"Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut

I really liked this book, mostly because of how things were described and its randomness. I also really liked how it had a completely different way of time traveling. Rather than Billy just traveling as himself at his current age, where he could possibly meet himself at a different age, he travels so he IS himself at a different moment in his life. He also knows what it going to happen in every moment of his life, and there never really is a current moment in his life that he goes back to. He never lives is life in order and never tries to change things, and that just how it is for him. I also liked the idea that other planets/races perceive time differently, and while for humans it is just a straight line, for the Tralmalfadorians they can just be in whatever moment of their life they would like to. So its not such a big deal when people die. I think that this is just a really weird concept, that time is only a matter of perception. I wonder if this means we could time travel if we just change the way we think about time. I think that if that would possible, it would be a lot harder to make happen than it sounds. People just cannot think about Time in any different way. I think maybe why the Tralmalfadorians see time this way is because they are smarter, or they just know how to use more of their brain. Maybe we could be able to time travel, if we could just figure out how to use more of our brain power.

"The Garden of Forking Paths" by Jorge Luis Borges

First of all, in this story there was really any time travel. No one went back or forward in time in any way. This story was also really confusing, and I didn't really like it. They do talk about time being an "infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times." I think this basically means that time exists in many different ways and 'directions'. I think this is something like the idea of parallel universes, and whenever you have to make a decision a bunch of different parallel universes are created, and in each one a different thing happens because you made a different decision in each universe. Which is really, really confusing and I don't think would actually happen. But maybe that's just me. It also talks about time as a riddle, which I did think was a cool idea, mostly because its saying that the answer to all the confusion in the book is 'time'. Which I just thought was interesting for some reason. What I thought was most confusing in this was when they talk about being friends, but in another universe they are enemies, and then one shoots the other. I totally did not understand what happened there, did it have something to do with time travel? Or was he just being a spy and trying to get information? And, did they actually time travel ever in their lives? Or did they time travel unexpectedly while they were talking? Or did it change to a different universe? Or something like that?

The Outer Limits: "Patient Zero"

In this episode, a group of scientists, who are among the last few people alive in the world, create a way to time travel so they can go back in time to stop the plague that killed most of the earth, from ever happening. They send a man named Colonel Beckett back to kill 'patient zero'. But when they give him the picture of the woman who is 'patient zero' you can tell that this is going to be a problem for him, which is going to create a bigger problem. So he goes back in time. He is following the woman when he gets hit by a car. She then helps him, and takes him to her apartment. He becomes attached to her and cannot kill her. So he is determined to just prevent her from coming in contact with the strands of DNA that will cause her to get the disease. But by doing this he accidentally becomes patient zero himself. Another soldier then has to come back in time and kill Beckett. Then time is changed and the plague had never happened. And everyone was alive again. I don't think there was really any different ideas about time travel in this episode, it just kind of went along with the regular ideas. And the reason they time traveled was a regular reason, which was to stop something really bad from happening. Although, it was different because they actually could change time, unlike a lot of other time travel things.

Timeline

I thought this was a pretty good movie. It also had another idea about time travel. In this movie, scientists accidentally discovered a way to time travel by trying to fax solid objects. But, when they sent one it didn't arrive at its destination, it just appeared back where it started, several hours later. So they took a look at cameras that had been on it, and by looking at the sky, they realized that their package had been in not just the wrong place, but the wrong time. So they discovered that they could use this machine to send things, and even people, back to 14th century France through a wormhole, that for some reason had appeared. I thought this was a cool idea about a way to time travel, and also probably the most realistic. It seems to me that if time travel was possible, and if we ever discovered it, it would be accidentally. I think this is most realistic possibility, because we know that the universe is really weird, and we really know nothing about it, so things like wormholes could be appearing all the time, but we just haven't realized it yet. Also, the fact that they could only travel to a certain place and time makes sense with the way that they traveled, and just makes it seem more possible. To me, anyways. Although I don't think time travel will ever be possible for us by an invention, I could see this potentially happening.

The Outer Limits: "The Man Who Was Never Born"

What I thought was most interesting about this episode was that it had a different method of time travel than everything else we've read or watched, and he traveled to the future, rather than the past. A man was traveling through space, when, without realizing it, he went through some kind of disturbance type thing which caused him to travel into the future. Once there he finds out that the human race is almost extinct because of one man who messed around with some extraterrestrial genes. The one 'human' he does meet looks nothing like a human. This makes him want to go back in time and warn people of what is going to happen, so it can be stopped. He takes the future human, named Andro with him. But when they are traveling back,  for some reason the man who originally came to the future, dies. So Andro is left alone in the spaceship. He ends up back on Earth in the past and has to use 'hypnotic suggestion' so people don't see what he actually looks like. He soon meets a girl and falls in love with her, but he soon figures out that she is going to be the mother of the man who created all the problems. And she is about to get married to the father-to-be of that man. Andro tries to prevent this from happening by causing a commotion at their wedding. He runs away and the girl follows him. She says that she doesn't think she ever really loved her fiance and he tells her the truth about where he came from and why he came. He says that he has to leave and she convinces him to let her go with. They are traveling back to the future when Andro starts to disappear. This was because he prevented this baby from being born, which in turn created a world where Andro was never born. And this leaves the girl floating through space, alone.

The Twilight Zone: "Back There"

In this episode a man named Corrigan inadvertently time travels back to April 14, 1865, which happens to be the day that President Lincoln got shot. So of course he has to go and warn people so he can prevent Lincoln's death. This of course makes everyone just think he is drunk or crazy and they don't believe him, and he is taken to jail. Only one of the officers believes him and he goes and tries to find more security guards for the president. Meanwhile, a man comes to the jail and offers to take care of Corrigan. He tells Corrigan his name is John Wellington, and takes him to his home and poisons him. Corrigan soon passes out and John goes to the theater. Later, Corrigan wakes up but can barely move, he collapses again and the police man who believed him comes in a few seconds later. Corrigan soon figures out that John Wellington is actually John Wilkes Booth. Just then, they hear the news that Lincoln has been shot. A little while later Corrigan gets transported back to the present. He goes back to his friends he had just been talking to and realizes there is a new guy there, and this guy had originally been a servant there, before he traveled back in time. He was rich now though because of what Corrigan did. The fact that the one police officer believed him caused the police officer and all of his descendants to be rich and this man happens to be one of them. I think this goes along with  a majority of the other time travel ideas in the fact that you can't change big things because they will always happen, but you can change minor things that don't affect the future much.

The Twilight Zone: "A Kind of Stopwatch"

I wouldn't really consider this episode time travel. I think It is more like time freezing. I also think that time travel is more likely to be possible than time freezing. I do think it would be awesome to have a stopwatch like this though. And it had some interesting ideas. Basically what happens is that a weird drunk guy gives McNulty a really old stopwatch. McNulty messes around with it and figures out that it can freeze everything around him, including time. And when he presses it again, it unfreezes time. So for people other than him, they don't even realize that anything happened. He tries to convince people that it really works, but of course no one believes him. When he stick stuff in their pockets, to them it would just seem like it suddenly appeared there, and they would have no recollection of being frozen. And most of it is because no one likes him. He then decides people would really like him and he would become famous if he just had a lot of money, and he knows just how he can get some. He freezes time and takes a bunch of money on a cart from the bank. But on his way out, the stopwatch drops out of his pocket and shatters. He panics and tries to unfreeze time, but it won't work. No matter what he does, no one will move. What I wondered was, now that time is frozen, even though he is still able to move around would he age at all? Or just be immortal? Now you think about that now.