Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time for an episode from the Vault. This one originally
Speaker 1: aired December, and it's called Time Traveler zero Part two,
Speaker 1: the follow up to last Saturday's episode. So we're picking
Speaker 1: up again with our exploration of the origins of the
Speaker 1: idea of time travel and time travelers. Let's jump right in.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
Speaker 1: we are picking up with our our second episode about
Speaker 1: time travel as a concept, time travel as it appears,
Speaker 1: especially in Fick Shan and The Human Imagination. The first
Speaker 1: episode was Time Traveler zero Part one. Uh, then we
Speaker 1: had a little break and did another episode, and now
Speaker 1: we're back with Time Traveler zero Part two. Now I
Speaker 1: thought this was going to be in one, but I
Speaker 1: guess we wait. Now we're already in twenty one. I
Speaker 1: get all confused about years. I thought it was going
Speaker 1: to be next year, but uh yeah, yeah, but then
Speaker 1: we ended up shuffling some stuff around so here we
Speaker 1: are earlier than we thought. Yeah, yeah, so we were
Speaker 1: just traveling back and forth between past and future, uh
Speaker 1: though within the the artificial confines of of our publication schedule. Now,
Speaker 1: in the last episode, we talked about some of the
Speaker 1: earliest possible appearances of forms of time travel in mythology
Speaker 1: and literature, such as in the Mahabarata and in some
Speaker 1: say Japanese folk tales, where the way you could probably
Speaker 1: describe the time travel mechanism is something like time dial action.
Speaker 1: So uh so, for example, the the story of King
Speaker 1: Rivada and his daughter Ravatti in the in the Sanskrit
Speaker 1: epics that would you know, they travel up to the
Speaker 1: Brahma realm and they stay there for a few minutes.
Speaker 1: But then they find because time moves differently in the
Speaker 1: Brahma realm than it does down on Earth, millions of
Speaker 1: years have passed and whoops, like that, their entire civilization
Speaker 1: is gone and it's on to a different age. But
Speaker 1: I think today we're going to look at a similar
Speaker 1: but slightly different mechanism that appears in the history of
Speaker 1: time travel mythology and literature, which is sleeping into the future. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is this is one of the concepts that's
Speaker 1: discussed in Paul J. Nahan's book Time Machines Time Travel
Speaker 1: in Physics, Metaphysics and Science Fiction, which is a book
Speaker 1: that I I cited in the first episode and we'll
Speaker 1: continue to decide from this if you if you're looking
Speaker 1: for a good time travel book that deals with like
Speaker 1: the concept of time travel but also gets into some
Speaker 1: of the heavier scientific contemplations of the topic, it's a
Speaker 1: great book to pick up. So Nan discusses the time
Speaker 1: travel by dreaming was once a common literary device, and yeah,
Speaker 1: that it's closely related to this idea of sleeping into
Speaker 1: the future. The and and and this is something I
Speaker 1: love because this is something that we can all relate
Speaker 1: to because we all do it every night, right, Well,
Speaker 1: we lay our head down on the pillow, and you know,
Speaker 1: there might be a little bit of struggle getting the
Speaker 1: time machine activated. But once the once sleep mode is
Speaker 1: in place, um, you were able to skip forward in time.
Speaker 1: Now depending on how you sleep in the nature of
Speaker 1: your dreams. Uh, you know, not every journey is going
Speaker 1: to be the same. Some of these journeys are a
Speaker 1: little round about, um, you know, where suddenly we have
Speaker 1: to you know, stop and um how to to to
Speaker 1: steal a joke from Mitch Hedberg, we have to let
Speaker 1: um uh build a toy playing with our boss or
Speaker 1: something before getting to our destination. Uh with my landlord
Speaker 1: was go kart with the land that Um, yeah, it
Speaker 1: say so. There might be some distractions on the way,
Speaker 1: but when you wake up, it will be tomorrow, it
Speaker 1: will be the next day, it will be the next morning. Though.
Speaker 1: One thing that's interesting about that is, uh that I
Speaker 1: think if you ever have the experience of going under
Speaker 1: general anesthesia and being able to compare that experience to
Speaker 1: the normal experience of sleep, at least for me, and
Speaker 1: I think this is pretty common for others as well,
Speaker 1: the comparison to anesthesia makes you aware that you are
Speaker 1: sort of semi conscious of the passage of time during
Speaker 1: sleep in a way that you're not really for the
Speaker 1: like the pure deep unconsciousness of anesthesia, where I mean
Speaker 1: under the drugs, it's just sort of like, you know,
Speaker 1: you snap your fingers and then you're awake hours later,
Speaker 1: or at least that that's sort of what I recall.
Speaker 1: But with with sleeping, you know, you're not really conscious
Speaker 1: of the passage of time, but you're you're sort of
Speaker 1: maybe liminally conscious that something is going on. Time is
Speaker 1: somehow passing, it's not quite as much of a pause
Speaker 1: and then play as as anesthesia is. Oh, I agree, absolutely,
Speaker 1: That's been my experience. Um. I guess when you sleep
Speaker 1: and when you dream, time gets weird. Uh. And it
Speaker 1: may it may feel like it passes very quickly, but
Speaker 1: when you go under anesthesia, UM, time just disappears completely.
Speaker 1: It is, like you said, just the like the snap
Speaker 1: of a finger. Um. So, so yeah, that's something important
Speaker 1: to keep in mind. But but but obviously, you know,
Speaker 1: people for you know, thousands and thousands of years would
Speaker 1: have been privy to this, this weird situation. And maybe
Speaker 1: it's not even that weird because it does happen every night.
Speaker 1: Though I would argue that the world of dreams always
Speaker 1: offers a little weirdness. Uh. People would be familiar with this, um,
Speaker 1: this phenomenon. And so we see a play out in
Speaker 1: various stories. Uh. Probably the most famous of these, um
Speaker 1: still to this day is it is going to be
Speaker 1: Washington Irving's eighteen nineteen story Rip van Winkle, in which
Speaker 1: a man sleeps his way twenty years into the future. Now,
Speaker 1: of course this this would become a pretty standard trope
Speaker 1: of of of science fiction, especially when you get into
Speaker 1: the realm of suspended animation. Uh. This, of course was
Speaker 1: parodied in the long running sci fi animated series Futurama,
Speaker 1: where Fry essentially sleeps into the future via cryogenics. But
Speaker 1: you all also find it in various other works. One
Speaker 1: that Naan mentions is um it was is H. G.
Speaker 1: Wells When the Sleeper Awakes from eight which is is
Speaker 1: not what I've read, not when I was familiar with.
Speaker 1: But this one involves a sleep jaunt from the year
Speaker 1: eighteen seven to the year so you wake up and
Speaker 1: there are some giant flying machines that look kind of
Speaker 1: like skeletal butterflies or something. Oh yeah, there's some wonderful
Speaker 1: illustrations from this that I was able to look up
Speaker 1: that I believe we're part of the original published story.
Speaker 1: And yeah, they're black and white, and yeah, there's like
Speaker 1: they're like enormous structures. They're these flying machines that look
Speaker 1: like the they look kind of like the ornithopter is
Speaker 1: that the Wookies are using in the Star Wars movies. Uh,
Speaker 1: really cool looking stuff. There was also a seventeen seventy
Speaker 1: one tale by L. S. Mercy Or about an eighteenth
Speaker 1: century sleeper who awakes in the twenty five century. And
Speaker 1: I just have to say, I love how so many
Speaker 1: of these time travel yarns they're just really jumping out there.
Speaker 1: You know, they're going, uh, you know, hundreds of years
Speaker 1: into the future. I wonder again, I think I contemplated
Speaker 1: this a little bit in our last episode, like, what
Speaker 1: does it say about a given time period, how far
Speaker 1: into the future time their fictional time travelers are going. Now,
Speaker 1: one of the things that Nan points out is that
Speaker 1: sleeping into the future is quite an old trope, and uh,
Speaker 1: it might well be the oldest time travel concept in
Speaker 1: human storytelling. I don't think any of the examples we're
Speaker 1: looking at would go back farther than the Maha Barta,
Speaker 1: which did not involve sleeping and was more of the
Speaker 1: time dilation version. But but certainly it us go way back.
Speaker 1: I'm going to cite an example of sleeping into the
Speaker 1: future from the ancient world in just a minute here. Well,
Speaker 1: the one that the name shares is from around six
Speaker 1: hundred ce Gregory of Tours told a story titled The
Speaker 1: Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, who traveled three hundred and seventy
Speaker 1: two years via sleep whoa sometimes known as the Seven Sleepers.
Speaker 1: This is a medieval tale told about a group of
Speaker 1: Christian youths who hide in a cave outside of of
Speaker 1: the city around to fifty c in order to escape
Speaker 1: Roman persecution, and they emerge. I think that the exact
Speaker 1: number of years they sleep varies. I've seen three hundred,
Speaker 1: I've seen three seventy two. But they they wake up
Speaker 1: and they find that the that everything has changed. The
Speaker 1: city is now a city of believers and um in
Speaker 1: a in A version of this tale is also found
Speaker 1: in the Qoran. Now that's interesting because it shows one
Speaker 1: of the things that time travel is sometimes used to
Speaker 1: do in literature and in folk tales, which is to
Speaker 1: uh to sort of vindicate a person's reputation or point
Speaker 1: of view, to to show sort of like, yep, the
Speaker 1: future acknowledged they were right. So these people go and
Speaker 1: fall asleep in a cave as a persecuted minority and
Speaker 1: then come out and their side is finally vindicated and
Speaker 1: has taken over. Yeah, and and I guess on on
Speaker 1: a simpler level, it's it's about using the time travel
Speaker 1: story to compare the past and the future or the
Speaker 1: past in the present, whichever compare two points of time
Speaker 1: and have some a character or characters involved as the
Speaker 1: bridge between the two that can provide a point of view. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. So the stories allow a level of perspective
Speaker 1: that doesn't occur in reality. That you know that you
Speaker 1: can see two things that a person in reality can
Speaker 1: can never see both of two different ages. Uh. But
Speaker 1: I found an example I thought was really interesting because
Speaker 1: it turns out sleeping into the future actually goes back
Speaker 1: even farther than the the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. I
Speaker 1: wanted to talk about a really interesting example I came
Speaker 1: across in the stories of the first century b CE
Speaker 1: Jewish scholar and a legend miracle worker named Honey the
Speaker 1: Circle Maker. Now, I think his best historians can tell
Speaker 1: Honey was a real person. This is not like a
Speaker 1: purely legendary figure, though I think some of the accounts
Speaker 1: of his life are obviously probably legendary. But but it
Speaker 1: seems like this was a real guy. He was a
Speaker 1: real scholar who lived in the first century b C.
Speaker 1: He's not mentioned in the Hebrew Bible or the Tanock.
Speaker 1: He he lived after the books of the Tannock were composed,
Speaker 1: but stories about him are preserved in the Talmud, the
Speaker 1: collection of of Jewish law and uh commentary known as
Speaker 1: the Talmud. And he gets his epithet the circle Maker
Speaker 1: or sometimes the circle drawer from the most famous story
Speaker 1: about his life, which which I will tell now. And
Speaker 1: I'm summarizing the version that appears in the Babylonian Talmud,
Speaker 1: which I found in full text English translation with a
Speaker 1: nice searchable online version called the William Davidson Digital Edition
Speaker 1: of the Talmud. It's got both English and modern Hebrew
Speaker 1: side by side, so it looks like a very usable addition.
Speaker 1: But anyway, the story of the most famous miracle goes
Speaker 1: like this. So there's this Jewish scholar named Hony Uh
Speaker 1: and he is living in a time of drought, and
Speaker 1: the people come to him and ask Hony to pray
Speaker 1: to God that rain might fall. And Hony seems very
Speaker 1: confident that he's going to get results, because he tells
Speaker 1: the people that they need to go and bring their
Speaker 1: clay ovens inside because there's about to be so much
Speaker 1: rain that the clay will dissolve. In the downpour. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't want that happen. So Hony prays, but no
Speaker 1: rain comes, and in response, Hony steps it up. So
Speaker 1: he draws a circle in the dust on the ground,
Speaker 1: and he stands inside the circle, and then he says, quote,
Speaker 1: Master of the Universe, your children have turned to their
Speaker 1: faces towards me, as I am a member of your household.
Speaker 1: Therefore I take an oath by your great name that
Speaker 1: I will not move from here until you have mercy
Speaker 1: upon your children and answer their prayers for rain. And
Speaker 1: apparently it works, because a little sprinkling of rain then begins,
Speaker 1: but it's a weak rain. So Hony is not satisfied,
Speaker 1: and he prays to God again, saying quote, I did
Speaker 1: not ask for this, but for rain to fill the cisterns,
Speaker 1: ditches and caves with enough water to last the entire year.
Speaker 1: So then the rain picks up and it starts to
Speaker 1: pour violently, mightily rushing rain. Uh. And Hony isn't quite
Speaker 1: happy with this either, so he says, quote, I did
Speaker 1: not ask for this damaging rain either, but for rain
Speaker 1: of benevolence, blessing, and generosity. I kind of like that.
Speaker 1: He's uh, He's kind of standing up to the Hebraic
Speaker 1: God in a way that you know, you don't see
Speaker 1: in in various other stories, certainly you don't see and say,
Speaker 1: like the Book of job right, there's a very different attitude. Yeah,
Speaker 1: with Tony here and and his sort of almost rudeness
Speaker 1: with God. Is is something that does come up in
Speaker 1: a controversy in the epilogue to the story. But just
Speaker 1: to quickly finish the story, uh, the narrative says quote Subsequently,
Speaker 1: the rains fell in their standard manner, but continued unabated,
Speaker 1: filling the city with water until all of the Jews
Speaker 1: exited the residential areas of Jerusalem and went to the
Speaker 1: Tipple Mount due to the rain. So he calls for
Speaker 1: rain and God provides it. But then there's sort of
Speaker 1: an epilogue where there's like controversy about several things. First
Speaker 1: of all, the people ask is it raining too much?
Speaker 1: Should should Hony pray to God to make it stop now?
Speaker 1: And they have a back and forth about that. But
Speaker 1: then also it's the question is raised, you know, was
Speaker 1: there kind of something wrong with the way Hony was
Speaker 1: was nagging God for rain? Like the text actually the
Speaker 1: English translation, I was looking at uses the word nag,
Speaker 1: but ultimately the scholars conclude that, you know, Hony is
Speaker 1: okay because God responded to his please without repre manned,
Speaker 1: And so it seems like Tony's relationship with God is good. Well,
Speaker 1: he was like a member of his households. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: they go way back. So that's Hony the circle maker.
Speaker 1: But how it becomes relevant to time travel is there
Speaker 1: is actually a story of Hony sleeping into the future. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this story is also from the Babylonian Talmud. It
Speaker 1: is attributed to a Rabbi Johannon, and I just want
Speaker 1: to read it here and then we can talk about
Speaker 1: it a bit. Quote all the days of the life
Speaker 1: of that righteous man Hony, he was distressed over the
Speaker 1: meaning of this verse A song of a sense. When
Speaker 1: the Lord brought back those who returned to Zion, we
Speaker 1: were like those who dream Psalms one one. He said
Speaker 1: to himself, is there really a person who can sleep
Speaker 1: and dream for seventy years? How is it possible to
Speaker 1: compare the seventy year exile in Babylonia to a dream?
Speaker 1: One day he was walking along the road when he
Speaker 1: saw a certain man planting a care u tree. Honey
Speaker 1: said to him, this tree, after how many years will
Speaker 1: it bear fruit? The man said to him, it will
Speaker 1: not produce fruit until seventy years have passed. Honey said
Speaker 1: to him, is it obvious to you that you will
Speaker 1: live seventy years that you expect to benefit from this tree?
Speaker 1: He said to him, that man himself found a world
Speaker 1: full of carab trees, just as my ancestors planted for me,
Speaker 1: I too, am planting for my descendants. Okay, so you
Speaker 1: know it takes this tree seventy years to grow. He's
Speaker 1: but he's not planting it hoping to reap the fruits himself.
Speaker 1: I guess these would be legum pods that grow off
Speaker 1: of the carob tree. Um. You know, he's planting for
Speaker 1: for future generations, his his descendants. But the story goes on.
Speaker 1: So it says Honey sat and ate bread. Sleep overcame him,
Speaker 1: and he slept. A cliff formed around him, and he
Speaker 1: disappeared from sight and slept for seventy years. When he awoke,
Speaker 1: he saw a certain man gathering caribs from that tree.
Speaker 1: Honey said to him, are you the one who planted
Speaker 1: this tree? The man said to him, I am his
Speaker 1: son's son. Honey said to him, I can learn from
Speaker 1: this that I have slept for seventy years, And indeed
Speaker 1: he saw his donkey had sired several herds during those
Speaker 1: many years. Hony went home and said to the members
Speaker 1: of the household, is the son of Hony the circle
Speaker 1: Maker alive? They said to him, his son is no
Speaker 1: longer with us, but his son's son is alive. He
Speaker 1: said to them, I am Hony the circle Maker. They
Speaker 1: did not believe him. They went to the study hall,
Speaker 1: where he heard the sages say about one scholar his halicott.
Speaker 1: And I think this word means um like religious laws
Speaker 1: or writings of or about religious laws. His halicott are
Speaker 1: as enlightening and as clear as in the years of
Speaker 1: Hony the Circle Maker. For when Hony would enter the
Speaker 1: study hall, he would resolve for the sages any difficulty
Speaker 1: they had. Hony said to them, I am he. But
Speaker 1: they did not believe him and did not pay him
Speaker 1: proper respect. Hony became very upset, prayed for mercy, and died.
Speaker 1: And then it offers a bit of commentary. Rava said,
Speaker 1: this explains the folk saying where when people say either
Speaker 1: friendship or death as one who has no friends is
Speaker 1: better off dead. Oh wow, I thought this was a
Speaker 1: really interesting story. And so there are a bunch of
Speaker 1: things about it. One is that it ties into a
Speaker 1: common theme of sleeping into the future, which is the
Speaker 1: passing away of everything that one cares about in the presence.
Speaker 1: So Hony sleeps seventy years into the future, but he's
Speaker 1: not confronted with You know, when we think of like
Speaker 1: time travel and science fiction going into the future, a
Speaker 1: lot of it is it is like people want to
Speaker 1: see amazing new types of technology or some kind of
Speaker 1: noticeable progress or or you know, or regress, you know,
Speaker 1: something some kind of change in the world that is notable.
Speaker 1: But but I don't think Honey really notices any um
Speaker 1: change to the scenario of the world. There's nothing to
Speaker 1: be amazed at. Instead, it's just that the unnoticed passage
Speaker 1: of time is lost and life without your friends and
Speaker 1: family is not worth living. Yeah, it's it's a nice
Speaker 1: it's a nice message. Um. Yeah. But but it's interesting too,
Speaker 1: Like you say that the world hasn't really changed. There's
Speaker 1: no indication that technology has changed. Um, And I guess
Speaker 1: for a lot of people throughout history that probably seemed
Speaker 1: to be the case. I mean that the basic technology
Speaker 1: you're using and your understanding of the world has not changed.
Speaker 1: This is just the way things are. These are the
Speaker 1: tools we have. The things that will change, and you
Speaker 1: know that they'll change, will be um, you know, the
Speaker 1: the lifespans of of a human activity. You know that
Speaker 1: that people will will live and die and be born
Speaker 1: and grow old. And then also you know that, uh,
Speaker 1: there's a good chance that as as people live and die,
Speaker 1: so will king's, so will rulers, and so there will
Speaker 1: be the you know, the ob and flow of dynasties
Speaker 1: as as well as wars and so forth. Right. Another
Speaker 1: interesting thing I thought about this is that Hony gets
Speaker 1: to see his own posthumous reputation as a scholar, which
Speaker 1: apparently is going very strong. Like he goes and finds
Speaker 1: in the study hall that people really appreciate the teachings
Speaker 1: of him, of Hony the Circle Maker, but he can't
Speaker 1: really enjoy that that positive reputation now because people don't
Speaker 1: believe he's really that guy that they respect. In principle,
Speaker 1: that raises an interesting question about what we value in reputation.
Speaker 1: Like most people want to be I want to have
Speaker 1: a good reputation want people to like them. But would
Speaker 1: it be would you be happy to have a good
Speaker 1: reputation if people didn't recognize you as yourself, if they
Speaker 1: didn't connect you in your current body to the bearer
Speaker 1: of that reputation. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty pretty interesting. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it makes you think about like legendary people and indeed,
Speaker 1: what if you had time travel scenarios where they got
Speaker 1: to travel into the future and they're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm famous. But also that that image of me has
Speaker 1: grown so and is and is so revered that you know,
Speaker 1: me just standing here, they're not even gonna identify me
Speaker 1: with that person. Well, so, anyway, I think this story
Speaker 1: would not be as old as the time dilation story
Speaker 1: in the Mahabarita, But otherwise I think this may be
Speaker 1: the oldest time travel story that that I've been able
Speaker 1: to come across, and it's definitely the oldest sleeping into
Speaker 1: the future story that I've found. Now, this wouldn't know,
Speaker 1: this wouldn't be older, but I did. I did run
Speaker 1: across some some interesting additional time weirdness stories here. Um uh.
Speaker 1: In between the publication of Part one in this series
Speaker 1: and the recording of part two. UH listener by the
Speaker 1: name of Ahmed wrote in, Ahmed has written in before
Speaker 1: with some interesting content, but this time Ahmed wrote into
Speaker 1: share a couple of time travel tales related to Islamic tradition.
Speaker 1: One of them and he ends up mentioning the Seven Sleepers. Again.
Speaker 1: We had not actually recorded this episode yet, so he
Speaker 1: did not know that seven seven Sleepers were coming. But
Speaker 1: he also shared the following us. So I'm going to
Speaker 1: read from Ahmed's email quote. According to Muslim tradition, Mohammed
Speaker 1: ascends to Heaven from Mecca on the back of a
Speaker 1: winged mount with the angel Gabriel as his guide. There,
Speaker 1: he individually meets with the prophets who came before him,
Speaker 1: ending with Moses and Abraham. Finally, he has an audience
Speaker 1: with God, who tells him to instruct Muslims to pray
Speaker 1: fifty times per day. After some back and forth at
Speaker 1: the urging of Moses, who says that fifty is far
Speaker 1: too onerous, Muhammed leaves with the current five day prayers
Speaker 1: for Muslims. Notably, many Muslims sources say that when Mohammed
Speaker 1: turns from this journey, his door is still swinging back
Speaker 1: and forth, suggesting either a complete stoppage of time or
Speaker 1: at least a considerable dilation. That is very interesting. And
Speaker 1: the plays once again on the idea that that time
Speaker 1: passes differently in the heavens or in the realm of
Speaker 1: God or the gods than it does here on earth,
Speaker 1: that maybe you know that you know, I guess it's
Speaker 1: similar to the idea that a day is as a
Speaker 1: thousand years, and a thousand years as a day. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there's something about the story that was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this this sounds familiar. I think I've I've read this before,
Speaker 1: or I've I've heard something like this before. So I
Speaker 1: looked into it a little bit and then I realized, oh, yes,
Speaker 1: there is a there's a wonderful creature involved in some
Speaker 1: of these tellings. Um and and again um um. Ahm
Speaker 1: Ed mentioned that there's a winged mount uh that that
Speaker 1: the prophet rides on, and this creature is sometimes described
Speaker 1: as Alba rock um, which means the shining or resplendent
Speaker 1: one um. Those were those translations were were provided by
Speaker 1: Jorge Luis Borges and his book Imaginary Beings and Carol
Speaker 1: Rose the Folklore's also provides the translation the lightning. So
Speaker 1: it's kind of a winged centaur in many artist depictions.
Speaker 1: You can look up images of of this. It's you know,
Speaker 1: sometimes spelled bu r a q or b o r
Speaker 1: a k in English, and rose ads that it is.
Speaker 1: It's generally described as being pure white. Uh. Sometimes it's
Speaker 1: covered with jewels and precious stones that might be of
Speaker 1: varying colors. Its breath is perfume, and it can understand
Speaker 1: human speech, but sources on are split on whether the
Speaker 1: creature can actually talk itself or if it can just
Speaker 1: understand um. But I wanted to read just a bit
Speaker 1: from boges book here. Uh. He shares a bit about
Speaker 1: about al Baraq. Quote. One Islamic Haadith tells us that
Speaker 1: is Baraque flew upward from the earth. It kicked over
Speaker 1: a jar filled with water. The prophet was taken up
Speaker 1: to the seventh Heaven, where he spoke with each of
Speaker 1: the patriarchs and angels that reside there, crossed the oneness,
Speaker 1: and felt a chill that froze his heart when the
Speaker 1: hand of God patted him on the shoulder the time
Speaker 1: of men is not the time of God. When he
Speaker 1: returned to earth, the prophet caught the jar before a
Speaker 1: single drop of water had spilled out of it. Wow.
Speaker 1: That Yeah, that's time dilation again. That's amazing. Yeah. Yea,
Speaker 1: the door is still swinging back and forth. The jar
Speaker 1: of water that was dropped has not yet hit the ground.
Speaker 1: Uh so so yeah, I love this account and I
Speaker 1: love that we have ah, this wonderful uh fantastic beast here. Um.
Speaker 1: By the way, if you pick up a copy of
Speaker 1: the Book of Imaginary Beings, the version that's imprint right
Speaker 1: now with illustrations by Peter Siss, al Baraq is on
Speaker 1: the cover, or a depiction of Albaroq is on the cover.
Speaker 1: But but also look up some of the various art
Speaker 1: art artistic ways that this creature has been brought to
Speaker 1: life in different is Lament cultures. Because it's pretty fabulous. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this illustration is great because it is it's almost like
Speaker 1: a mix between a pegasus and a megalithic sculpture. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: another possible example of time travel and old texts UM
Speaker 1: can be found in the sixteenth century Ming Dynasty text
Speaker 1: from China Journey into the West UM. And I actually
Speaker 1: had not thought to look here until you mentioned it.
Speaker 1: To Joe, and so I ended up uh checking it
Speaker 1: out see what exactly the Monkey King was up to.
Speaker 1: Uh that relates to time travel? Oh okay, So I
Speaker 1: think I came across a mention of time travel in
Speaker 1: the supplement to the Journey to the West. But there,
Speaker 1: but there's time travel in the original as well. Um. Yes,
Speaker 1: both to a certain extent. So, um, so if if
Speaker 1: you're wondering, yeah, Journey into into the West Chinese classic. Uh.
Speaker 1: This is a classic work and has been adapted many
Speaker 1: times in many different forms. Uh. And and it generally
Speaker 1: concerns the exploits of the Monkey King or Sun will Kong,
Speaker 1: the Great Sage equal to Heaven. Um, so there's uh
Speaker 1: uh and that's so that's the main work. But yes,
Speaker 1: there's also this supplemental work supplement to the Journey to
Speaker 1: the West and uh. In both cases, the episodes concerned
Speaker 1: the time warping experience of dream so in the In
Speaker 1: the original, there's basically just a section where um years
Speaker 1: of training for monkey are compressed by a time trance.
Speaker 1: But yeah, when you get into the supplement, that's where
Speaker 1: things get really interesting. This second work is also known
Speaker 1: as the Tower of Myriad Mirrors and its which I
Speaker 1: think Borges would would would surely have loved that title.
Speaker 1: Uh And it takes this fantastic travelog style of the
Speaker 1: original and gives us even more time weirdness. I was
Speaker 1: reading about this in an article by Dr II ching
Speaker 1: Wang of the University of Liverpool titled Tower of Myriad Mirrors,
Speaker 1: and so I want to read just a quote from
Speaker 1: this quote in the narrative. Upon leaving the Flaming Mountain,
Speaker 1: the monkey uh i e. Monkey King or Sugu and
Speaker 1: Kong is trapped in a hallucinatory world of mirrors evoked
Speaker 1: by ching Fish, a monster epitomizing desire and a negative
Speaker 1: force proportionate to the monkeys innate morality, though a tower
Speaker 1: of myriad of mirrors is in disparate identities. The monkey
Speaker 1: embarks on an array of adventures to various time points,
Speaker 1: ranging from the immemorial Chin to Twe through two oh
Speaker 1: six BC dynasty to the Song through twelve seventy nine
Speaker 1: dynasty that is preceded by the story setting i e.
Speaker 1: The Tang dynasty six eighteen through n d. Upon returning
Speaker 1: to his own era, the monkey discovers that his master,
Speaker 1: the priest, defies the abstinence from sex and becomes a general,
Speaker 1: and the monkey is entangled in a gargantuan war, during
Speaker 1: which he encounters his own offspring. In the end, the
Speaker 1: monkey is awakened by the original time traveler and kills
Speaker 1: the ching fish as the embodiment of desire that entraps
Speaker 1: his altruism, thereby eliminating the negative traits from his psyche
Speaker 1: or self. Okay, so if this counts as a type
Speaker 1: of time travel, you might say that it is time
Speaker 1: travel as a weapon, like a weapon of distraction against
Speaker 1: the hero of the of the story. Yeah, yeah, And
Speaker 1: I guess in this, I mean, in this it reminds
Speaker 1: me a lot of of the time travel that we
Speaker 1: see in a Christmas Carol, right, because it's all within
Speaker 1: a dream essentially, it's all within the nighttime headspace of
Speaker 1: a character. Uh. Though in the case of the Christmas
Speaker 1: Carol it is um it is being pulled off by
Speaker 1: a ghost in order to try and save that individual
Speaker 1: from damnation and and uh. And in this case it
Speaker 1: is being orchestrated by a demon in an attempt to
Speaker 1: u to distract and corrupt our our hero. But so,
Speaker 1: because this novel, the supplement to the Journey to the
Speaker 1: West is written in the future about a previous era.
Speaker 1: It can have its protagonist at least in this hallucinatory
Speaker 1: distraction thing going through the air, looking through these mirrors,
Speaker 1: are going through these mirrors and journeying two times into
Speaker 1: the past and future from where he began. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: sounds pretty pretty interesting. Um again, I have I haven't
Speaker 1: I haven't read I have not read this work, but
Speaker 1: I was running across some other papers that we're talking about. UM.
Speaker 1: Time travel potentially being used in some of the Monkey
Speaker 1: King films that have come out, and there have been many. Again,
Speaker 1: there have been many Monkey King films and TV shows, uh,
Speaker 1: and the adaptations of Journey into the West. So if
Speaker 1: anyone out there is has seen a bunch of them,
Speaker 1: I think I've seen one or two. I don't remember
Speaker 1: there being any time travel narratives, but it stands to
Speaker 1: reason that time travel pops up in some of those adaptations.
Speaker 1: So if you've seen one, that's pretty cool, let us know.
Speaker 1: I'd love to know about it. Well, I'd at least
Speaker 1: say that this is also notable for being um even
Speaker 1: though you could say that there's some big caveats on
Speaker 1: it because it's like a hallucinatory kind of thing. But
Speaker 1: to the extent that you would consider this time travel.
Speaker 1: It is one of the earliest examples I can think
Speaker 1: of we've looked at that involves traveling backward, because all
Speaker 1: of the others we've looked at so far, the time
Speaker 1: dilation or the sleeping into the future, tend to just
Speaker 1: involve traveling forward relative to the normal uh rate at
Speaker 1: which time would pass or at which you would age. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's um, it's interesting to sort of try and
Speaker 1: and and figure out like why that is the case,
Speaker 1: and I the best I can come up with is
Speaker 1: it is probably what the author is um is touching
Speaker 1: on here, the dynastic progression. Uh, the idea that like
Speaker 1: that that history is important enough that you would want
Speaker 1: to comment on it through through time travel. Um. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I don't know that. I'm sure there's more
Speaker 1: to the story there, but but at any rate, Uh,
Speaker 1: here's the here's the Monkey King popping up as a
Speaker 1: as one of our our many older time travelers. Maybe
Speaker 1: not time traveler zero, but if it's still notable. You know,
Speaker 1: while we're on the subject of um Chinese conceptualization of time,
Speaker 1: this reminds me of an interesting email that we got,
Speaker 1: so maybe we can we'll do a couple of listener
Speaker 1: mails within this episode itself, which is actually, I think
Speaker 1: very cool that the time gap in between part one
Speaker 1: and two has allowed us to incorporate some listener feedback
Speaker 1: into part two itself here. But um, so, so this
Speaker 1: is a message we got from Born. So this is
Speaker 1: responding to the part of part one of this series
Speaker 1: where we talked about visualizing time as a type of space,
Speaker 1: which appears to be extremely common, maybe even universal, or
Speaker 1: if not, it's nearly universal across languages on Earth. Uh.
Speaker 1: That that we talk about time as if it were
Speaker 1: a type of space, or a dimension of space, or
Speaker 1: a sort of range within space, and uh. And then Rob,
Speaker 1: you and I ended up talking about how how common
Speaker 1: it is to discuss the future as if it is
Speaker 1: physically in the space in front of us, in the
Speaker 1: past as if it's physically in the space behind us. Uh.
Speaker 1: This also appears to be pretty common cross culturally, but
Speaker 1: apparently this is not universal. And this is really interesting.
Speaker 1: So Bjorn was passing along some comment from his girlfriend
Speaker 1: who is from Hong Kong, and she apparently says quote
Speaker 1: When you think of the future, you see it as
Speaker 1: something in front of you, something you are moving towards.
Speaker 1: The past, on the other hand, is something you have
Speaker 1: left behind in Cantonese. In the Cantonese language, the concepts
Speaker 1: are reversed. The past is in front of you because
Speaker 1: these are things which happened and you can now see clearly.
Speaker 1: The future, on the other hand, is behind your back.
Speaker 1: You can sense it but not perceive it with any clarity.
Speaker 1: So I thought that was really interesting. I don't know
Speaker 1: if I don't know how common or if that's near
Speaker 1: universal for Cantonese speakers, but I would be interested to
Speaker 1: hear more about that. Uh. And that that makes its
Speaker 1: own logical sense in a way, so you would still
Speaker 1: be conceptualizing time as a type of space, but just
Speaker 1: flipping the polls with respect to your body. But but certainly,
Speaker 1: I mean, we were talking about metaphors in the first episode.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like the way we talk about time, uh,
Speaker 1: and in the way we think about time, like these
Speaker 1: these are the things that end up affecting the way
Speaker 1: we construct our time travel narratives. Well, it makes me
Speaker 1: wonder like if this is it, if this is actually
Speaker 1: more common or there are. There are at least some
Speaker 1: languages in which it's more common to uh to build
Speaker 1: metaphors where the space behind you is the future, in
Speaker 1: the space in front of you is the past. With
Speaker 1: that effect, how people who speak those languages design uh
Speaker 1: time machines and science fictions? Are they less likely to
Speaker 1: be sort of forward facing vehicles like you you often
Speaker 1: see in you know, the DeLorean and stuff like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's interesting now, you know, thinking back to us, specially
Speaker 1: talking I was talking about this, but also talking about
Speaker 1: not dreaming and sleeping. Um. For the most part, we're
Speaker 1: talking about baseline human experience here kind of extrapolated into
Speaker 1: into the fantastic um. But obviously, if you've add various
Speaker 1: other conditions and substances into the mix, uh, time can
Speaker 1: seem even weirder. I know there's at least one time
Speaker 1: travel story that Nayan mentions, uh, some early work of
Speaker 1: literature in which somebody's hit on the hill. Oh, no,
Speaker 1: I know what it is. It was, of course, Mark
Speaker 1: Twain's Confederate Yankee and King Arthur's Court. I believe the
Speaker 1: time travel what did I say, Confederate Yankee Confederate Yankee? Well, yes, um,
Speaker 1: Connecticut Yankee. Rather uh in In uh In in King
Speaker 1: or this court uh that book which I think I
Speaker 1: read a long time ago. I've forgotten all of it,
Speaker 1: but but I believe time travel is achieved by that
Speaker 1: character being hit on the back of the head with something.
Speaker 1: I think he is the foreman in a factory and
Speaker 1: one of his workers wax him on the head with
Speaker 1: a wrench. I think that's right, m and then travels
Speaker 1: back in time. So but it is a reminder that, yes,
Speaker 1: when you start talking about altered um, altered experiences of
Speaker 1: the brain, that adds a different dimension to your contemplations
Speaker 1: of time travel. Um. And you know this is the
Speaker 1: case too when you start throwing in various substances. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, we did a whole series on psychedelics a
Speaker 1: couple of years back, and one of the commonly sided
Speaker 1: effects there is the altered perception of time. And you
Speaker 1: know we see this in literature as well as far
Speaker 1: back as like Thomas de Quincy's Confessions of an English opiameter.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Now, Nan doesn't spend a lot of time
Speaker 1: with this. He points out the quote smoking marijuana or
Speaker 1: taking amphetamines and or LSD to achieve a nonlinear hallucinogenic
Speaker 1: experience of time travel. Uh. He says that sometimes used
Speaker 1: by writers as a way of exploring the concept of
Speaker 1: time travel, but it's not something that he set out
Speaker 1: to explore extensively in the book. So I was thinking, well,
Speaker 1: who who might have talked talked about psychedelics and time travel?
Speaker 1: I was like, Oh, I wonder what Terence McKenna had
Speaker 1: to say about this. So I started looking around for
Speaker 1: Terence McKenna talking about time travel. And the weird thing
Speaker 1: was is I ran across an interview with McKenna from
Speaker 1: nine in which he mentions that he is currently reading
Speaker 1: Nayan's book on time travel. Oh that's weird, I thought.
Speaker 1: For some reason, I thought that that Naan book came
Speaker 1: out in like two thousand one. Well, there have been
Speaker 1: different editions of it. Oh okay, yeah, let me see okay,
Speaker 1: first published ninety three, Okay, okay, okay, okay, So it
Speaker 1: is possible. Good, maybe the interview is from eighty nine, right, right, yes,
Speaker 1: and the book would have first come out. Sorry for
Speaker 1: all the unnecessary time traveling, uh listeners, but any rate,
Speaker 1: Uh they the short too late for the short version
Speaker 1: on this. But basically I found it amusing that that
Speaker 1: McKenna was talking about the very book that I had
Speaker 1: been reading for this episode. Um and, I don't know,
Speaker 1: thinking it didn't have a lot ex extra to add,
Speaker 1: but he did talk a little bit about time travel
Speaker 1: and some of his talks mentioning that he liked the
Speaker 1: idea that you can only travel back as far as
Speaker 1: the time machine exists, So you can only go back
Speaker 1: as far as like day one of the time machine
Speaker 1: existing as a time machine. Um and and you know
Speaker 1: then to explore it as kind of a fantasy scenario,
Speaker 1: but he also lays out a scenario in which time
Speaker 1: travel is more hyper spatial rather than linear. And uh
Speaker 1: and N asked, like, what have you pushed the button
Speaker 1: on your time machine and it's simply simply made all
Speaker 1: future events seem to occur at once. Uh So the
Speaker 1: time machine would be more like a doorway to eternity
Speaker 1: rather than a gateway into the future. Oh so, rather
Speaker 1: than actually transporting you, it just like breaks the person
Speaker 1: inside perception of time. Yeah, in a way. You know
Speaker 1: this this reminds me of the movie, uh Jack Frost
Speaker 1: that we just recently talked about for Weird howth Cinema
Speaker 1: um in in that there's you know that wonderful scene
Speaker 1: where she uh, where Nastinka begs ruby ruby finger don
Speaker 1: to reverse itself, like gets the sun to to go
Speaker 1: back down over the horizon so that she has a
Speaker 1: little more time to finish her chore by dawn. And
Speaker 1: uh and there's a lot there's a lot of fun
Speaker 1: to be made on mysteray science theater riffing on that
Speaker 1: about oh, well, you know this is going to bring
Speaker 1: about tidal waves and global destruction to have the sun
Speaker 1: suddenly stop uh and reverse itself or the planet you know,
Speaker 1: reverse itself whichever, uh, you know, just to totally screw
Speaker 1: up the celestial mechanics of everything. Um in a way
Speaker 1: you could you could say, well, maybe it would be
Speaker 1: the same thing with the time machine. Say you did
Speaker 1: somehow create a machine that allowed you to travel in time,
Speaker 1: that allows you to uh to move around like this. Well,
Speaker 1: what if it just wrecked everything? What if it just
Speaker 1: or if it didn't wreck everything, you just like permanently
Speaker 1: screwed up your human perception of time. Well, this is
Speaker 1: the idea that uh, that we talked about with Daniel
Speaker 1: Whiteson where he was saying, you know, if you were
Speaker 1: really trying to think about a machine that would allow
Speaker 1: you to travel into the past and try to make
Speaker 1: it work. He says, it would make more sense the
Speaker 1: machine reverses the flow of time for the entire universe
Speaker 1: around you than that it does anything for you. So
Speaker 1: time continues to pass normally for you, but somehow it
Speaker 1: it makes time go backwards for the for the entire
Speaker 1: rest of the world. Now. In the book, Nan goes
Speaker 1: into greater detail with lots of examples that are definitely
Speaker 1: worth looking up for for fans of old school time
Speaker 1: traveler yarns. But I think it's safe to say that
Speaker 1: you know they're there are older ideas and perhaps even
Speaker 1: ancient ideas, you know, understanding that time passes in weird ways,
Speaker 1: and if there's something particularly human about reflecting on the past,
Speaker 1: worrying about the future, and engaging in patterns of thought
Speaker 1: and systems of behavior that can connect us to different
Speaker 1: times and even deliver us to different times, certainly in
Speaker 1: the and when we when we sleep into the future now,
Speaker 1: um Naan writes a little bit about time machines, of course,
Speaker 1: and uh says the machines entered the scenario because they
Speaker 1: represent reason and of course science, and they indicate the
Speaker 1: belief that there may be some sort of way to
Speaker 1: make possible what it is to varying degrees thought possible,
Speaker 1: at least under certain circumstances. Um, particularly if you're talking
Speaker 1: about time travel into the future. Yeah, this is interesting,
Speaker 1: and this brings me back to um some thoughts that
Speaker 1: that I was reading and listen to an a lecture
Speaker 1: by a scholar that I mentioned in the previous part
Speaker 1: who is a professor of science fiction studies at Georgia
Speaker 1: Tech named Lisa Yazik, And you know, she draws some
Speaker 1: connections between specific developments in technology and not just technology,
Speaker 1: technology and transportation infrastructure in the late nineteenth century that
Speaker 1: sort of push forward the idea that you could create
Speaker 1: a time machine. Now, of course we know that H. G.
Speaker 1: Wells The Time Machine published in eight This was a
Speaker 1: hugely influential work of science fiction that I think would
Speaker 1: inspire a lot of the time travel stories that came afterward.
Speaker 1: But it was by no means the first story about
Speaker 1: time travel. But one thing you can say is that
Speaker 1: almost all of the time travel stories before Wells, we're
Speaker 1: not really science fiction, and that the time travel mechanic
Speaker 1: was almost always a sort of inexplicable, uh, fantasy thing,
Speaker 1: and it was like the action of a god or
Speaker 1: an angel or some kind of supernatural imposition, or it's
Speaker 1: some type of time dilation by going to different planes
Speaker 1: of existence or something. But but with Wells you get
Speaker 1: a time machine, a vehicle that is created by science.
Speaker 1: Now I think it's not even the very first example
Speaker 1: of that that I want to mention another example I
Speaker 1: came across that that I think is very funny and
Speaker 1: it will be fun to read a little bit from.
Speaker 1: But I was just watching a lecture by Yazik where
Speaker 1: she she mentions a couple of things. One is that
Speaker 1: before you get to the time machine, um, a number
Speaker 1: of the time travel stories from the nineteenth century that
Speaker 1: involved traveling through time based on some kind of device
Speaker 1: used not vehicles but clocks. And a classic example here
Speaker 1: is a story called the Clock that Went Backward by
Speaker 1: Edward Page Mitchell that was published in eighteen eighty one.
Speaker 1: And this is about this is also kind of a
Speaker 1: fantasy story. I mean, it's not like a clock that
Speaker 1: was designed to do this by and a scientist, inventor
Speaker 1: or something who wanted to travel through time. It's just
Speaker 1: like there's a weird clock and when you wind it up,
Speaker 1: people nearby can get sent back in time. But the
Speaker 1: thing that I thought was interesting was that Yazick mentioned,
Speaker 1: you know, these stories about technological time travel arising in
Speaker 1: an age of standardization of time measures, uh for for
Speaker 1: industry and politics. So in this era of industrial zation,
Speaker 1: coordination of rapid transport through train stations and shipping ports
Speaker 1: in in the late nineteenth century, Um, something happens in
Speaker 1: people's consciousness that makes them think about time differently, and
Speaker 1: this maybe helps give rise to the proliferation of time
Speaker 1: travel stories that would follow than now. I was also
Speaker 1: reading a short introduction that that Laci Azik wrote to
Speaker 1: a recent new edition of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.
Speaker 1: It was the dred and twenty fifth anniversary edition, So yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess that would have been last year, right, and
Speaker 1: published in eight came out in Karence McKenna read it
Speaker 1: in Yeah exactly, Okay, you come more of an inside
Speaker 1: joke for us, okay, uh But so she writes about
Speaker 1: how so the Time Machine the novel was published in
Speaker 1: eight U and that was sort of the work that
Speaker 1: launched H. G. Wells literary career. He was born in
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty six, so I guess he was only like
Speaker 1: twenty nine at the time that it came out. Though
Speaker 1: The Time Machine the novel was actually based on a
Speaker 1: short story that Wells had written seven years before, called
Speaker 1: and I Love this the chronic Argonauts. Have you read
Speaker 1: this one? Rob? I have not. I have not either,
Speaker 1: So it's it's sort of, I think, a shorter, earlier
Speaker 1: version of the Time Machine where the hero is not
Speaker 1: so much a hero. He's more of a mad scientist
Speaker 1: who gets into trouble by creating a time machine and
Speaker 1: unleash his havoc that goes on for thousands of years.
Speaker 1: But interesting fact I learned from from Yazig's intro here.
Speaker 1: Apparently Wells published this story in his college lipmag. So
Speaker 1: let this be an inspiration to your college lipmag editors
Speaker 1: out there. Yeah. Yeah, it could be the place where you, um,
Speaker 1: you published the garbage version of your future it. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah. So in subs went years, Wells revised and
Speaker 1: expanded the short story until it developed into the novel
Speaker 1: that we know today. Um and so. Wells apparently wrote
Speaker 1: in later years that he believed there was a rule
Speaker 1: for writing good science fiction. I'm not sure if I
Speaker 1: agree with this, but but it's interesting. So he says,
Speaker 1: to have good sci fi, you need to give the
Speaker 1: story only one fantastical element and then make everything else
Speaker 1: as grounded, realistic and human as you possibly can. So
Speaker 1: how would that apply to the time Machine? Well An
Speaker 1: example is that in the original short story The Chronic Argonauts,
Speaker 1: Wells had the protagonists living in a gothic mansion in
Speaker 1: the countryside, and so I think the implication here is
Speaker 1: that it would invite readers to think of other tropes
Speaker 1: of Gothic literature, the mysterious, the uncanny. I think the
Speaker 1: association I would have would be with like Charlotte Bronte
Speaker 1: and Jane Eyre. But in the Time Machine and the
Speaker 1: novel version, he he rewrote it to uh to locate
Speaker 1: the protagonist in bourgeois neighborhood of London, basically as mundane
Speaker 1: and uninteresting as setting as he could think of. But
Speaker 1: you go into this mundane uh, you know, bourgeois household,
Speaker 1: and here's a time machine. It's interesting how you don't
Speaker 1: think about the setting of the time machine being mundane
Speaker 1: today because it is. It is now an historical work.
Speaker 1: So the idea that it's it's set uh in um
Speaker 1: in this neighborhood in London, like that's part of it's
Speaker 1: such as charm, it's appeal. Like essentially you have you
Speaker 1: have two different elements that are that are foreign to
Speaker 1: the to the reader, or more than two. But the
Speaker 1: time Machine becomes a novelist full of a strange and
Speaker 1: wonderful places that are not our own reality. Right. I
Speaker 1: guess the idea today would be like, uh, what if
Speaker 1: you went into a house like a McMansion in the
Speaker 1: suburbs and in the subdivision here and here it is,
Speaker 1: here's a time machine. Now we've already mentioned that the
Speaker 1: time Machine is by no means the first story to
Speaker 1: depict time travel. Obviously, if you include time dilation and
Speaker 1: sleeping into the future, time travel stories can be found
Speaker 1: here and there, well into the ancient past, and even
Speaker 1: some stories of more direct time travels, such as being
Speaker 1: delivered documents from the future. I think that's something that
Speaker 1: happens in a story called Memoirs of the twentieth Century,
Speaker 1: written by Samuel Madden and published in the eighteenth century.
Speaker 1: I think this was like seventeen thirty three and basically
Speaker 1: the story is an angel appears from the future and
Speaker 1: deliver some letters from future people to people living at
Speaker 1: the time. Yeah, from the years nineteen seven and nine.
Speaker 1: And then of course you get these nineteenth century examples
Speaker 1: we've been talking about, like the clock that went backwards
Speaker 1: and stuff that there are still and UH and Christmas
Speaker 1: Carol and connect a Yankee and King Arthur's Court that
Speaker 1: are still basically fantasies. But yas it makes the distinction
Speaker 1: that the Wells is really the first to popularize time
Speaker 1: travel as a convention of of realistically grounded science fiction,
Speaker 1: and to popularize the idea of the time machine as
Speaker 1: a piece of technology, specifically a vehicle that is deliberately
Speaker 1: designed to allow people to navigate time in the same
Speaker 1: way that people use regular vehicles to navigate space. And
Speaker 1: I think she says, you know, the obvious comparison if
Speaker 1: you look at this uh, at its historical setting. This
Speaker 1: is in the eighteen nineties. This would have been when
Speaker 1: we're seeing bicycles and early automobiles, So so there's a
Speaker 1: lot of vehicular consciousness at the time. But I was wondering, Okay,
Speaker 1: are there earlier examples of actual time machines like science
Speaker 1: fiction time machines. Well, it depends on what you count,
Speaker 1: Like do you count the clock that went backward? It's
Speaker 1: probably not really, that's just kind of a weird little
Speaker 1: fantasy object. Um. But I did find at least one
Speaker 1: thing that looks pretty much like a conventional time machine
Speaker 1: that does just barely pre date Wells. And this would
Speaker 1: be the nineteenth century Spanish author Enrique gas Bars novel
Speaker 1: l Anacronopete, which was apparently published one year before Wells
Speaker 1: story The Chronic Argonauts, so this would have been in
Speaker 1: eighteen eighties seven. And this novel describes a an inventor
Speaker 1: who creates this device that I think is basically a
Speaker 1: giant sealed metal box that is equipped with huge pneumatic
Speaker 1: apparatus is that allow you to travel through time, including
Speaker 1: traveling backwards through time. And I haven't read this novel
Speaker 1: in full, but I was scanning through an English translation
Speaker 1: and I came across a part that I thought was
Speaker 1: so good that I wanted to share it here because
Speaker 1: it's it's where the inventor is explaining his theory of
Speaker 1: time via the example of sardines and canned peppers. Robert
Speaker 1: Are you ready for this, Okay, So the inventor says,
Speaker 1: it's common knowledge that to preserve sardines from nantes or
Speaker 1: peppers from calahora, we must remove the air from their
Speaker 1: tin cans. Wrong, we must remove the at atmosphere, and consequently,
Speaker 1: the time you see the air is no more than
Speaker 1: a compound of nitrogen and oxygen, whereas the atmosphere, in
Speaker 1: addition to consisting of eighty parts nitrogen to twenty parts oxygen,
Speaker 1: also contains an amount of water, vapor, and carbonic acid
Speaker 1: elements that are never left behind when forming a vacuum.
Speaker 1: But never mind the science, let's speak to common sense.
Speaker 1: Imagine the world is a tin of red peppers from
Speaker 1: which we have not extracted the atmosphere. What happens when
Speaker 1: the can is sealed without this precaution, Time begins to
Speaker 1: exert its influence and carry out its work. First, a
Speaker 1: few molecules adhere to the sides of the container, agglomerating
Speaker 1: and solidifying, only to petrify with the passage of years
Speaker 1: and yield those substances in which we would find the
Speaker 1: mineral beginnings of primitive rock. We then note that the
Speaker 1: substance is covered with a kind of scum that is
Speaker 1: none other than rudimentary vegetation. And finally, microscopic organisms in
Speaker 1: the water vapor come to life, reproduce and develop like
Speaker 1: maggots in our tin of preserves, enriching it with the
Speaker 1: unending variety of the animal kingdom. Can you still doubt
Speaker 1: that the atmosphere is time? This is one of those
Speaker 1: things that's like wrong but genius. Yeah, like this is
Speaker 1: it's he really thought long and hard. Uh and well
Speaker 1: on this this this thoroughly uh incorrect mechanism for time. Well,
Speaker 1: I like that. It's it's sort of making the intuitive
Speaker 1: connection again between time and entropy, which we talked about
Speaker 1: in our interview with Daniel, because it's saying like, okay,
Speaker 1: so things in a can they don't rot. You, if
Speaker 1: you don't know any better, you might presume this because
Speaker 1: the time has been removed from the can and it
Speaker 1: takes time for things to rot. Well, you know, it's
Speaker 1: coming back to that that idea of of time as
Speaker 1: a as a measure of change in the universe. And
Speaker 1: if in the can things are not changing, what does
Speaker 1: that say about about time? Uh? In a way it
Speaker 1: kind of serves as a nice you know, it's it's ridiculous,
Speaker 1: and it takes a second to really think about what
Speaker 1: it's even trying to say with with this atmosphere as time.
Speaker 1: But but in a way it kind of serves as
Speaker 1: an It kind of throws you off out of your
Speaker 1: your your back of the future line of thinking, where
Speaker 1: you think about time as this linear thing that you
Speaker 1: could conceivably move about in um. But but this is
Speaker 1: an entirely different model. So I had a hard time
Speaker 1: finding scrolling through the book trying to find details on
Speaker 1: exactly how how the time travel itself works, like when
Speaker 1: you're going backward. I couldn't find that part. But at
Speaker 1: least according to the wiki summary, what it says is
Speaker 1: that the machine flies backward through the atmosphere against the
Speaker 1: rotation of the Earth, and this is what allows time
Speaker 1: travel into the past. That would seem to fit with
Speaker 1: the other part about the atmosphere, but I'm not positive
Speaker 1: on this. So but maybe one day I will just
Speaker 1: read this book in full, because it looks like it
Speaker 1: might be kind of bad but pretty fun. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean that that concept is pretty uh, it's pretty crazy.
Speaker 1: I like it. Also, just while I'm on the subject
Speaker 1: of of l A An Acrono Pete. I gotta say
Speaker 1: that I skipped ahead to the end of the story
Speaker 1: to see what happens, and it apparently involves the inventor
Speaker 1: going mad and accelerating the time machine all the way
Speaker 1: back to the beginning of time. Oh wow, do you
Speaker 1: mind if I read this part too? Yeah? No, I
Speaker 1: want to know what he does there? What do you?
Speaker 1: What do you do? Okay? So I guess he's arguing
Speaker 1: with the other passengers in the in the time machine,
Speaker 1: and he says, it's useless, continued the lunatic, laughing convulsively.
Speaker 1: Don't you see that our speed is increased fivefold? Nothing
Speaker 1: can stop us. I have destroyed the controls and l
Speaker 1: Anacrono Pete runs headlong into the primordial white hot essence.
Speaker 1: And then people cry out horrors. Death awaits us in
Speaker 1: the chaos. K us look, and then it says, and
Speaker 1: indeed through the porthole glowed a dim light that marked
Speaker 1: the beginning of the natural world and the end of
Speaker 1: formless emptiness. But continuing backward, chaos gradually but persistently increased,
Speaker 1: and soon not even thick port glass would be enough
Speaker 1: to hold back the flood of water, earth and fire
Speaker 1: all agitated in a suspension of air via periodic violent
Speaker 1: collisions that propelled the floating vehicle through that incandescent matter.
Speaker 1: The inalterability procedure that they had all undergone had lost
Speaker 1: its potency. Asphyxia was overtaking the travelers. The walls could
Speaker 1: no longer stop the heat, and finally the glass melted,
Speaker 1: letting forth a torrent of igneous substances with the boom
Speaker 1: of a hundred volcanoes. And then there's like a like
Speaker 1: an eight line ellipsus, and then and then, uh, the
Speaker 1: inventor wakes up, having fallen asleep at a play and
Speaker 1: it was a dream. And I'm not sure if I'm
Speaker 1: not sure if the entire novel was a dream, or
Speaker 1: if only part of it leading up to that end
Speaker 1: point was a dream. I don't know. I'll have to
Speaker 1: go in and read the whole thing someday. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's almost like there there used to be a law
Speaker 1: that's said, look, you can explore the concept of time
Speaker 1: travel all you like, provided everything takes place within the
Speaker 1: space of a dream or vision. Why are they always
Speaker 1: doing the dream? I mean, why does it need to
Speaker 1: be a dream? Again? I guess it comes back to
Speaker 1: just the basic understanding that the dream dreams or where
Speaker 1: time is weird. Therefore that's where time travel is going
Speaker 1: to happen. I mean, does the author think, Wow, if
Speaker 1: people get to the end of this book and I
Speaker 1: don't say it was all a dream, They're gonna think
Speaker 1: I'm nuts. So I've got to just say, well, that
Speaker 1: didn't actually happen. Or maybe they were thinking, look, they're
Speaker 1: gonna actually invent time travel in like ten fifteen years top.
Speaker 1: And I don't want my work to them the day.
Speaker 1: But if it's all within the context of a dream,
Speaker 1: you can't say I got it wrong. That's good, that's
Speaker 1: very good. So let's see. We've looked at various concepts
Speaker 1: of time travel. Here, time travel by machine, time travel
Speaker 1: involving um manipulation of the atmosphere, time travel by magical beast,
Speaker 1: time travel by a drug, by head wound um. Oh man,
Speaker 1: there's so many ways to think about it. Time travel
Speaker 1: by cave, time travel by sleep. The cave is an
Speaker 1: interesting one too, because, of course the cave also makes
Speaker 1: one think of the tomb uh. Time travel via via
Speaker 1: death and it um. Yeah, and I guess it also
Speaker 1: reminds me of like all these various other stories of
Speaker 1: like characters venturing into realms beyond life for realms, even
Speaker 1: beyond death, venturing into the underworld or into you know,
Speaker 1: or to purgatory or paradise. You know, they're all these
Speaker 1: fantastic stories about somebody traveling elsewhere, learning something and then
Speaker 1: eventually coming back or trying to come back anyway, and
Speaker 1: and ultimately, like time travel stories are of the same mode, right,
Speaker 1: It's about somebody traveling into the fantastic realm and then returning.
Speaker 1: And that fantastic realm it might be hell, it might
Speaker 1: be um, the nineteen fifties, you know, it might be uh,
Speaker 1: you know, seven years into the future. It might be
Speaker 1: all a dream. But let's hope it's not. But regarding
Speaker 1: the l n Acrono Pete, I do want to say, well,
Speaker 1: it looks like a great story. And while it does
Speaker 1: appear to predate wells short story by one year, I
Speaker 1: think it's probably still fair to say that that Wells
Speaker 1: is probably the major popularizer of of the idea of
Speaker 1: the time machine as technology and science fiction. Yeah, Wells
Speaker 1: as Wells time machine is hard to be. Like we
Speaker 1: said before on the show, like it's it's a great book.
Speaker 1: It's still very readable, very enjoyable. All right, well, we're
Speaker 1: gonna go ahead and close this episode out, but obviously
Speaker 1: we'd love to continue to hear from everyone out there
Speaker 1: insights you have about time travel stories and myths and legends, traditions,
Speaker 1: and of course books and movies. What are some of
Speaker 1: your favorites right in? Let us know, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the smartest time travel or to time travel stories that
Speaker 1: are just a lot of fun, even if you you
Speaker 1: don't dare think about them too hard. Can you find
Speaker 1: earlier examples of of of intentionally created vehicles for time travel?
Speaker 1: I want to know, does it go back earlier than yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: or other time traveling magical creatures. Obviously I want to
Speaker 1: hear about that. In the meantime, if you want to
Speaker 1: check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,
Speaker 1: you can find them in the Stuff to Blow your
Speaker 1: Mind podcast feed, available wherever you get your podcasts. We
Speaker 1: have Artifact episodes on Wednesday's, Core episodes of the show
Speaker 1: on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Monday's we do listener mail,
Speaker 1: and on Friday we do Weird How Cinema. That's our
Speaker 1: time to set aside most serious matters and just focus
Speaker 1: in on a weird film. And we do occasionally cover
Speaker 1: time travel films. There we did, uh, we did what
Speaker 1: troys and transfers to time after time? And was there
Speaker 1: another one? I don't know if you count Morosco with
Speaker 1: the Sun going backward, but well we'll take Well that's
Speaker 1: that's three time travel movies and I'm sure there will
Speaker 1: be more in the future. Guess what's coming up next.
Speaker 1: Transfers nine uh, transfers nine uh. The atmosphere is time
Speaker 1: where they where they put Jack Death in a sardine can.
Speaker 1: I would do I would do. Transfers three, Trancers three
Speaker 1: is pretty fun anyway. Huge thanks as always to our
Speaker 1: excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like
Speaker 1: to get in touch with us with feedback on this
Speaker 1: episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
Speaker 1: or just to say hello, you can email us at
Speaker 1: contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com Stuff
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