I think its simpler than that - its running a ‘chess’ program - and it gets to go back and restart a series of moves.
I know I lost now, but what if I go back and change X - what happens then? Now, in its computer mind, it already ‘knows’ the answer - kill baby, no cure - it likely doesnt care that its ‘current’ future will remain unchanged.
Then the next run thru, it does the same choices - its losing, it finds the next ‘move’ to try and win…
it has no concern over the other timelines, only the current one that it is in.
In fact, there are no other ‘timelines’ out there running concurantly - just different moves being played on the past based on the outcome of the previous move - that they all come together in roughly the same timeframe (our current) is based on the knowledge that the AI has - and that is all the ‘players’ that are there in the endgame (and therefore are likely to be around at the same time in the past).
At some point, SkyNet either wins (and the time traveling stops, game over) or it continues to lose, and the time traveling continues).
Or our team realizes the way to win is not to stop skynet, but to stop the technology that enables time travel.
HO-LEE SHE-AT! That is fantastic and I hope the producers run with that idea. It fits in with The Turk and it fits in with how computers are supposed to think.
From my own POV, I’d guess if the mission had succeeded, the future would change so that, with no one with immunities to the plague around, Skynet wouldn’t have sent back anyone to eliminate the girl with an immunity in the first place—not that it would have created a paradox, since it’s been established that in the Terminator universe, a time traveler becomes immune to changes made to their own past, or their home timeline. At most, Skynet would just have an old Terminator report in at some point claiming that Skynet sent him back to the past to kill a baby who would have been immune to a plague in the future. Which now Skynet wouldn’t have to do, because in it’s own time, there were no plague immune humans.
Actually, when you think about it, if Judgement Day had already been averted by some changes in the present* (say, Ellison tells John Henry that it’s wrong to kill, and JH goes “Okay. Sure. we’ll go with that.”), we wouldn’t even know about it, even if more Terminators keep showing up—they’d effectively be refugees from a timeline that already doesn’t exist!
Hopefully, Skynet was on it’s last legs already when the time travel missions started launching. Otherwise, problems might start piling up…like if a triumphant Skynet from 3000 A.D. sent a platoon of Terminators back to secure a renegade T-1000 that caused trouble in the clone plantations of the mid 2050s, only to arrive in the 2050s where Skynet was prevented from existing in the first place!
Wow, bravo! That is a really elegant way to explain almost every question I’ve ever had about the Terminator-verse. I’m going to spread that one around.
Although now that you’ve got me thinking, I’ve got a phrase running through my head: “Would you like to play. . . thermonuclear war?”
I meant in the series’ new timeline, not the original film’s. That plot point from the original had a kind of relieving elegance about it—the kind of thing that’d help prevent twenty timeline pileups.
Um…it’s been pretty firmly established that the future war and Skynet that we see in the series (and thats been sending stuff back to the past) is a different one than seen in T1 and T2—for no other reason than Judgment Day happened almost fifteen years after in the series than when it was foretold in the first two movies.
