Time Travel Is A Tricky Thing

Marty McFly and Doc Brown did it. Bill and Ted did it. And now Lost is doing it.

Time travel. There are a lot of different variations on the time travel genre. Everyone has their theories on how time travel happens and how it effects things. The thing about time travel is since it doesn't exist, you can make up your own rules.

There are a few ways to do this. You can go the Bill and Ted route and say everything is written. That's how they were able to just say "after this we'll go back and leave the keys behind this sign" and then the keys were there. That's where the future is already written so it has already effected the past.

Then there's the Butterfly Effect rule. You go back and change things, it effects every aspect of what made the future you came from possible. If you go back and invent the iPod in 1992, the you that invented it and made millions off of it has changed the you that went back in the first place. So when you get back to the present, you'd have all new memories (hence the nose bleeds in the movie). A Sound of Thunder had a similar effect. They went back in time and stepped on a butterfly and killed a T-Rex, changing history and evolution.

Now Back to the Future kinda went their own way with time travel. Not so much in the first one, that was pretty straight forward but in parts 2 and 3 they went haywire. If Marty and Jennifer were taken by Doc Brown, they wouldn't be in the future since they were taken away from the past. Also, if time was already written, like in Bill and Ted's, then wouldn't older Marty and older Jennifer remember the date that they went into the future?

Now Lost has joined the time travel game but i'm not quite sure what to make of it. First there was brain time travel. Which seems like it could really only work for backwards time travel. Then there was time travel by frozen wheel, where Ben turned the wheel to move the island and ended up about a year into the future (and on the other side of the Earth). Now there's time travel by flashing skylights, where the island's time line keeps changing and the people effected keep landing in different era's of the island's history.

Time travel does not exist and never will. If it did ever exist, then there would people from the future here studying us or sightseeing. I have my theories on who are time travellers though. Leonardo Di Vinci, Jules Verne, Steve Jobs... People with visions far beyond that of their time. What if you could go back and write books about everyday occurances and they became the biggest science fiction stories of all time? Or everything you created was years ahead of it's time?