Terminator: Salvation
Finally saw it last night.
Meh. I was less-than-impressed. By a lot.
I’d also like someone(s) who has seen it to explain something to me. It’s not really spoilery, since it’s kinda the theme of all of the movies:
Is there a legitimate time-travel-theory explanation for how John Connor could have existed to send Kyle Reese back to impregnate his mother? I think of time linearly (failure of imagination, I know) so I conceptualize it such that the first time history played through, John wouldn’t have existed, because he didn’t exist in the future to send Kyle back. And since he didn’t come to exist, he wouldn’t have been able to send Kyle back, so he never would have existed.
So. If this makes sense in time-travel theory, someone explain it, because I don’t have enough nerd cred to get it.
If it doesn’t make sense, then I guess I just suck at suspension of disbelief.
Oh, and two more questions/annoyances that are spoilery:
- If they’d figured out a signal that would deactivate machines, why the hell weren’t they playing that thing everywhere they went?
- When they destroyed Skynet HQ at the end, if that was an actual nuclear explosion, wouldn’t there have been an associated EMP that would have killed their chopper?
Oh, and it also took me until 2010 to realize John Connor = J.C. Gee, can you think of any other savior-types with those initials?
The pseudo-philosophical debates re: Time Travel are never ending. Larry Niven says time travel=fantasy, so the rules are whatever the author says they are. Grandfather paradox? No grandfather paradox? New timeline? Dealer’s choice.
EMP depends on more factors than “just” a nuke–and a sufficiently powerful conventional explosive will produce a “mushroom cloud.”
They definitely said there was nuclear material involved in the final blast, though it went like this:
John Connor: “It’s fuel cells for the T-800s. Nuclear. Enough to level this whole place.”
Because nuclear material is automatically explosive, and all?
It’s a weird way to talk about it, but yeah–any form of energy storage can be measured in terms of how much you can blow up with it if all that energy was used for a violent, uncontrolled explosion. The fat in the average human body can probably blow up a small car, for instance, in terms of pure energy storage.
You know how gasoline and other petroleum products are explosive? Petroleum is an oil, chemically similar to fat. The only reason animals aren’t heavily explosive is because we’re mostly water. The human body is essentially 150-300 pounds of extremely soggy explosives, chemically speaking.
For similar reasons, it’s very difficult to invent high capacity laptop batteries because of the engineering challenge involved in stopping them from bursting into flames.
And you don’t need a nuke to make EMP right?
Nukes are the easiest and most proven way to make a big EMP, but there are, theoretically, other ways.
“Is there a legitimate time-travel-theory explanation for how John Connor could have existed to send Kyle Reese back to impregnate his mother?”
That’s a predestination paradox. While it seems odd, it makes perfect logical sense. There wasn’t any “original” timeline where John Conner existed without Reese’s trip back into time, just the one that has the loop in it. That’s the entire point of time travel–events in the future cause events in the past. It seems weird because your notions of causation are tied into your notions of time.
There’s a Heinlein story about a guy who is both of his own parents, incidentally.
Which Heinlein story? I know Lazarus Long has sex with himself, and his mom, but he wasn’t his own parent, right?
“—All You Zombies—”
spoilers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E2%80%94All_You_Zombies%E2%80%94
Mr. Drang is quite correct. One has to “work at it” to get a strong EMP pulse. The real danger of EMP is out of atmosphere, where it can handily destroy satellites which are not hardened.
And, EMP does not require a nuclear detonation. There are other albeit smaller ways to generate EMP pulses.
I guess you covered it. Can you expand at all?
Here’s another brain bender for you – John Connor lead the resistance, right? How did he get his training? From his mother. Who was nothing but a waitress until a Terminator was sent back in time to kill her. After that, she learned how to be a soldier.
Therefor, the Machines *created* John Connor.
Had they never sent back a Terminator, Sarah Connor would have never a) met Kyle Reese and b) would have never become militant.
Time travel is FUN!
I may be wrong (I often am), but aren’t nuclear EMPs caused when a nuke goes off above/ at the very edge of the atmosphere and not necessarily everytime a nuke goes off? As I said, I’m not sure about that one.
EMP is not produced by nuclear blasts lower than about 20 km. This is because the pulse is created by the interaction between high energy photons (gamma rays) and the earth’s magnetic field. At low altitudes these gamma rays are absorbed by the atmosphere.
This makes since, because Enola Gay and Bock’s Car were not downed in Japan in 1945.
See http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/emp.htm.
http://io9.com/5191092/10-different-timelines-from-the-terminator-universe
A write up of the 10 time lines in the Terminator world.
Robb. You make a most excellent point!
If I were to write a sequel to the Terminator series, I’d write about how the machines figured that little nugget out and were actively trying to work around it with each successive time travel hosing things up even more. It’d be interesting to see a Terminator come back and have to work with humans to ‘prevent’ something, only to be discovered at the end it’s really to ensure that time travel never gets invented and thus, ensuring the machines’ domination.
“New this season, From Robb Allen, it’s Terminator: The Series! Watch as the Machines create a new time line every week!”
Here’s a post I did on the subject of Coronal Mass Ejections–Sol’s Own Electro Magnetic Pulse– and sequel, of sorts, I did on EMP.
Drang, I couldn’t do that because of fear of litigation from the last Star Trek movie ;)
Philip – The US has already deployed non nuclear explosive flux compression EMP bombs.