How do terminators time travel

That's just branching because the universe is becoming more and more complicated and varied over time. You could add to that the idea of time travel, where you're going back into the past, but the place you're going back to isn't the place you came from because the world has split into a different timeline. That sounds like it would give the Terminator films a lot of flexibility. Do they stay consistent enough for the multiple-timelines explanation? The weirdness in the Terminator films is that it sort of goes beyond that, with people passing back and forth between timelines, not just creating more every time somebody goes back.

Time travel in the Terminator films is all back in time, never forward. Is there a scientific basis for that? Might we be able to go forward someday? It's easy to go forward in time. I went forward in time yesterday by 24 hours, and here I am.

It took me 24 hours to do it, and I'm gonna do it again in 24 hours. We're always going forward in time, and it seems to be a one-way street. The English language isn't really up to the task of talking about this.

We say we move "forward in time," but it's not the same kind of movement we talk about when we're talking about moving through space. So you just stay on course, but faster to go into the future. How would terminators get to the past, though? If you ask, "If you did go to the past, what would the rules be?

We can guess. Yes, please guess. The scientific question is, "Can the shape of the universe be distorted so much that you and I can locally, in our neighborhood of space, be moving forward in time just like we always do, but that forward motion in time twists around so much that we end up coming back to a point before we left?

There's no part in physics that says I can just disappear and reappear somewhere else. There's nothing even remotely respectable about that. Would it look like what we see in the Terminator movies? If you want to be physically reasonable, one of the very first things you should object to in movies like The Terminator is if you could travel backwards in time, it wouldn't be that you disappear, and then reappear in the past. Why is that a problem? Einstein taught us that time and space are both part of one four-dimensional thing called spacetime.

So in general relativity, which is Einstein's theory of spacetime, if you want to go backwards in time, you just move through spacetime in a particularly curvy way, so that your path takes you to a point before you left. But there's no part in physics that says I can just disappear and reappear somewhere else. What should traveling into the past look like using a closed timelike curve?

You'd have to hop in a spaceship and fly around for several years until you finally got back to the year or whatever. It's a lot less visual, and it gets in the way of the story you're trying to tell. That stuff doesn't bother me. That's just violating the laws of physics. The humanity comes from how, inside these causality loops, there is no more free will.

We just play out a future that is already written. But somewhere in the years between The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day , Cameron changed his mind about time travel. With this new freedom, T2 taps into a many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, where actions in the past create various futures. In one world, Judgment Day goes off without a hitch. In another, it never arrives.

Throughout Judgment Day , the most compelling characters, especially Sarah Connor, fight against the idea of a predetermined future. Viewed 6k times. The most upvoted answer states: The point is that time travel movies, by their very nature, have plot holes like this related to time-travel paradoxes. Improve this question. Community Bot 1. Related: Nude time travel in Terminator Universe. By the by, if you include the comics, the Robocop vs.

Terminator comic also includes the idea that time changes in waves slower than the speed of light, giving the computers a chance to adjust their tactics as they perceive changes happening further away. Very well, thank you! Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. I was having a conversation about this today, how cool is that? Improve this answer. Sophy Swicz Sophy Swicz 3 3 bronze badges. Dronz Dronz 4, 21 21 silver badges 36 36 bronze badges. Here is how the time-travel works: Whenever someone goes back in time, they go to a copy of the original timeline.

John Connor John Connor 70 5 5 bronze badges. This isn't the case in Genisys, either. Valorum Elaborate. What is not the case in Genisys? In Genisys we see that there's a single timestream that can be altered, Butterfly Effect-style. Though I kinda get what you mean. I want to preface by saying that movies are art and meant to be interpreted by the individual, so you can interpret anything anyway you like I won't say 'you're wrong'.

I will explain how I see it and why I see it that way. So, you're referring to Kyle's visions of different timelines while in the 'nexus point'. I just see this as how time-travel kinda works in that you can glimpse and FEEL yourself through time.

It falls apart, though, in Dark Fate , where the events of Judgement Day mean Skynet was never created and thus a new AI, called Legion, pops up in its place.

This is a huge no-no. When he got out of bed and survived the crash, he created a tangent universe that he then corrects through his actions in the movie. None if this explains Frank, the dude in the freaky bunny costume. If you try to apply it to Avengers: Endgame For as long as there have been Terminator films there has been this idea that an all-powerful artificial intelligence decided the best way to stop their own demise is to send a Terminator back in time to kill the person who is trying to overthrow them.