Time Travel

I happened to watch two shows recently that featured that common topic, traveling back in time to change events. One was the movie The Butterfly Effect, which had a DVD release featuring an alternate ending. In this case, I agree with the focus groups and say the director's ending was so much worse than the final version. The theatrical version was the blatantly obvious answer, given an earlier line in the movie.

The other show was the season premiere of Star Trek: Enterprise. Now, time travel is a very common feature in the Star Trek universe. The cliffhanger of the previous season involved World War II, and had the series been cancelled, it would have been an intriguing cliffhanger that was never resolved. The two-part show was fairly satisfying, but the "temporal cold war" is a plot line that requires significant disbelief to follow.

All this reminds me of Larry Niven's law of time travel, which basically says in a universe where time travel is possible, it won't be invented. If it is, it destabilizes everything, so the only stable universe is one with no time travel.

But in the event I do travel back in time, I have a set of winning lottery numbers memorized, providing excellent seed money for some key stock market investments. :-)