Arrival (seen it - open spoilers)

Cafe Society
101

All this discussion of time reminded me of this bit of Douglas Adams from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe:

One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can’t cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.

The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.

Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.

102

I literally LOL’d at the last line.

103

“When it comes to figuring out temporal paradoxes, my advice is don’t even try.” - Capt. Kathryn Janeway

104

I think we can easily wave away the whole language as way to thwart time thing. It was left open ended enough that I think it could just have been what us puny, ignorant humans believed at the time. Louise spent enough time in the alien ship and in close proximity to the aliens that who knows what they might have been able to do to her. In the future flash forwards, nothing seems to indicate that anyone other than she is capable of seeing the future for one. And no one else involved in the other projects seems to be able to do the same either, or at least we never know if that’s the case. Also, where this movie leaves it open to interpretation, Interstellar hands us unequivocal bullshit as a twist and has it come spewing out of a character that should know better, and for whom the speech is just completely out of character and out of left field.

I don’t see a problem with her decision to see Hannah’s life through either. Her “memories” of the future were just as real as our memories of the past. Future Hannah is just as much a part of her life as our children are to ours.

I loved the movie, didn’t see the twist coming, and was at the edge of my seat pretty much the whole time. It did feel a bit claustrophobic though, and very narrowly focused, so even if it was amazing, I’m not seeing myself watching it over and over as I do a lot of my favorite sci-fi (like say Contact which I usually have running in the background on lazy sunday afternoons when I’ve got nothign to do).

It’s a common theme that humans are always on the edge of attacking alien visitors. I wouldn’t put it past us violent apes. But common now. These are beings capable of traveling interstellar distances and control gravity! It’d be like a fully loaded airplane carrier traveling back in time to the stone age and having a bunch of cave people hurl spears at it. Why would we think we would do anything but get our asses handed to us?

105

I take your point, although the explosives did apparently kill one of the aliens. Mightn’t an all-out series of nuclear strikes have some effect? The aliens presumably would have very long supply lines, so in theory even a very advanced civilization might have trouble, just as the U.S. did in Vietnam and the Soviets did in Afghanistan.

106

That’s the thing though, and also why its silly in so many other movies, even when it’s not really humans that do the aliens in (like in War of the Worlds - aliens with interstellar knowledge don’t know anything about anti-biotics?).

The level of cooperation, social engineering, the technological command over physics is so beyond what we could even comprehend at this stage that it’ ludicrous for us to think they wouldn’t have us figured out the moment they saw us.

“Hairless Apes, just as our original DNA and anthropological probes predicted 500,000 thousand years ago when they visited. They appear to have split the atom.”

“You don’t think they’d try to throw a thermonuclear bomb at one of our vessels do you?”

::looking at eachother::

“HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

In all likelyhood a species capable of such a feat as interstellar travel, with a fleet for that matter, is either looking to make friends or learn about us, or won’t care ad consider us ants, in which case we’d probably all be dead before we knew what hit us anyway.

107

Maybe we’d be like ants to them. But ants do pretty well for themselves despite incurring our wrath.

108

I found the film disappointing. I loved the original short story but there’s the rub, it was a short story. Drawing it out to the length of a full movie attenuates the material and necessitates the use of fillers to hold it together. Far too much time is spent looking at ink blots and trying to speak profoundly about them.

All in all it made for a mediocre and boring sf film.

109

Just watched the movie and was underwhelmed. If I was to put anything on the movie, it was that it felt disjointed, whether that was bad editing, or simply just the story put to screen, is a bit beyond me. Was disapointed that the bug eyed monsters are advanced enough, got the handle on the timey whimey, wibbley wobbley stuff, and yet we have to learn their language.

Does the book bring anything else to the table, or am I just looking at a movie thats not to my taste.

110

Well, in fairness, the WOTW aliens just came from Mars. But then there were the interstellar-distance-travelling geniuses in Signs who were deathly allergic to water and decided to invade, oh, I don’t know, a world which is mostly covered with it.

111

True, i was going by the Tom Cruise remake :stuck_out_tongue:

112

" I don’t want to talk about time travel because if we start talking about it then we’re going to be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws. "

  • Old Joe
113

“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect. But actually, from a nonlinear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey … stuff.” – The 10th Doctor

114

I’m still struggling to find an understandable explanation of all the ‘least action principle’ stuff from the short story.

Sent from my LG-V410 using Tapatalk

115

In post #25, I proposed the following trivia question:

Q: What do the films Arrival and Still Alice have in common?

A: They both have American female linguistics professors as their main character.

Someone pointed out to me yesterday that an even more specific answer is possible, since they’re both red-haired American female linguistics professors.

116

I don’t think the film intended for the ‘remembering the future’-kind of thing to be a special power, or anything of that sort; rather, time simply isn’t the linear progression of cause to effect we assume it is. That’s ultimately just an arbitrary structure imbued upon time by the concepts our language imbues us with, just as there’s no real northern direction on a sphere.

And I think that makes sense, as far as the film goes—think about the fact that native Russian speakers can differentiate between shades of blue more easily than English speakers: the different languages just allow a different coordinatization of the colour space. Likewise, within the conceit of the film, the different languages coordinatize time differently: to us, there’s a difference between past and future, while to the Heptapods, there isn’t, similar to how there’s a difference between certain shades of blue for a Russian speaker that might be elusive to an English speaker.

It even makes sense with respect to the Heptapods biology: to us, who’ve grown up in a land-based environment, there’s a clear difference between up and down; add to that the direction of motion, and we have only a bilateral symmetry. This naturally introduces concepts such as ‘ahead’ and ‘behind’, which then get ported to the temporal domain as ‘before’ and ‘after’.

In the Heptapods’ fluid environment, there’s no great up/down difference, and thus, they only have the direction of motion—thus, the rotational symmetry. Consequently, they didn’t develop the same concepts, and don’t distinguish between past and future. And like a Russian speaker might loose the distinction between different shades of blue when ‘thinking in English’, becoming truly fluent in a language in which there’s no past/future distinction erases it likewise in the experience.

I haven’t read the original short story, but I’d bet that the physicist at some point noted that there isn’t really a distinction between past and future as far as the physical laws are concerned (i.e. there’s time-reversal invariance for fundamental laws)—within the conceit of the film, the distinction then simply comes from the way we use our concepts to coordinatize the world. (Perhaps somebody could spoiler me regarding whether I’m right with that.)

That’s at least a damn sight more plausible than getting a message from the inside of a five-dimensional black hole into the past thanks to the power of love.

There also isn’t really a problem with free will, or with her making a certain choice as opposed to another one—not anymore than there already is in a world with a past/future distinction, at any rate. She saw the future she saw, because she made the decision she did; if she had decided otherwise, she would have seen a different future. But that doesn’t mean that she couldn’t have decided differently—it just means she didn’t. That’s a distinction: that I did decide to have pizza yesterday doesn’t mean that I couldn’t have decided otherwise. So if you’re inclined to believe that my choice of pizza yesterday was free, then so can choices be in a world in which one doesn’t just remember the past, but also ‘premembers’ the future.

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118

Just read the 1998 short story by Ted Chiang, which I recommend. Some significant differences from the movie:

[spoiler]By the end, the Amy Adams character isn’t able to see what the stock market is going to do or win the lottery every day. Learning the heptapod language sort of rewires her brain, though, and she comes to know everything which will happen in her life, just as the heptapods see all of existence at once. She is able to foresee her daughter’s birth, and death (from a mountain-climbing accident when she’s 25, not from a rare disease when she’s much younger), and even her own death in about 50 years (although she doesn’t say of what). It’s implied that one other linguist on the U.S. first-contact team also is changed by learning the language.

The Jeremy Renner character is bearded and much more tweedy/academic. They go out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant and later sleep together at least once while the aliens are still here.

The aliens have big ships in orbit, and set down “looking glasses” (two-way communications screens) in many places on Earth. They don’t have big ships that actually come down to the surface. They don’t give us any high-tech help.

There’s no global crisis, no Chinese threat to attack the aliens, and no U.S. military mutiny or assassination attempt against the aliens.

The heptapods just leave at the end, with no explanation given as to why. No mention that humanity will have to save them in 3000 years, either. After the aliens leave, further study of their language does not change anyone else, nor, apparently, does it lead to global peace.

Still a good story, and an interesting contrast to the movie.
[/spoiler]

119

Interesting! Any explanation of why she wouldn’t try to keep her daughter off the mountain?

120

She did become

concerned about her daughter’s minor risk-taking as a child and teenager, but it was nothing more serious than any parent’s - don’t climb that tree, don’t drink and drive, be careful around hormone-addled teenage boys, etc. - and she accepted her daughter’s eventual fate as, in essence, destiny. It was going to happen; it had always happened. Chiang discusses free will, fate and the heptapods’ very different approach to existence, but not at great length.