Message from the future

other than being rather poorly written and sounding contrived as hell, i think the circularity is a nice touch. however, they slip up here: surely the authors must realize that they DID try to avert the disaster, and failed. you cannot change the past: something either happened or it did not happen.also, 12 monkeys was a good movie.This message has been edited by arachnophilia, 09-30-2005 05:10 AM

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yes, i did. fixed now... it's 5 am and i'm on little sleep. and i tend to leave endings off words or omit short words when i'm tired. (or screw up gender in hebrew class...) because logically they can't or didn't. if they did, the disaster would have been averted, and there would be no prompting for them to send us back technology. this is logically impossible, of course. the only possibility is that they did not, for whatever reason. cause some internet goon wrote it, obviously. maybe they were manipulating the information in his brain. i don't see a problem. i don't understand the nature of this question. what do you mean "start?" there's no "first draft" of history somewhere. we get the message, die, get found by alien who send the message. circular causality is perfectly logical. well, evidently we're not going to. but even still, the virus is not effected by the message (unless i missed something). so either we get the message, save 11 people, who send a message that's forwarded (backwarded?) to the past, and then we all die; or we don't get the message and all die.either way, the end result is the same. the message hasn't actually done anything but cause itself. well, no, not again. like i said, there's no first draft. it's going to happen, period. because it did happen, period.

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what do you mean? it begins when we recieve the message, and ends when we send it. you're getting caught up in the idea that effect has to come after cause, which of course isn't a factor since we're dealing with time travel. tautologically. it's outside the cycle. time travel, it's included in the premise. but i still don't see why the virus would be effected let alone caused by the message.

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why are there multiple versions of a single instant in time? it happens once, and once only.i tell you, bad scifi movies have caused all kinds of confusion, with first drafts of the past. first it happens one way, then we go back and change it, then the future's different. but it CAN'T happen that way. the past comes before the future, so if it happened in the past, it effects the future. there's no "null state" where the "change" had not happened, because there cannot be change. it either happens, or does not.

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smartass. i think you wrote it!

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i figured you did. you didn't seem happy when i said it was poorly written that and you seemed to know something we don't -- i saw no indication it was causing much of anything.

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all in good fun. i find it best not to take myself TOO seriously -- i write rather poorly myself, and i'm well aware of that fact. i'm particularly bad with typing the words in the head my accurately. i tend to leave things out.but i wasn't trying to be mean -- had no idea you wrote it. sorry.

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that's my problem. i never proofread. it doesn't help much when i do, either. because i just hear what i wanted to say instead of what i actually wrote. i'd have to wait a little while, and then come back to it.

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i read it in my head, yes, but the process is comparable to hearing for me. if i read it aloud it wouldn't make much difference, i'd still say what i thought i wrote instead of what i actually wrote. goes through the same mental pathways. i only catch differences after some time of doing something else.when i write essays for school, i usually take a "conclusion break." i got my friends at college hooked on it too. write the whole essay (usually at once, but those 15 pagers tend to take a while), and then take a 15 minute break before writing the conclusion. the idea is to completely get your mind off the project. watch tv, do laundry, listen to music, whatever. then you come back to the essay with a clear head. you proof-read the whole thing, and then come at the conclusion with fresh ideas.seems to work pretty well. keeps you from repeating yourself, and lets you tie things together from the perspective of a reader.i also like to get other people to proof-read. usually i get my lit-major friend (or my mother, who's really good with grammar) to check it over.

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