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00:00 What happens when the end of time is time itself?
00:03 Is the ticking nature of this reality also its fatal flaw?
00:07 And, how many mind-bending knots can one theory tie itself in, before the end of the world
00:14 might even be a kindness?
00:16 This is Unveiled, and today we're taking a closer look at the time travel apocalypse.
00:22 Do you need the big questions answered?
00:24 Are you constantly curious?
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00:29 And ring the bell for more thought-provoking content!
00:32 The ability to move through time runs through the core of so many great science fiction
00:37 storylines.
00:38 It's a superpower, even if those that wield it often aren't your stereotypical cape-wearing,
00:43 world-saving hero kinds of people.
00:45 The time traveller often has to go under the radar, quiet and unnoticed in whichever time
00:50 they're infiltrating, so as so not to trigger some sort of existential collapse should anyone
00:55 realise who they are.
00:56 It's a delicate business with potentially dire consequences, all of which serves to
01:01 ramp up the tension in all of the best sci-fi examples.
01:05 Time travellers in the real world, however, are seemingly not so careful.
01:08 Or, at least, there are many who have clearly chosen to break rank.
01:12 Multiple times in just the last few years, time travel claimants have made headlines
01:17 the world over by predicting Armageddon.
01:19 In 2022, word spread online of a traveller known as Edward, who claimed to have taken
01:25 part in an experiment in 2004.
01:28 At the time, he was working in LA, but via the experiment he was transported to the year
01:32 5000, where he snapped a photo of the future LA, which Edward claims is entirely underwater.
01:38 Meanwhile, and again in 2022, a series of time travel warnings were posted on TikTok,
01:45 including reported dates in that year when massive, world-changing events should have
01:49 happened, such as the sudden disappearance of two million people, and the sudden emergence
01:54 of another group of nightmare creatures.
01:57 Ultimately, the TikTok prophecies proved incorrect.
02:00 But more broadly, a genuine time travel apocalypse is about more than just the testimony of individual
02:06 people.
02:07 All too often, those can be easily discredited.
02:10 But the mechanics and plausibility of time travel is something that even mainstream science
02:15 is directly interested in.
02:17 To a point, we need to understand the subtle workings of time in order to maintain some
02:22 quite mundane things of the modern world, like GPS systems, satellite networks, and
02:27 all types of space travel.
02:29 We know that time is relative, and that it runs differently on Earth (in our frame of
02:33 reference) compared to how it would under essentially any other conditions in the universe.
02:38 In this way, you might say that time is actually unknowable… and it's in its many grey
02:43 areas that doomsday theories can take shape.
02:47 Firstly, let's imagine that there's only one timeline.
02:51 This one.
02:52 Nowadays, this idea has been severely challenged, thanks to the development of various "many
02:56 worlds" and "multiverse" models of reality.
02:59 And we'll move to those shortly.
03:01 But for now, we can still imagine the universe as just one, unending, unbroken and complete
03:06 thing.
03:07 How does the time travel apocalypse unfold?
03:09 All we need to do is to consider one of the most popular paradoxes… but if it were to
03:14 really get out of hand.
03:16 A bootstrap paradox, otherwise known as an information paradox, is where information
03:22 is moved between the present, past, and future… so that actually it can never exist outside
03:27 of that loop.
03:28 But it can also never be taken away, either.
03:31 For example, imagine that you are given a book as a child by an adult.
03:36 Then you live your whole life with that book until you, as an adult, travel back in time
03:41 and give that book back to the child that will grow up to become the adult who gives
03:46 the book to you.
03:47 There's no breaking that cycle.
03:49 The book exists in perpetuity.
03:51 And yet it only exists because it's being constantly passed around between the two people
03:56 in the loop.
03:57 Now imagine, though, that written inside that book, there's something very, very bad.
04:02 As we learned in a previous video, Professor Nick Bostrom of the Future of Humanity Institute
04:07 has formulated the Vulnerable World Hypothesis to demonstrate just how… well, vulnerable
04:13 we really are.
04:14 Bostrom talks of so-called "black ball" technologies, which are things that, if they
04:19 are invented, will trigger the end of the world.
04:22 The example he spends most time on is easy-to-make nuclear bombs… but really, a black ball
04:27 technology could be anything.
04:29 It could be a genetically-engineered, 100% death-rate virus that's easily and instantly
04:34 spread… or a machine designed solely to attract asteroids from space, which turns
04:39 Earth into a cosmic punching bag… or a self-replicating AI that will always, always grow to hate humanity
04:47 so much that it just has to kill us all off.
04:50 You get the picture.
04:52 If that kind of technology, if that kind of information, were to exist… then you'd
04:57 seriously hope that it would somehow remain hidden and unknown.
05:00 Throw it into the bootstrap paradox, however, and not only would the cat be out of the bag…
05:05 but it would be inescapably released into probably exactly the same way, time and time
05:10 and time again.
05:12 This is the end of the world, but on repeat.
05:14 It's a record that skips and skips and skips, but it's impossible to turn off.
05:19 In some ways, it taps into the "block universe" way of thinking, otherwise known as "eternalism".
05:24 This is a philosophy of time in which all moments are presented as existing as one.
05:29 The past, present and future are all equally real, all equally happening… within the
05:34 wider 4D block that is reality itself.
05:37 On the tamer end of the scale, this means that the moment when you pressed play on this
05:41 video exists, still, alongside the moment right now… and the moment when this video
05:47 will end.
05:48 Nothing moves through time as we might typically understand it.
05:51 It's more like everything just pulsates through space-time, reconfiguring and reconfiguring
05:57 in ways that it was always supposed to do.
06:00 The bootstrap paradox is a little different, though, because it specifies this feeling
06:04 of inescapability.
06:06 And in this case, the mechanism for the end of the world is what's inescapable.
06:11 If true, and if the right conditions formed, we could say, then, that the apocalypse was,
06:16 is and always will be nigh… because it's essentially baked into the fabric of time
06:22 itself.
06:23 Unsurprisingly, the picture changes quite a lot when we add the potential for multiple
06:27 universes into the equation.
06:29 Really, it's little wonder that the multiverse has become such a popular theme in contemporary
06:33 science fiction writing… because it seemingly solves so many of the problems that time travel
06:38 throws up.
06:39 Hugh Everett's hugely influential "many worlds" interpretation may have been formulated
06:43 as far back as the 1950s, but its repercussions are still being explored.
06:48 It views reality through its smallest parts, and suggests that for every single quantum
06:53 event, all possible quantum outcomes do take place.
06:57 The theory allows for this by proposing that reality splits whenever a decision is made
07:02 or a chance occurrence unfolds.
07:04 Time is then viewed as something like an infinitely branching tree, sprouting more and more branches
07:10 with every passing second.
07:12 On a larger scale, this might be shown as the differences that could happen if you apply
07:16 for two jobs before choosing one over the other.
07:19 At the point that you make that decision, your reality splits - two separate versions
07:23 of you exist along two separate timelines, and their lives play out differently, perhaps
07:28 very differently, as a result.
07:30 But the many worlds can also be shown on smaller scales, such as the different timelines created
07:36 when you choose to turn left or right at a junction, or the ones created when you choose
07:40 to wear red or blue, sit or stand, blink twice or blink once.
07:46 In theory, there's really no limit to how particular you could go, with every single
07:50 alternate path simply branching out from the one you're on now.
07:54 So how does the apocalypse come into play?
07:57 The many worlds interpretation seemingly solves the bootstrap paradox, because it allows for
08:01 an infinite number of "try-agains".
08:04 The never-ending loops of self-fulfilling information now can be escaped from, because
08:08 they'll only ever exist on some, not all, of any one person's timelines.
08:14 And that should make us feel quite a lot safer.
08:17 No longer could we one day become doomed by the wrong information being passed back and
08:21 forth, causing all of us to die over and over and over again.
08:25 However, while you could view the multiverse as a kind of existential safety in numbers,
08:30 it also implies that no one timeline is particularly special.
08:34 No matter how important you think you are right now, there are actually an infinite
08:38 number of yous, spiralling off all around this present moment.
08:43 An infinite number of your friends and loved ones, too.
08:46 Of the towns and cities that you know.
08:48 Of the planet that you live on.
08:50 And so, if a blackball technology is ever introduced, if it ever does become possible
08:55 to drop just a little bit of poison into one slither of reality, then why not into this
09:01 one?
09:02 In the multiverse, it's not like that one action would even be noticed, in amongst all
09:06 the other endless variations.
09:08 And that's pretty scary.
09:10 On the one hand, with the Bootstrap Paradox and the possibilities that it could bring,
09:15 you have what you might even now term the traditional time travel apocalypse.
09:20 On the other, with the eternal mass of the multiverse to get lost in, it really is the
09:24 case that nothing's sacred anymore.
09:27 Not even your own time, as you think you're experiencing it.
09:32 What do you think?
09:33 Is there anything we missed?
09:34 Let us know in the comments, check out these other clips from Unveiled, and make sure you
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