The year is 2055. Time travel has
been invented, but the nature of this new advancement is used more for
entertainment purposes than everything; the wealthy use time travel to
transport themselves to the past and kill for sport. The game? Dinosaurs.
One man decides to go back and hunt
dinosaurs for the first time in his life. Before the group leaves, they discuss
how a fascist presidential candidate was defeated by a much better one, to
everyone’s relief.
As they begin the tour, the tour
guide reminds everyone to only kill the dinosaurs with the special tags, and to
stay on the path at all times. These precautions serve to minimize the changes
that the hunters will leave on their timeline. As Ray Bradbury explains it, a “small
thing [] could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes
and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across
Time,” creating an enormous impact from one small incident (Bradbury).
The man arrives in the Jurassic
time period. The T-Rex that they wish to kill has been observed by the tour
guide before – the death of the T-Rex is very close to when the hunters will
kill him, so the death will not largely impact their timeline. All the tagged
dinosaurs would’ve died within minutes without the hunters, so their death was
inevitable anyway.
The man hears the roar of the
T-Rex. Frightened, he accidentally steps off the path. Immediately, the tour
guide yells at him to get off, to return to the time machine.
The tour guide is very upset, and
barely lets the man return with them to the future. As they arrive in the lobby
of the time travel company, they notice that the air smells strange. The words
on the wall are slightly different. Quickly, they ask the receptionist who won
the election, to which he replies, “Deutscher of course!” who was the fascist
candidate. The man who stepped off the path looks down at his boot in horror.
Underneath his boot is a single butterfly. He hears the sound of thunder, then
dies as the tour guide shoots him.
Although the ending is rather
abrupt, Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder explores several ideas.
First of which, the chaos theory. A
study in initial events and how essential they are in dynamic systems, commonly
referred to as the butterfly effect. The butterfly on the bottom of the man’s
boot is Bradbury’s nod to this theory – that very simple events can have
profound and complex effects. The man steps on a butterfly and thousands of
years later, a dictator has won America’ presidential election and the English
language is forever changed.
Secondly, the danger associated
with time travel. The human immune system works in two ways: innate immunity –
general defenses that the body is born with, including inflammatory responses,
fever, and other symptoms of the common cold; adaptive immunity – a specific
kind of defense that responds to the pathogen that has made its way into an
individual’s system. Adaptive immunity is unique in the way that there are
first and secondary adaptive immunity responses. The first time a pathogen is
detected, the body produces cells specific to destroying that pathogen. However,
these cells will then proliferate into memory cells. The second time there is
an exposure, the body (specifically, the memory cells) elicit a secondary
immune response that is more rapid and more intense than the first immune
response. This is immunological memory.
The Greek historian Thucydides
observed that victims of the plague who had recovered could then tend to others
with the disease, “for the same man was never attacked twice” (MIT). In regards
to time travel, transporting to a different time period would expose the
traveler to numerous diseases that they had never been exposed to before.
Immunological memory serves as the cornerstone of the human immune system. Time
travelers’ immune systems would be responding with the slower, weaker immune
response to new pathogens. In her novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey
Niffenegger even portrays time travel as a disease itself.
And thirdly, the theory of the
multiverse. Originally conceived by the physicist Hugh Everett, the theory
suggests that there are an infinite number of universes, each one slightly
different from the next, resulting from the infinite possible ways a decision
or a choice can affect a timeline. Physicist David Deutsch wrote that “if time
travel to the past were indeed possible, the many worlds scenario would result
in a time traveler ending up in a different branch of history than the one he
departed from” (New Dawn). Does this mean that, in some alternate universe, the
man in A Sound of Thunder never stepped on the butterfly? And in another, he was
left behind in the Jurassic time period? Or another where he never went time
traveling in the first place.
Did the man return to a different
universe than the one he left? Or did his actions impact his timeline, the same
universe he left? Parallel universes open up thousands of possibilities,
side-stepping paradox limitations by allowing travelers to hop from universe to
alternate universe. However, the ideas are all hypothetical – the basis of all
these theories and stories stems from time travel, something we’ve yet to
discover.
Sources:
A Sound of Thunder, Ray Bradbury.
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