Temporal Causality Weapons. (TCW’s)
Created | Updated Oct 17, 2002
The idea of time travel has been toyed with by many of the arts. There are many films, novels, comics and TV series that deal with time as a transportation method. Very few have considered it as anything else, even less have considered it as a weapon.
Fictional TCW's
Probably the most famous example of the idea of a weapon involving time is the film Eraser. In this film, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a witness protection agent. His latest assignment is to defend Lee Cullen who witnessed the use of a TCW. This TCW was designed to eliminate people and things. This type of TCW has also been used in the PC game Red Alert 2. In that game, a type of soldier known as the 'Chrono Legionnaire' can eliminate enemy units from the timeline. Star trek has also taken a slant on time travelling and TCW's. In Star Trek, the Federation takes a very serious view of time travel and controlling it. According to Federation history, temporal technology was perfected in the 29th century. The 'Timeships' as they are called, patrol the time space continuum, making sure that no one alters history. This is an expansion of the Federation's Prime directive. In one episode of Voyager called "year of hell" a species known as the Krenim were using a very advanced TCW. There was one Temporal weapon ship commanded by Annorax, which was trying to restore the Krenim impirum. They were doing this by eliminating enemies of the impirum from the timeline. This was an incredibly advanced TCW because as Annorax put it "I can control the destiny of a single molecule or an entire civilisation". When he first fired the weapon, Annorax used it to destroy the Krenim's greatest enemy, the Rilnar who had defeated them in a war earlier. It worked at first, the Krenim thrived and conquered large sectors of space. But, the Rilnar had introduced a crucial antibody into the Krenim genome and a disease killed 50 million, one of which was Annorax's wife. Since then he has being truing to undo that damage. In another Voyager episode called 'futures end' a 29th century time ship piloted by Captain Braxton comes back from the future believing that they are responsible for a temporal explosion that will destroy Earth. What actually happened was that when Voyager stopped him from destroying them, the Timeship was sent back to 1969 where a businessman named Henry Starling found it and used it to start the computer revolution of the late 20th century. Starling launched the timeship into the future and caused the explosion by making the jump badly. Fortunately Voyager stopped him making the jump 'again' and the sequence of events never happened.
How do TCW's work
To avoid boring you with Temporal mechanics only the basic principal will be explained. The idea of a TCW is to eliminate something or someone from the timeline to your advantage. For example, say that you had ancestors who were killed during the holocaust, you may want to use your TCW to eliminate Hitler from the timeline. The problem with this is that the timeline may be altered even more badly, like bringing an even more tyrannical dictator to power. There is also of time paradoxes. According to temporal theory, there are two types of time travel. One is linear time, which means that everything that you do in the past/future has already happened and nothing will change. The other is multiple possible futures, which means if you mess up the past/future then you could prevent certain other events happening. If a TCW is to work then it has to use the second type of time travel otherwise the events that the object or person caused will still happen. When you stop these events happening, you create a causality paradox. However, many of these are dangerous and cause even worse events in the process.
Posibilty of real TCW's
The chances of making a real TCW are difficult. For a start, we cant make a time machine but there is a way. According to Einstein, the faster you travel the slower time moves. When you travel at light speed, time stops on the object. So theoretically, if you travel faster than light you travel back in time and thus you have a time machine. The only problem is how to get back, you would have to see the quantum physics experts there. You could use this to your advantage by going back to, say when Hitler fought in WW1 and kill him there. There is, however, no real way to completely eliminate someone from the timeline yet.
Other uses for time travel
Time travel can not only be used for war. If you were very patriotic, you could say go back in time and help your native country, eg Russia to say, win the cold war, win a war you may have lost, be the first on the moon or the ones to invent... well everything. Also it could be used for commercial reasons. You may want to go back in time with a very advanced piece of technology and claim to have invented it. Not only will you be much better off, but you will also be advancing the human race as if that technology is developed eariler then who knows what could be developed in future times.
To conclude...
At present, TCW's are part of science fiction only, but if we develop the right kind of time travel, then we may be able to tamper with our timeline. The question is, do we want to?....
