Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

Chris Carter asks: Is going back in time to defeat your enemies really an effective plan?

My dear dear friend Chris,
Urgh! Time Travel! Don’t worry. I’ll spare you the details on the space-time continuum or as I call it, the space-time finitum. (Make no mistake. I said “FINITUM”.) But we’ve touched on that before and now is not the time to go back to the future nor forward to the past.
In the original Terminator film we saw a scenario where the war of the future between man and machine had been all but won but in a last ditch effort the machines sent back in time a bulky Austrian cyborg to kill Linda Hamilton who despite a successful Hollywood career manages to raise a son (John) who would grow up and lead humanity to victory.
The idea that the machines could simultaneously succeed in time travel AND alter the future is a paradox as anything they would do in the past to assure their victory would negate the necessity to go back in the first place. A second paradox further complicates matters when John sends back the soldier Reese to protect his mother at which point Reese, possibly fulfilling some misplaced sense of loyalty to his leader, decides to father him in a 1980’s love scene. This may be an explanation as to why John chose to send a reprogrammed cyborg to protect her in the sequel.
“I can’t run the risk of some horny soldier becoming my father again so we’ll send a reprogrammed cyborg.”
“Okay, but do we have to put clothes on him before we send him?”
“Nah, send him in nude. That’ll be hilarious! Also, can you program him to say Zaggen-zu-Haggen alot and make him aspire to run for governor of California?”
A third paradox is revealed when we learn the adult John KNEW who would become his father thanks to some recorded tapes left by his mother on which she explained details about his father and the future. Reese is actually younger than John when they first meet. MIND BLOWN!
“Son, may I barrow the car to take a girl to the movies?”
“Is she Linda Hamilton?”
To take these movies at face value we’re going to have to take a page out of the film “Kate and Leopold.” Now there’s a movie that could have used some killer robots! Basically it is explained that the looping back of time travel BECOMES the natural order of events NO MATTER WHAT. According to this concept, the only way events are as they are in your present is BECAUSE of the time travel. Ultimately this means it doesn’t matter whether you travel back and alter events or not, the future will always be as you knew it. Why the super-intelligent calculating machines couldn’t figure this out, I’ll never know. Perhaps it was all just an elaborate prank. The T-2000 Pranking Machine? That sounds right. The Prankinator? There’s a movie for you.
If this was not evidence enough of the futile effect of past-altering, let’s consider the concept of alternate time-lines. Speaking purely hypothetically as opposed to before, if you could alter the future by changing the past what would the result be? In regards Terminator we would see the machines go back and kill Linda or John. A new leader would rise up and what, STOP the machines from killing Linda or John? Or perhaps this new leader would send someone back to stop the rise of the machines. What would the result of that be? We would inevitably see the machines rise up some other way at some later time, right? Even if we accept the idea of alternate time-lines we’re still at a stalemate. It’s like playing tic-tac-toe with yourself and you keep traveling back in time to put an X where your alternate self was going to put an O… no forget that. That doesn’t make any sense.
It seems the only real option is to go not to past but to the future, long after your faction is obliterated, and take advantage of the element of surprise. At that point the only worry is whether the other side thought of it too and attacked sometime further in the future than you did… urgh. You know what? This all sounds like a lot more trouble than it’s worth. Let’s just agree to not give guns to robots be glad we do not have the ability to breath life into our creations like SOME people we know.
Still, I have to ask what the machines would do with the planet once the humans are annihilated. I think it would be funny if we go to the future to perform our sneak attack and found the robots had prepared a surprise party for us. Why not? We’d already be naked, right? Isn’t that a requisite for time travel… and parties? That’s two birds with one stone and I KNOW robots are all about efficiency!
Final paradox. Well, it’s not really a paradox and it doesn’t have anything to do with the question at hand but I’m curious. In Terminator, Reese explains that futuristic weapons couldn’t travel through time for some reason but organic matter could. I assume the robots could time travel because they were covered with bulky Austrian skin? (Sorry, I think bulky Austrians are funny.) My question is why did they not just cover futuristic weapons with Austrians and send them through that way? That would be quite the advantage despite the bizarre headlines that would surely follow.
“Muscular naked men shoot each other with skin covered laser guns. Story at eleven.”
I think it may be best we remember what Hector Berlioz said- “Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.”

-Come with me if you want to live!

-Professor Popinjay.