Two really nerdy things (that I love)

Time travel paradoxes

I can remember being ten years old and THRILLED with the very concept of time travel.

At the time I had no knowledge of the series I would come to love, Doctor Who, but I was in love with the idea of time travel anyway.

 

I would always imagine me and friends time-traveling to various eras, some in the future, some in the past. Sometimes, it would even be either myself or my friends who helped discover how to travel through time, dreams that weren’t helped by my love of science fiction.

 

When I got older, and got interested in more complex sci-fi, I started to learn more about time travel paradoxes, and just like when I was a kid, I’m still thrilled. I love reading about examples of said paradoxes in fiction, thinking about ways that could avert them, etc.

 

Morphic resonance

This one’s a little more recent, and by that, I mean within the last few days. I just finished re-reading the amazing comic book series known as ‘Y! The Last Man’, but this time, I decided to pull up a little research.

 

In the series, all of the male mammals on the earth die simultaneously, with no direct reason given in the series. One of the themes in the second half of the series is ‘morphic resonance’, mentioned first in a flashback scene and later as a possible cause for the “gendercide”.

 

What it boils down to is the theory that there is a field within and around every living thing that organizes it’s characteristics and patterns of activity. Morphic resonance is sort of a feedback between these morphic units, and a great example is given in the comic series – an experiment in which animals on one island were taught something, and once they’d had it down to the point of perfection, it was found that animals of the same species on another island had developed the same skill without having been taught by an external source.

 

That’s probably inaccurate to the way the story is told in the comic, but hey, shit happens. I’m not perfect. The point is that the idea of beings and things being able to be connected and develop in that sort of manner is really interesting. If correct, it’s a form of adaptive evolution, and fun stuff aside. :)