Superman:Time travel

[Soubhagya]

Superman used to time travel. He still does now but apparently needs Flash's treadmill to fine tune it.

My questions are regarding the 'physics' of his time travel. Was it a random power back then or was it the relativity thing where faster then light travel somehow makes one a time traveller. Was it explained? Speed may explain moving forward in time. But how on earth can one go back in time by speed? Perception of time slows down for the faster then light time traveller. So the only possible diirection is forward.

Next question is about the effects of time travel. I think it applies to the whole DC universe as well. Was it even explained how time travel is strange in that by doing so you essentially change something which shouldn't have happened.

And are there any fun stories with Superman's time travel? The obvious answers must be LoSH.

And finally do you want Superman's time travelling powers used more often? I find it quite incredible that you don't even need a time machine when you are Superman. Not only space but even time can be one's playground.

[Yoda]

Time and Time Again is one of my favorites. It's from the early triangle era. He doesn't time travel under his own power but it's a fun bouncing around time story. The Legion and the Time Masters factor into it.

[Kuwagaton]

The post crisis Time and Time Again was fun. So was the pre crisis story of the same name, written by Marv Wolfman. In that period (late 70s early 80s) things were still pretty fantastic, but there was a little more writing to the feats. There they explain ed that going counter clockwise to the rotation of the earth beyond lightspeed is how he does it. Wrong, sure, but that's just how it was.

Around that same time there was a story dealing with his responsibility as a time traveler, the lead story of Superman #372. Superman has a ton of time travel stories but I guess a lot of these stories are hard to track down.

But "Autograph, Please!" From Superman #48 and "The Impossible Mission!" From Superboy #85 are two of the most significant and easiest to find

[Jon Clark]

Superman used to time travel. He still does now but apparently needs Flash's treadmill to fine tune it.

My questions are regarding the 'physics' of his time travel. Was it a random power back then or was it the relativity thing where faster then light travel somehow makes one a time traveller. Was it explained? Speed may explain moving forward in time. But how on earth can one go back in time by speed? Perception of time slows down for the faster then light time traveller. So the only possible diirection is forward.

Next question is about the effects of time travel. I think it applies to the whole DC universe as well. Was it even explained how time travel is strange in that by doing so you essentially change something which shouldn't have happened.

And are there any fun stories with Superman's time travel? The obvious answers must be LoSH.

And finally do you want Superman's time travelling powers used more often? I find it quite incredible that you don't even need a time machine when you are Superman. Not only space but even time can be one's playground.

Pre-Crisis Superman's ability to travel in time was connected to moving faster than light. It was never gone into with much depth as he used the same ability (moving FTL) for going forward or backward in time and for travelling interstellar distances. There must have been some special procedures he used to determine whether he just wanted to travel a distance or through time but as I said it was never spelled out.

I may be wrong but I think the theory of relativity has it that time slows as you approach the speed of light and supposedly actually stops if you actually move at the speed of light. If I have that right the logical idea is that if approaching it is slowing and reaching it is stopping then exceeding would be going in reverse. But since I'm no physicist and far as I know nothing has ever been proved to exceed the speed of light it's all based on theoretical layman's understanding.

The Superman books largely held that two rules applied to going backward in time.
1) If you already physically existed at a given point in time you couldn't physically enter that time again. So Superman couldn't (in the comics) go back and prevent Lois dying in that earthquake since there was already a version of him somewhere else on Earth during her death.
2)History was a constant and the universe did real weird **** to keep it that way. So if you went back to Lincoln's assassination you either were unable to prevent it due to a string of improbabl events or worse yet whatever action you took actually made it more likely he was assassinated.

Going forward in time was a bit more interesting because nothing there was set in stone. Superman could travel a few decades forward and meet his kid with Lois one issue and travel to the same year the next issue to find he never had kids with Lois. Of course that was dependent on Superman not getting Lois pregnant between issues, since once it was established in the "present" that something occurred it was now irrevocably part of the future. This was why Superboy could visit the Legion in the 30th century, but Superman or the Flash could still visit a 30th century where no Legion existed.

Some fun Superman time travel stories were a few returns to Krypton.

The first was the Golden Age tale where Superman first discovered his origin by travelling faster than light and following the path of the first piece of kryptonite back to it's creation. This was one of those since baby Kal-El existed physically adult Superman was non-corporeal and could observe the events leading up to the planet's death.

A later tale had Superman "accidentally" breaking the time barrier and winding up on Krypton just prior to his birth/conception. He hung out with Jor-El and Lara (without telling them who he really was) and fell for the Marilyn Munroe of Krypton before circumstances resulted in his getting back to the "present".

One of his earliest time travel stories had Superman going through history getting autographs from historical figures to help some kid win an autograph contest. Others had Superboy meeting Samson and Goliath (both having secret IDs in their own times), Krypto starting the Great Chicago Fire, Superboy creating self-fulfilling time loops by investigating historical evidence of earlier Superboys (who turned out to be him).

The Lincoln assassination story was used as Superboy learning that history couldn't be changed. Young Clark went back trying to prevent the assassination only to encounter adult Lex Luthor who was hiding from adult Superman by travelling to the past. Lex assumed Superboy was there to capture him and inadvertently battled Superboy long enough that the assassination occurred. Apparently Lex had no idea that the date he chose to hide on was Lincoln's assassination. And since Superboy was present physically he could never return to that date a second time to get another chance at stopping the assassination.

The stories were fun, but I'm not sure if their wacky logic would work today.

[Kuwagaton]

It used to be that Superman hitting the right speed would be all that was needed bring him into the ethereal space outside time where he could go where he wanted. Anything else was just thinking about it too hard. He broke the time barrier is all. I think readers would be able to take it if the stories weren't always trying to be so serious. I mean like 99% of the DBZ cast is named directly after food and that's hotter than ever.

One cool thing is seeing the evolution of Superman's light speed. He could get up to light speed in movement at first, then he would start using the momentum of flying in an arcane pattern to have the speed take him through time (the first story had him go backwards in time) and for the most part he began just hitting faster than light flight instantly. When he reached light speed in post crisis it was the same as those earlier years.

[Soubhagya]

Thanks!

That was all i needed. So its FTL travel. If you think deeply some elements barely make sense. But its solid enough. They really put much thought into it. There can't be two Supermen at the same time. Past is fixed but future is not. When you think about it, this is quite solid.

I have heard about Lyla Lerrol. But i didn't know that she was Marilyn Monroe of Krypton. That's quite a compliment.

[Jon Clark]

Thanks!

That was all i needed. So its FTL travel. If you think deeply some elements barely make sense. But its solid enough. They really put much thought into it. There can't be two Supermen at the same time. Past is fixed but future is not. When you think about it, this is quite solid.

I have heard about Lyla Lerrol. But i didn't know that she was Marilyn Monroe of Krypton. That's quite a compliment.

If you look at the art from the issue, It's pretty apparent Wayne Boring was drawing Marilyn's face

[Jim Kelly]

When Superman first started time travelling in the late 1940s, it requred him to twist his body the right way to get through the time barrier. Later on in the early 1980s, Elliot Maggin had him do the same sort of thing.

For most of the pre-Crisis period, we saw Superman flying through rings of time with dates. This was just a visual way of showing the power, but if he was just going super-fast, he wouldn't have control over where he ended up. Let's suppose he has to approach the speed of light to travel through time and when he does that all of time-space is laid out before him and he sees where to go and pushes his body through select holes in the continuum.

Something I like about the pre-Crisis time travel is that he becomes a phantom when he time travels within his own lifetime. This is pretty cool--like Scrooge travelling through time and witnessing his life but not being visible to anyone.

[babyblob]

I agree with the posts above. Time and time again was a great read. It was the first Superman story that I read. I found the trade at a used book store and picked it up for two bucks.

[Vakanai]

I think time travel works best if you don't explain it too much, like the flux capacitor. Currently there is no law of physics that says you can't travel back in time, but most mainstream scientists believe it to be impossible. I'd love to see some modern writers take a stab at it more often. The show Krypton is handling the time travel in an interesting way, with Zod preventing Brainiac from bottling Kandor. Kind of a missed opportunity so far not having Clark visit his grandfather's adventures in that show.

[Jim Kelly]

Well, personally, I don't think that time travel into the past exists.

If we eventually are able to travel great distances in space, there will be forward travel through time based on relativity. We are all travelling forward in time at the same rate now, so relativity predicts that there will be different rates of forward travel if we can travel at velocities approaching the speed of light.

But obviously, travel into the past hasn't happened because no one has appeared from any future to say so. I know there are lots of silly videos on youtube about time travellers, but they're clearly hoaxes. Once time travel was invented, the accumulated number of travellers would just grow to such a degree that we couldn't help but notice them in our history.

However, I love time travel stories. It's a great wish fulfillment. And the fact that the 1986 reboot took it away from Superman is one of the biggest indications of what spoil sports those creators were. "Oh you like this bit? You think it's fun? Well, we can't have that then. Superman can't be fun, he can't satisfy your wishes. He has to be as boring as possible."

[Vakanai]

Well, personally, I don't think that time travel into the past exists.

If we eventually are able to travel great distances in space, there will be forward travel through time based on relativity. We are all travelling forward in time at the same rate now, so relativity predicts that there will be different rates of forward travel if we can travel at velocities approaching the speed of light.

But obviously, travel into the past hasn't happened because no one has appeared from any future to say so. I know there are lots of silly videos on youtube about time travellers, but they're clearly hoaxes. Once time travel was invented, the accumulated number of travellers would just grow to such a degree that we couldn't help but notice them in our history.

However, I love time travel stories. It's a great wish fulfillment. And the fact that the 1986 reboot took it away from Superman is one of the biggest indications of what spoil sports those creators were. "Oh you like this bit? You think it's fun? Well, we can't have that then. Superman can't be fun, he can't satisfy your wishes. He has to be as boring as possible."

Playing devil's advocate here, but you're failing to take in the possibility that we're all living in a multiverse. Basically, in that case any time someone goes back and changes history, they're essentially creating a new universe with a new timeline. Doesn't mean time travelers aren't messing with time all willy nilly right now in some version of reality. We'll just never know because we're stuck in an unaltered timeline. You can change the past, just sadly never our version of it, because everything you do creates a different reality.

Plus even if time travel into the past was possible, to assume it would be so easy that many people from the future are engaging in it could be a stretch. How many human beings have actually set foot on the moon? Imagine time travel is so costly that only a handful of people in the future are ever chosen for a mission, can we really say that the presence of a few time displaced individuals across all of history will be noticed by us? Never mind that any power great enough to develop a time machine might place restrictions and limits on the use of it. There's a difference between time travel backwards in time is possible but hard to do and strictly regulated, to time travel is possibly and wildly done. There are possible scenarios of time travel we wouldn't notice, especially if the people using it are responsible scientists out not to change time drastically but discretely observe it. Besides, there's plenty of things in history we haven't been able to properly explain (feats of engineering we can't replicate with laser precision tools, yet we're told ancient people did with stone tools for example) Why do you think ancient astronaut theory is gaining so much traction with certain segments of the populace? There are things in history we largely can't explain with any acceptable current theory of the past that aliens or time travelers could explain (not saying that either of those are explanations for such things, just pointing out there are mysteries that could easily advocate thinking of such possibilities).

Not saying time travel into the past is possible mind you, just playing devil's advocate that there's plenty of reasons to not make a blanket assumption on the possibility one way or another. Without an actual scientific law saying it is indeed impossible, one shouldn't rule out the possibility. I mean we should be skeptical, but informed skepticism is different from blind disbelief.

[Jim Kelly]

Yes, I've thought that maybe it's possible when you travel back in time you end up creating an alternate timeline. So I'm saying for us on Earth as human beings in this timeline, I don't think it will happen. But outside of that, I could believe it's possible. In fact, there are things that do travel back in time--theoretically in particle physics, it does happen. But it's a bit like travelling at the speed of light--things do travel at those speeds, but traveling at that speed would kill a human being, so it doesn't seem physically possible for human beings to do it and live.

PRIMER is probably the best movie at establishing a credible time travel scenario, but it shows how the complexities of time travel ultimately destroy anyone who figures out how to do it. So I think that even if someone figures out how to do it, there must be a catch that prevents anyone from using it in an effective way to influence the past.

[Vakanai]

Yes, I've thought that maybe it's possible when you travel back in time you end up creating an alternate timeline. So I'm saying for us on Earth as human beings in this timeline, I don't think it will happen. But outside of that, I could believe it's possible. In fact, there are things that do travel back in time--theoretically in particle physics, it does happen. But it's a bit like travelling at the speed of light--things do travel at those speeds, but traveling at that speed would kill a human being, so it doesn't seem physically possible for human beings to do it and live.

PRIMER is probably the best movie at establishing a credible time travel scenario, but it shows how the complexities of time travel ultimately destroy anyone who figures out how to do it. So I think that even if someone figures out how to do it, there must be a catch that prevents anyone from using it in an effective way to influence the past.

But without any scientific evidence for there being a "catch" to keep humans from influencing the past, why assume such a catch would exist? And if particles can do it, then time travel does exist in principle - whether humans can survive it who knows, but at least the particles prove there's no fundamental rule against. This is why I love time travel stories, of all science fiction tropes it "feels" the most doable because there's nothing in science to really say otherwise. With a lot of the space travel fiction, to cover vast distances quickly, there's a lot of fubbing around with physics to get faster than light, but with time travel there's currently nothing to fub, because we don't know. Makes a sort of great opportunity to imagine what it could be like since you don't have to worry about running afoul of known science as much. I don't know, at least for me.

Doesn't hurt that I also hope time travel exists just because it'd help mankind's future expansion in space - many of the technologies we would need to cross galaxies (and not have to wait millions of years at the woefully slow speeds below light) are things that also theoretically could function as time machines, such as wormholes (and I think warp drives too maybe? Can't remember).

[Soubhagya]

When Superman first started time travelling in the late 1940s, it requred him to twist his body the right way to get through the time barrier. Later on in the early 1980s, Elliot Maggin had him do the same sort of thing.

For most of the pre-Crisis period, we saw Superman flying through rings of time with dates. This was just a visual way of showing the power, but if he was just going super-fast, he wouldn't have control over where he ended up. Let's suppose he has to approach the speed of light to travel through time and when he does that all of time-space is laid out before him and he sees where to go and pushes his body through select holes in the continuum.

Something I like about the pre-Crisis time travel is that he becomes a phantom when he time travels within his own lifetime. This is pretty cool--like Scrooge travelling through time and witnessing his life but not being visible to anyone.

Thanks for the reply. So, that's something beautiful to add. You can go back to a time when you existed but in a phantom like form.

So, they almost confirmed that Superman dies sometime later. That's nice. My feelings of an almost immortal Superman is mixed. In right hands it can be a gripping tale. But most people do things with it which i don't like. The legend of Superman becomes a far better option then.