Yea, I was now thinking that too. You could just brute force your tries until you win. But then you could, theoretically, never get past 1984.
How would you ever know when you won.
Didn’t they deliberately poke at this concept in Dark Fate? Skynet just kept sending a few more T-800s back in time until… one of them completed its mission! However, not only did this not stop the influx of more Terminators from other alternate futures, it is implied that in some of these futures Skynet and Cyberdyne itself got nipped in the bud despite having successfully eliminated John, and the extra extra Terminators were being sent by some other AI for its own (analogous) purposes.
I think you are talking beyond my pay grade. Could you perhaps summarize your thoughts on how time works?
Genisys also explicitly established that there is a Sophisticated Skynet going around conquering the various Big Dumb Skynets out there. John Connor even calls Pops a “relic from a deleted timeline”. There’s also a hint of this in T3 when the T-X goes into the facility where Skynet is “born” and reprograms various things.
I’m just spitballing here, but perhaps Cyberdyne was already onto a research line that would’ve lead them to AI when the future tech fell into their hands. They abandoned that line and started working on the future tech instead, but found themselves having to reverse-engineer Skynet software 40 years more advanced than their own, which wound up taking longer than if they’d just stayed on the path they were on in the first place.
in the first and second movie, the resistance had beaten Skynet and the t-800 and 1000 was sent back to stop that from happening but in the T2 book adaptation it has a couple of pages on the resistance hacking an unused t-800 and John programming it specifically for the mission
Out of curiosity, do we get told what John is thinking then? Which is to say: is it more ‘desperation ploy’ or more ‘since I already saw how this plays out, I’ve been ready to do this for decades; why the heck wouldn’t I know precisely which commands to give right now?’
OK, since you used the word “rewind”, let’s forget about time travel for a moment and think about a VCR tape. I’ve taken a bunch of pictures of my living room, and in the pictures, you can clearly see the TV, on which I’m watching a movie, and the VCR, showing the number of minutes I’m at in the movie. I show you all the pictures: Can you see whether I’ve rewound the movie? No. You can tell that there’s a moment at which I’m 5:27 into the movie, and a moment at which I’m 23:17 into the movie, and a moment at which I’m 1:44:12 into the movie, and so on, but that’s not enough.
Now let’s suppose that, in the movie I’m watching, there’s a clock visible on the wall. Now can you tell whether I’ve re-wound? Still no. At the moment when the VCR display says I’m at 5:27, the clock in the movie says 12:05:27, and at the moment when the VCR display says I’m at 23:17, the clock in the movie says 12:23:17, and so on. Just by looking at anything in the movie, you can never tell whether the movie has been rewound. It matters not at all to the movie characters.
But now let’s suppose that, in addition to my TV and VCR in my living room, you can also see a clock in my living room (that is, not in the movie). Now, you can tell whether I’ve rewound the movie, because even if the clock in the movie and the clock in my living room started off in agreement, after I rewind, they won’t agree any more.
That’s what I mean when I say that, to talk about “rewinding the Universe”, you need to compare to some other time outside of the Universe. It’s just like how, to talk about “rewinding a movie”, you need to compare to some other time outside of the movie.
I have to wonder, what if Sarah and John Connor just hid out in the 1993 time loop in Punxsutawney…?
If the VCR is the time machine then the operator would know where in the tape(time) he was rewinding to. I’m not sure why there are pictures of the room rather than being in the room. Your post made me more confused. That’s what I get for asking someone named Chronos about time. Tequila shots on me.
When your family eats by their snake tongues.
If that were to happen I’d just expect to hear, “I’ll be back”
This is why the sequels are inferior, and Terminator works best as a standalone movie.
And donuts by the tens of thousands fall from the sky.
That’s just one overweight beer drinking guy’s opinion, though on what constitutes winning.
In Terminator, if there is just one timeline, one side wouldn’t stand for losing and thus make sure they went back in time to keep from losing. And if they won, the other side would go back to make sure they won. It would never end. I don’t see how you’d get past 1984. Neither side would say, “eh, close enough”.
I think the problem is this is a more philosophical understanding of time than what the rest of us are dealing with. There is no way to prove that the universe existed in the past. It’s certainly possible that nothing existed a moment ago until everything sprang into being including memories of a past that never existed. However, if you try to argue that point on a physics test it’s not going to go well for you.
For the purposes of science, “the past does not exist except in memories” is not a useful concept. We need to be able to determine what happened in the past based on current conditions, and extrapolate what will happen in the future. And in fact, in physics time is a dimension just like length and width and height. We are all traveling through the dimension of time together but there are situations where you might travel a different “distance” through time than I, for instance if you stay on Earth and I travel in a spaceship moving close to the speed of light.
Technically, if someone traveled faster than light they would be traveling faster than time too. If I moved 39 light-years away in an instant and turned around to look back I would see the Earth of 1984. The light from that time has been moving away from us for nearly 40 years and only time travel could ever allow us to see it again.
Not really; if you travelled along such a trajectory as to experience zero proper time, you would be going along with the light rays, not somehow racing faster.
I was not talking philosophically. What I’m saying is the past does not exist as a physical location that you could travel to. All the matter of the universe travels forward in time, so there is no 1984 to travel to.
You’re absolutely right. I should have made it clearer that I was referring to somehow racing faster than light, not moving relativistically equal to the speed of light.
Given the four-dimensional nature of spacetime I don’t think this is accurate. For one, you seem to be implying all matter travels forward in time equally, which general relativity proves is not the case. Many factors can alter the rate at which you travel through time. I could theoretically leave on a relativistic rocket and return hundreds of years later, while only experiencing a few years by my own reference. Am I matter from 2025 now existing in 2223?
This is why I don’t believe it’s accurate to say 1984 doesn’t exist anymore, because the only difference between traveling to 2223 and traveling to 1984 is the amount of energy required. Granted, by current theories the amount of energy would be insurmountably vast, but it is still theoretically possible. Time is a dimension we travel through just like the other three, and the past is still there “behind” us.
I have a few things to say.
First of all, I think the first Terminator film is the best, as it was my favorite movie of all time for a while. (It isn’t anymore, but it’s still ranking very high up there for me.) Comparing it to T2 is like comparing a perfect, flawless chocolate chip cookie to an elaborate 7 layer wedding cake that has some problems.
Secondly, I’m bummed that Linda Hamilton was never in Game of Thrones, because the other Sarah Connors were Cersei Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen.
And finally, I believe that everything and every place that ever existed and will ever exist is always everywhere at once. But we can only perceive it in a linear fashion and can only travel forward through time at a rate of 60 minutes per hour. (Unless you take good naps, then you can speed things up.) If time travel were possible, it just gives you a chance to get around that limitation somehow.