1: might hold and and various simulations about how that future

646
00:36:33,680 --> 00:36:37,319
Speaker 1: situation will affect us, how will respond, etcetera. So you

647
00:36:37,320 --> 00:36:38,719
Speaker 1: can just say that, or you can go with the

648
00:36:38,760 --> 00:36:42,239
Speaker 1: more fun idea that like actual beings from beyond the

649
00:36:42,280 --> 00:36:45,440
Speaker 1: grave came and visited him and took him on journeys,

650
00:36:45,960 --> 00:36:48,600
Speaker 1: you know, through the through, through the past, and the

651
00:36:48,640 --> 00:36:51,600
Speaker 1: president in the future. Right, and so, while a lot

652
00:36:51,680 --> 00:36:55,680
Speaker 1: of the modern sci fi time travel I think is

653
00:36:56,000 --> 00:36:58,800
Speaker 1: clearly traceable back to two H. G. Wells and the

654
00:36:59,080 --> 00:37:01,800
Speaker 1: stories he wrote in the eighteen nineties and uh, mainly

655
00:37:01,920 --> 00:37:06,160
Speaker 1: the novel The Time the Time Machine in right, this

656
00:37:06,239 --> 00:37:09,120
Speaker 1: goes back significantly earlier. Christmas Carol came out in eighteen

657
00:37:09,200 --> 00:37:13,000
Speaker 1: forty three. Yeah, now you have even earlier stories. They

658
00:37:13,160 --> 00:37:16,560
Speaker 1: get closer to a whole trope or or about to discuss.

659
00:37:16,719 --> 00:37:19,200
Speaker 1: There's a Bulgarian tale from eighteen twenty four about a

660
00:37:19,239 --> 00:37:22,880
Speaker 1: Russian hero who swept overboard at sea and he becomes

661
00:37:22,880 --> 00:37:26,799
Speaker 1: wrapped in an herb known as the UH is the

662
00:37:26,880 --> 00:37:29,880
Speaker 1: root of life and UH, and then he comes to

663
00:37:30,160 --> 00:37:34,160
Speaker 1: in the year four. I love how some of many

664
00:37:34,200 --> 00:37:36,920
Speaker 1: of these older time travel stories they just go for it.

665
00:37:36,960 --> 00:37:40,399
Speaker 1: They just go like a thousand years into the future. Um,

666
00:37:40,600 --> 00:37:42,200
Speaker 1: you don't seem like you don't see as much of that,

667
00:37:42,520 --> 00:37:44,440
Speaker 1: and and I don't know many of the stories we

668
00:37:44,440 --> 00:37:46,239
Speaker 1: were you know, we grow even I guess I fall

669
00:37:46,280 --> 00:37:49,360
Speaker 1: back to the patterns set by Back to the Future,

670
00:37:49,640 --> 00:37:51,640
Speaker 1: Like what are you looking at your traveling into the

671
00:37:51,680 --> 00:37:54,919
Speaker 1: time of your parents, or you're traveling into the time

672
00:37:55,000 --> 00:37:57,560
Speaker 1: of your children, which I think makes a lot of

673
00:37:57,560 --> 00:38:01,360
Speaker 1: sense because that's a very human perspective of individual perspective

674
00:38:01,440 --> 00:38:04,480
Speaker 1: level of time travel. That's the that's generally the spectrum

675
00:38:04,480 --> 00:38:06,399
Speaker 1: that we're most concerned about, or should be I guess

676
00:38:06,440 --> 00:38:08,960
Speaker 1: most concerned about it is like where do we come from?

677
00:38:09,000 --> 00:38:11,600
Speaker 1: And what sort of world are we leaving for our children?

678
00:38:12,280 --> 00:38:16,600
Speaker 1: I wonder if the tendency for for time travel journeys

679
00:38:16,640 --> 00:38:19,200
Speaker 1: to become more modest in scale, you know, people going

680
00:38:19,480 --> 00:38:22,760
Speaker 1: a hundred years into the future instead of a thousand. Uh,

681
00:38:22,960 --> 00:38:27,160
Speaker 1: if that happens in the twentieth century because of the

682
00:38:27,320 --> 00:38:31,560
Speaker 1: increasing rate of cultural and technological change in the twentieth century,

683
00:38:31,680 --> 00:38:34,160
Speaker 1: like people living in a time where things see it

684
00:38:34,200 --> 00:38:35,839
Speaker 1: will seem at least and I don't know if there's

685
00:38:35,840 --> 00:38:38,000
Speaker 1: an objective way to measure this, but seem at least

686
00:38:38,000 --> 00:38:41,759
Speaker 1: to be changing faster than ever. Did they start to think, like,

687
00:38:41,800 --> 00:38:43,840
Speaker 1: I can't set this a thousand years in the future,

688
00:38:43,880 --> 00:38:46,560
Speaker 1: because like nothing will even be recognizable. I've got to

689
00:38:46,600 --> 00:38:49,680
Speaker 1: I've got to pull the pull the reins back a bit. Yeah,

690
00:38:49,760 --> 00:38:52,640
Speaker 1: getting into the concept of future shock, right, the idea

691
00:38:52,719 --> 00:38:54,520
Speaker 1: that it just seems like things are moving at such

692
00:38:54,840 --> 00:38:58,360
Speaker 1: a terrific level, I can't possibly predict what it's going

693
00:38:58,440 --> 00:39:00,719
Speaker 1: to be like in uh, you know, in just ten

694
00:39:00,800 --> 00:39:02,719
Speaker 1: years now. One of the interesting things there is, of course,

695
00:39:02,719 --> 00:39:05,680
Speaker 1: that the concept of future shock, that there could be

696
00:39:05,719 --> 00:39:09,399
Speaker 1: almost this trauma and anxiety associated with the the rate

697
00:39:09,440 --> 00:39:12,400
Speaker 1: of technological advancement. This didn't come about till nineteen seventy.

698
00:39:12,480 --> 00:39:18,120
Speaker 1: This was American futurist Alvin Toffler and his spouse Adelaide. Uh.

699
00:39:18,160 --> 00:39:21,640
Speaker 1: They they formulated this concept. So, I don't know, it

700
00:39:21,640 --> 00:39:23,360
Speaker 1: would be interesting to look at the sci fi. At

701
00:39:23,400 --> 00:39:26,279
Speaker 1: sci fi from the nineteen seventies, was was it less

702
00:39:26,920 --> 00:39:31,480
Speaker 1: less um likely to look at near future situations and

703
00:39:31,560 --> 00:39:35,000
Speaker 1: more likely to gaze into the far future, you know,

704
00:39:35,040 --> 00:39:38,560
Speaker 1: sort of like the early earlier work of Frank Herbert

705
00:39:38,560 --> 00:39:41,120
Speaker 1: looking into the far future Humanity and Dune. Because it

706
00:39:41,160 --> 00:39:43,320
Speaker 1: seems like by the time we get into the nineteen eighties,

707
00:39:43,520 --> 00:39:46,080
Speaker 1: you have far more of a tendency with sci fi

708
00:39:46,120 --> 00:39:49,719
Speaker 1: authors to look into an immediate future. But I could

709
00:39:49,760 --> 00:39:52,160
Speaker 1: be way off off the path there. I'm just probably

710
00:39:52,719 --> 00:39:55,480
Speaker 1: cherry picking thinking about various works from different decades that

711
00:39:55,560 --> 00:40:05,000
Speaker 1: I'm familiar with. Well, we we teased earlier the question

712
00:40:05,120 --> 00:40:08,719
Speaker 1: of how far back in history the concept of time

713
00:40:08,719 --> 00:40:11,160
Speaker 1: travel actually goes. It's clear again that a lot of

714
00:40:11,200 --> 00:40:15,239
Speaker 1: modern time travel, I think is largely traceable back to H. G.

715
00:40:15,360 --> 00:40:17,920
Speaker 1: Wells and The Time Machine. Again, that's the eighteen nineties,

716
00:40:17,960 --> 00:40:21,080
Speaker 1: but there are ideas of time travel from before that.

717
00:40:21,120 --> 00:40:24,840
Speaker 1: Like we've been discussing how far before that. So I

718
00:40:24,880 --> 00:40:28,359
Speaker 1: was looking around for evidence of the oldest stories of

719
00:40:28,440 --> 00:40:32,320
Speaker 1: time travel and literature, and I came across an interesting

720
00:40:32,400 --> 00:40:37,279
Speaker 1: claim from a professor, actually a professor at Georgia Tech

721
00:40:37,480 --> 00:40:41,600
Speaker 1: named Lisa Yazik, who is a professor of science fiction studies.

722
00:40:41,960 --> 00:40:45,120
Speaker 1: So I was watching a video lecture that she did

723
00:40:45,120 --> 00:40:49,799
Speaker 1: in about She actually wrote the preface or introduction to

724
00:40:49,840 --> 00:40:53,720
Speaker 1: a recent new edition of of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells,

725
00:40:54,480 --> 00:40:57,200
Speaker 1: and she's done a lot of study about the history

726
00:40:57,400 --> 00:41:01,800
Speaker 1: of time travel stories actually connected her also by a

727
00:41:01,880 --> 00:41:05,000
Speaker 1: mentioned in that article by by Adam Man in Life Science.

728
00:41:05,320 --> 00:41:09,399
Speaker 1: But Yesik actually has a lot of of interesting thoughts

729
00:41:09,400 --> 00:41:12,120
Speaker 1: about time travel. She argues that it is not as

730
00:41:12,200 --> 00:41:16,080
Speaker 1: modern a literary concept as we might assume, and in fact,

731
00:41:16,440 --> 00:41:20,520
Speaker 1: some forms of time travel are as old as literature itself.

732
00:41:20,960 --> 00:41:23,279
Speaker 1: And so what would be the examples here? Well, she

733
00:41:23,400 --> 00:41:27,520
Speaker 1: gives the example of the ancient Sanskrit epic the Mahabarita,

734
00:41:28,160 --> 00:41:31,480
Speaker 1: which describes a form of time travel that yeas it

735
00:41:31,640 --> 00:41:35,160
Speaker 1: calls time dilation. So this would be similar to the

736
00:41:35,480 --> 00:41:38,680
Speaker 1: type of time travel that is quite real a confirmed

737
00:41:38,760 --> 00:41:41,640
Speaker 1: part of modern physics that we know from general relativity,

738
00:41:41,640 --> 00:41:44,280
Speaker 1: where say, if you are um, if you are near

739
00:41:44,400 --> 00:41:47,200
Speaker 1: an object of great mass, or if you are moving

740
00:41:47,239 --> 00:41:51,000
Speaker 1: at great velocity, then relative to other objects in the universe,

741
00:41:51,320 --> 00:41:54,120
Speaker 1: your experience of time will slow down. You will age

742
00:41:54,160 --> 00:41:56,520
Speaker 1: more slowly, as as time sort of zips by in

743
00:41:56,560 --> 00:41:59,800
Speaker 1: the broader context. But this story is not about physics,

744
00:41:59,800 --> 00:42:02,680
Speaker 1: so uh. This story in the Mahabarata probably dates back

745
00:42:02,719 --> 00:42:06,080
Speaker 1: to sometime in the first millennium b c. E UH,

746
00:42:06,120 --> 00:42:08,920
Speaker 1: and it is the story of a king named Rivada,

747
00:42:09,040 --> 00:42:13,759
Speaker 1: who is also known as Kakudman and his daughter Ravati

748
00:42:14,080 --> 00:42:16,200
Speaker 1: actually found a good text of this story, though it

749
00:42:16,320 --> 00:42:19,279
Speaker 1: is the version that's told not in the Mahabarata but

750
00:42:19,440 --> 00:42:22,880
Speaker 1: in the Vishnu Puranha. And so this version is from

751
00:42:22,960 --> 00:42:25,800
Speaker 1: the Vishnu Puranha, and it's translated into English in the

752
00:42:25,880 --> 00:42:30,000
Speaker 1: nineteenth century by Horace Hayman Wilson. So the story begins

753
00:42:30,080 --> 00:42:33,040
Speaker 1: with this king Ravada, who is the eldest of a

754
00:42:33,120 --> 00:42:38,920
Speaker 1: hundred brethren. And King Ravada has a surpassingly wonderful daughter

755
00:42:39,080 --> 00:42:43,040
Speaker 1: named Ravati, and she is just awesome and lovely in

756
00:42:43,120 --> 00:42:47,160
Speaker 1: every possible way. She's like the best princess ever. And

757
00:42:47,239 --> 00:42:51,600
Speaker 1: in fact, Ravati is so great that Rivada doesn't know

758
00:42:51,760 --> 00:42:54,320
Speaker 1: if there are really any men around who are worthy

759
00:42:54,360 --> 00:42:57,680
Speaker 1: of her hand in marriage. So he gets an idea.

760
00:42:58,160 --> 00:43:01,200
Speaker 1: He is going to consult the heads. He will travel

761
00:43:01,680 --> 00:43:04,680
Speaker 1: to the Brahma realm, the plane of existence where the

762
00:43:04,680 --> 00:43:08,279
Speaker 1: god Brahma dwells, and he will consult with the great God.

763
00:43:08,320 --> 00:43:11,280
Speaker 1: He will get the advice of Brahma, because if anybody

764
00:43:11,280 --> 00:43:14,000
Speaker 1: should be able to find him a suitable match for Ravati,

765
00:43:14,040 --> 00:43:17,120
Speaker 1: it should be Brahma. But when the two of them

766
00:43:17,200 --> 00:43:19,920
Speaker 1: get there, Brahma is in the middle of listening to

767
00:43:19,960 --> 00:43:23,680
Speaker 1: a concert. They're they're a group of of divine singers

768
00:43:23,719 --> 00:43:26,600
Speaker 1: who are who are going through a song. And so

769
00:43:26,840 --> 00:43:30,120
Speaker 1: Ravada and Ravati sit and wait patiently for the song

770
00:43:30,160 --> 00:43:32,160
Speaker 1: to finish. And here I'm going to quote from the

771
00:43:32,400 --> 00:43:36,399
Speaker 1: Wilson translation. At the end of their singing, Ravada prostrated

772
00:43:36,480 --> 00:43:40,600
Speaker 1: himself before Brahma and explained his Errand whom should you

773
00:43:40,640 --> 00:43:43,319
Speaker 1: wish for a son in law? Demanded Brahma, And the

774
00:43:43,400 --> 00:43:46,000
Speaker 1: King mentioned to him various persons with whom he could

775
00:43:46,040 --> 00:43:50,240
Speaker 1: be well pleased. Nodding his head gently and graciously smiling,

776
00:43:50,560 --> 00:43:53,160
Speaker 1: Brahma said to him, of those whom you have named,

777
00:43:53,239 --> 00:43:58,160
Speaker 1: the third or fourth generation no longer survives, for many

778
00:43:58,239 --> 00:44:02,000
Speaker 1: successions of ages have passed away whilst you were listening

779
00:44:02,000 --> 00:44:07,200
Speaker 1: to our songsters. Now upon earth, the great age of

780
00:44:07,239 --> 00:44:10,880
Speaker 1: the present Manu is nearly finished, and the Collie period

781
00:44:10,960 --> 00:44:14,399
Speaker 1: is at hand. You must therefore bestow this virgin gym

782
00:44:14,520 --> 00:44:18,080
Speaker 1: upon some other husband, for you are now alone, and

783
00:44:18,160 --> 00:44:23,440
Speaker 1: your friends, your minister's servants, wife, kinsman, armies, and treasures

784
00:44:23,560 --> 00:44:26,760
Speaker 1: have long since been swept away by the hand of time.

785
00:44:27,960 --> 00:44:31,239
Speaker 1: So the issue here is that time flows at a

786
00:44:31,360 --> 00:44:35,240
Speaker 1: different rate on Earth than it does in the Brahma realm.

787
00:44:35,280 --> 00:44:37,880
Speaker 1: It's as if the Brahma realm were like near a

788
00:44:37,960 --> 00:44:42,200
Speaker 1: supermassive black hole. So while the two mortals were sitting

789
00:44:42,239 --> 00:44:45,080
Speaker 1: here listening to this song, presumably the song's only a

790
00:44:45,120 --> 00:44:48,600
Speaker 1: few minutes long, millions of years have passed on Earth,

791
00:44:48,680 --> 00:44:54,000
Speaker 1: and everybody they ever knew or knew of is dead. Fortunately,

792
00:44:54,239 --> 00:44:57,440
Speaker 1: there are some immortal god still around, and so there

793
00:44:57,520 --> 00:45:00,400
Speaker 1: is a semi happy ending for Ravati because at the

794
00:45:00,520 --> 00:45:03,719
Speaker 1: end she gets too She gets pared up with one

795
00:45:03,719 --> 00:45:06,840
Speaker 1: of the avatars of the god Vishnu, who is quite

796
00:45:06,840 --> 00:45:10,000
Speaker 1: worthy of her hand in marriage, of course, because he's Vishnu.

797
00:45:10,160 --> 00:45:12,319
Speaker 1: And then there's a long section of the story in

798
00:45:12,400 --> 00:45:16,239
Speaker 1: the Vishnu Puranha version that is just a monologue on

799
00:45:16,239 --> 00:45:20,879
Speaker 1: the nature of Vishnu, who interestingly is in places described

800
00:45:21,040 --> 00:45:24,080
Speaker 1: sort of like a manifestation of time itself. So I

801
00:45:24,120 --> 00:45:26,560
Speaker 1: just want to read some some parts of this monologue,

802
00:45:26,600 --> 00:45:30,640
Speaker 1: not the whole thing. Quote the being of whose commencement,

803
00:45:30,880 --> 00:45:35,200
Speaker 1: course and termination we are ignorant, the unborn and omnipresent

804
00:45:35,320 --> 00:45:38,640
Speaker 1: essence of all things, He who's real and infinite nature

805
00:45:38,640 --> 00:45:42,160
Speaker 1: and essence we do not know is the supreme Vishnu.

806
00:45:42,360 --> 00:45:47,080
Speaker 1: He is time, made up of moments and hours and years,

807
00:45:47,120 --> 00:45:51,080
Speaker 1: whose influence is the source of perpetual change. He is

808
00:45:51,160 --> 00:45:54,240
Speaker 1: the universal form of all things, from birth to death.

809
00:45:54,680 --> 00:45:58,200
Speaker 1: He is eternal, without name or shape, and then skipping

810
00:45:58,200 --> 00:46:01,439
Speaker 1: ahead of it. He is at once the creator, and

811
00:46:01,560 --> 00:46:04,799
Speaker 1: that which is created the preserver, and that which is

812
00:46:05,000 --> 00:46:08,960
Speaker 1: preserved the destroyer, and as one with all things, that

813
00:46:09,040 --> 00:46:13,480
Speaker 1: which is destroyed, and as the indestructible. He is distinct

814
00:46:13,520 --> 00:46:17,359
Speaker 1: from these three vicissitudes. In him is the world. He

815
00:46:17,600 --> 00:46:20,920
Speaker 1: is the world, and he the primeval self born is

816
00:46:20,960 --> 00:46:24,640
Speaker 1: again present in the world. Wow. Yeah, that that reminds

817
00:46:24,640 --> 00:46:31,720
Speaker 1: me of some translations of of the Geta. They they

818
00:46:31,800 --> 00:46:34,680
Speaker 1: translate the words of Ishnu as as I am time

819
00:46:34,800 --> 00:46:38,879
Speaker 1: grown old, which I like that. That yeah, that gives

820
00:46:38,880 --> 00:46:41,880
Speaker 1: me chills. Now. There's another interesting thing that gets mentioned

821
00:46:41,920 --> 00:46:44,600
Speaker 1: in this story, which is that, though there are some

822
00:46:44,719 --> 00:46:48,879
Speaker 1: very important differences between this myth and the dystopian sci

823
00:46:48,920 --> 00:46:52,520
Speaker 1: fi stories of the modern era, Rivada and Ravati do

824
00:46:52,719 --> 00:46:56,480
Speaker 1: return to a future earth that could be called dystopian,

825
00:46:56,680 --> 00:47:00,000
Speaker 1: or at least worse off than the one they left at.

826
00:47:00,000 --> 00:47:01,719
Speaker 1: Don't know if this has to do, it might have

827
00:47:01,760 --> 00:47:04,479
Speaker 1: to do with um what Brahma says about the Earth

828
00:47:04,520 --> 00:47:07,520
Speaker 1: being on the verge of the Collie age. But we

829
00:47:07,600 --> 00:47:11,440
Speaker 1: are told quote being thus instructed by the Lotus born divinity.

830
00:47:11,640 --> 00:47:15,040
Speaker 1: Ravada returned with his daughter to Earth, where he found

831
00:47:15,040 --> 00:47:18,560
Speaker 1: the race of men dwindled in stature, reduced in vigor,

832
00:47:18,680 --> 00:47:22,560
Speaker 1: and enfeebled in intellect. So they come back and people

833
00:47:22,600 --> 00:47:25,040
Speaker 1: are like worse than when they left. Things things have

834
00:47:25,120 --> 00:47:28,959
Speaker 1: gone downhill. And uh So I want to be clear

835
00:47:29,000 --> 00:47:32,239
Speaker 1: that the kind of dystopian future described by H. G.

836
00:47:32,400 --> 00:47:37,040
Speaker 1: Wells in The Time Machine is I believe understood as

837
00:47:37,080 --> 00:47:42,360
Speaker 1: a contingent consequence of bad social and political trends within

838
00:47:42,520 --> 00:47:45,600
Speaker 1: linear time. So I think the important point that Wells

839
00:47:45,719 --> 00:47:48,760
Speaker 1: is trying to make is that if we say, continue

840
00:47:48,800 --> 00:47:52,520
Speaker 1: tolerating a society in which the rich relentlessly exploit the

841
00:47:52,560 --> 00:47:55,200
Speaker 1: labor of the poor, here's what you're gonna get. You know,

842
00:47:55,239 --> 00:47:59,200
Speaker 1: you're gonna get Eloi and morlocks. Um, I don't get

843
00:47:59,239 --> 00:48:03,000
Speaker 1: that kind of implication in this ancient Indian epic. It

844
00:48:03,000 --> 00:48:05,080
Speaker 1: would be good to hear from listeners with more knowledge

845
00:48:05,080 --> 00:48:08,520
Speaker 1: about ancient Hindu thought. But I think the story about

846
00:48:09,160 --> 00:48:13,000
Speaker 1: Ravata and Ravati is more consistent with a vision of

847
00:48:13,000 --> 00:48:15,759
Speaker 1: a kind of cyclical mythic time in which there there

848
00:48:15,800 --> 00:48:18,960
Speaker 1: are ages of human advancement and then ages of human

849
00:48:19,040 --> 00:48:22,359
Speaker 1: retreat and it's just that they happen to pop out

850
00:48:22,400 --> 00:48:25,719
Speaker 1: of the Brahma realm in one of the bad times. Yeah,

851
00:48:25,760 --> 00:48:28,040
Speaker 1: that's that's my understanding as well. And of course, this

852
00:48:28,200 --> 00:48:30,759
Speaker 1: this view of time um that is um matches a

853
00:48:30,920 --> 00:48:33,480
Speaker 1: very very loosely with with some of the ideas you

854
00:48:33,560 --> 00:48:38,040
Speaker 1: see in um uh in various Native American tribal cultures

855
00:48:38,120 --> 00:48:41,440
Speaker 1: and in Mesoamerican cultures, where it's a procession of different

856
00:48:41,480 --> 00:48:45,920
Speaker 1: ages and catastrophes and we find ourselves and yet another age,

857
00:48:45,920 --> 00:48:48,319
Speaker 1: and there will be another catastrophe, but then there will

858
00:48:48,320 --> 00:48:51,240
Speaker 1: be another age beyond that. Now, of course this raises

859
00:48:51,280 --> 00:48:53,640
Speaker 1: the question people always want to like pick at logical

860
00:48:53,640 --> 00:48:56,160
Speaker 1: issues in time travel stories, and and this story has

861
00:48:56,239 --> 00:48:58,520
Speaker 1: mythic logic, so it's pointless to try to pick at it.

862
00:48:58,560 --> 00:49:00,960
Speaker 1: But I couldn't help but think, why didn't they just

863
00:49:01,000 --> 00:49:03,200
Speaker 1: wait a few more minutes with Brahma and maybe like

864
00:49:03,280 --> 00:49:05,359
Speaker 1: listen to another song, and then they could pop out

865
00:49:05,400 --> 00:49:07,839
Speaker 1: at a better time on Earth? I don't know. Now.

866
00:49:08,000 --> 00:49:10,759
Speaker 1: I love the idea that it involves um listening to

867
00:49:10,760 --> 00:49:13,200
Speaker 1: to music though, because yeah, I gets into this, like,

868
00:49:13,239 --> 00:49:15,560
Speaker 1: because what happens when we listen to listen to to music?

869
00:49:15,600 --> 00:49:17,719
Speaker 1: You know, that's just one of the many human experiences

870
00:49:17,800 --> 00:49:20,840
Speaker 1: that can alter our perception of time. You know, you

871
00:49:20,880 --> 00:49:23,080
Speaker 1: get lost in a good song, and I don't know,

872
00:49:23,200 --> 00:49:25,640
Speaker 1: sometimes that good song doesn't seem to last long enough.

873
00:49:25,640 --> 00:49:27,080
Speaker 1: You've gotta put it on repeat and listen to it

874
00:49:27,120 --> 00:49:29,960
Speaker 1: about six times um. And in other cases, you know,

875
00:49:30,040 --> 00:49:33,040
Speaker 1: you it seems to stretch on for a very long

876
00:49:33,080 --> 00:49:36,759
Speaker 1: time and you lose yourself in it. Um. And curiously enough,

877
00:49:36,760 --> 00:49:39,480
Speaker 1: this pops up in another UH tale. This is a

878
00:49:39,560 --> 00:49:45,479
Speaker 1: Japanese fairy tale of Urashima Taro Uh. This tale about

879
00:49:45,480 --> 00:49:48,200
Speaker 1: a fisherman who rescues a turtle and returns it to

880
00:49:48,239 --> 00:49:52,120
Speaker 1: the dragon palace beneath the sea. While he's there returning

881
00:49:52,160 --> 00:49:55,960
Speaker 1: said turtle, he's entertained by the princess there as a reward,

882
00:49:56,600 --> 00:50:00,000
Speaker 1: and you know, there's music and dancing. It's great, uh.

883
00:50:00,040 --> 00:50:01,960
Speaker 1: And then he's sent home with a box that he's

884
00:50:01,960 --> 00:50:05,000
Speaker 1: forbidden to open. And when he returns to his home village,

885
00:50:05,239 --> 00:50:08,560
Speaker 1: he finds that a hundred years has passed, and when

886
00:50:08,560 --> 00:50:11,520
Speaker 1: he opens the box that again he was forbidden to open,

887
00:50:11,840 --> 00:50:16,080
Speaker 1: he immediately ages an entire century. Oh no, don't open

888
00:50:16,120 --> 00:50:18,799
Speaker 1: the box, dude. Yeah. I mean, if if gods and

889
00:50:18,880 --> 00:50:21,840
Speaker 1: goddesses and strange ladies under the ocean tell you not

890
00:50:21,920 --> 00:50:25,440
Speaker 1: to open the box, don't open that box. You know what.

891
00:50:25,680 --> 00:50:27,600
Speaker 1: We're in the odd situation where I think we need

892
00:50:27,640 --> 00:50:30,759
Speaker 1: to call this episode right here. But there's a lot

893
00:50:30,800 --> 00:50:32,960
Speaker 1: more we want to say about the history of of

894
00:50:33,000 --> 00:50:36,480
Speaker 1: thinking about time travel, and so what I'm proposing is

895
00:50:36,560 --> 00:50:40,040
Speaker 1: that on this subject, we sleep into the future. I

896
00:50:40,280 --> 00:50:42,600
Speaker 1: don't think we're quite ready for the next episode of

897
00:50:42,600 --> 00:50:44,320
Speaker 1: the show to be part two of this, so maybe

898
00:50:44,320 --> 00:50:47,479
Speaker 1: this will be an open part one, and who knows

899
00:50:47,520 --> 00:50:49,520
Speaker 1: when the hands of time will reach out and feed

900
00:50:49,560 --> 00:50:52,800
Speaker 1: you the second entry. Yeah, just don't open any strange

901
00:50:52,840 --> 00:50:57,399
Speaker 1: boxes in the meantime, all right, well, yes, definitely look

902
00:50:57,400 --> 00:51:00,200
Speaker 1: out for that in the next episode. Uh, we have

903
00:51:00,239 --> 00:51:01,640
Speaker 1: some we may have. I think we are gonna have

904
00:51:01,680 --> 00:51:03,920
Speaker 1: some other episodes that have to occur before then, but

905
00:51:04,000 --> 00:51:06,360
Speaker 1: we will be back to discuss this topic more. In

906
00:51:06,400 --> 00:51:08,440
Speaker 1: the meantime, you would like to check out other episodes

907
00:51:08,480 --> 00:51:10,440
Speaker 1: of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Will You can find

908
00:51:10,520 --> 00:51:13,960
Speaker 1: all of them trailing back through time in the Stuff

909
00:51:14,000 --> 00:51:16,440
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. You can get that

910
00:51:16,480 --> 00:51:19,800
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts. Uh. We have our core

911
00:51:19,880 --> 00:51:23,279
Speaker 1: episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays listener mail. On Mondays we

912
00:51:23,360 --> 00:51:26,880
Speaker 1: do a short form artifact on Wednesdays. On Friday we

913
00:51:26,920 --> 00:51:29,000
Speaker 1: do a little something called Weird House Cinema. That's when

914
00:51:29,040 --> 00:51:32,040
Speaker 1: we set most serious concerns aside and we just talk

915
00:51:32,120 --> 00:51:35,640
Speaker 1: about some sort of strange film. And we have discussed

916
00:51:35,640 --> 00:51:39,439
Speaker 1: time travel films and not only time after time, but uh, oh,

917
00:51:39,719 --> 00:51:43,440
Speaker 1: what else did we get into? Um uh, Transfers. Transfers

918
00:51:43,440 --> 00:51:46,600
Speaker 1: is a hell of a time travel movie, The Return

919
00:51:46,640 --> 00:51:49,239
Speaker 1: of Jack Dad. Yes, TEUs right, we did, we did

920
00:51:49,239 --> 00:51:53,040
Speaker 1: Transfers to Oh and then on the weekends we do

921
00:51:53,080 --> 00:51:55,200
Speaker 1: a vault episode that's a rerun from the previous year.

922
00:51:55,600 --> 00:51:58,359
Speaker 1: Huge Things. As always to our excellent audio producer Seth

923
00:51:58,440 --> 00:52:00,600
Speaker 1: Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch

924
00:52:00,640 --> 00:52:02,799
Speaker 1: with us with feedback on this episode or any other,

925
00:52:02,880 --> 00:52:05,200
Speaker 1: to suggest a topic for the future, or just to

926
00:52:05,280 --> 00:52:08,000
Speaker 1: say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff

927
00:52:08,040 --> 00:52:17,759
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your

928
00:52:17,760 --> 00:52:20,680
Speaker 1: Mind is production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts

929
00:52:20,719 --> 00:52:22,799
Speaker 1: for My heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,

930
00:52:22,960 --> 00:52:34,520
Speaker 1: Apple podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.