2011-09-25 - Temporal Paradox

So I watched a movie on TV yesterday. It seemed a fairly low budget movie but David Hewlett (McKay) was in it so I figured I’d watch it and see how it was. The movie was called Morlocks and as you might be able to guess it was a sort of retelling of “The Time Machine”. Instead of the original premise of a scientist building a time sled, it was the army and a scientist building a time portal thing. Now the CGI in the move was a bit off and some of the plot is rather dumb but overall it was a fairly alright movie. Now the reason I bring this up is because there was a paradox in the movie and paradoxes are fun.

In the movie, as in the original, the Morlocks are mutated human beings found in the future. They are described as being more primitive in some respects but stronger in other which leads the man in charge of the expedition to want to steal their DNA. You see his son has cancer and the doctors keep telling him there’s nothing that can be done so he figured if he injected his son with DNA from the future he could save him. The end of the movie hints that this did in fact happen and that injecting the kid with the DNA actually resulted in the Morlocks.

This is what’s known as a “Bootstrap paradox” because the Morlocks DNA is never actually created. The DNA comes from the Morlocks in the future which is then injected into the kid and ends up making the Morlocks of the future. It’s a closed loop with the effects being their own cause. The DNA has no origin, it never came from anywhere, and it just is because it was. I’ve always found things like that to be rather fascinating because the DNA is essentially trapped in a never ending cycle with itself.

I just thought it was interesting.