Lvl 2 Expert
2020-08-18, 09:36 AM
Okay, before I say anything else, I'm going to spoil the hell out of the movie Time Trap here. If your hobbies include seeing budget sci-fi based on honestly kind of an interesting idea unspoiled, leave now. Yes, right now.
I'm going to be making fun of the concept behind this movie a few paragraphs from now not because this was a movie that demanded to be made fun of but because it's a concept with honestly some pretty wild implications that deserve to be thought through far enough to be lampooned.
I've recently seen this movie on Netflix. It's about some people finding a cave in which time runs slower than in the outside world. At first it looks like time passes at the pace of around one outside day per every inside second, but the big shock of the movie is that it's actually one outside year per inside second. Probably the first hint we get at this is that the first character we see going in sees a cowboy looking kind of dude with a revolver on his belt standing near the entrance. As the character pushes through the thick air that marks the start of the slow zone, the cowboy speeds up and walks off. Now why would a cowboy lost in a creepy time cave be there at that moment, being near the entrance just to walk off? The fridge logic here is that this guy entered the cave probably around 150 years ago or so. (For one, revolvers like several other mothern-ish gun technologies started becoming widespread around 1850. I could try to identify more details and look into which American state this plays out in and such but that's a close enough idea for me so I'm not going to.) So during the 150 years that passed on the outside of the cave, only 150 seconds, 2.5 minutes, passed inside. Not a weird amount of time to spend cautiously looking around after entering a weird cave with a strange thick layer of air in front of it. There are cavemen in the cave as well. Which makes sense given the amount of time dilation involved. They're not a population or a family who made it to the modern day by hiding out, they've literally only been there for a few hours. There has been quite a lot of scientific debate and all sorts of evidence in recent years that the America's may have been inhabited much earlier than previously assumed, but let's just say the writers played it a little bit on the safe side and imagined these cavemen being from 13,000 years ago, at the rate of 1 year per second that would have given them around 4 hours and 7 minutes inside. No matter when you're from, everyone enters the cave in sequential order, but still more or less at the same time.
Now there are some holes in this logic. Several characters entering the cave together for instance do not end up a year apart simply because one walked just a tad ahead of the rest. (Edit: wait, no, they'd end up on top of each other, you would end up years apart if you left together, but that's a thing that doesn't happen in the movie until the magic presumably synching thing happens.) And I don't really get how a large object like a human can step through a layer where time speeds up this much without either squashing together, tearing apart, coming out the other side like some sort of age-Frankenstein creation or [insert other horrible effect here]. Nor do I get what happens when it rains outside the cave. i would expect the place to be positively flooded. But mostly the film does an okay job of keeping the movie magic intact. Three people/groups entering the cave days apart from each other all use a different entrance, for reasons, so they wouldn't see each other frozen in the doorway.
Which brings me to the part I wanted to make fun of. At some point, inside the cave, they come across a second layer of time slowyness. There's a bunch of people hanging still, stuck in time, presumably taking another year to do what takes a second in the first layer of the cave. Some people are stuck at the border of the layer, having just run in. But there's also a battle going on, between cavemen and conquistadors. Apparently this time stuff is all a protection mechanism for the fountain of youth, which is hidden inside an unspecified number of layers of slow. Even though there is a fountain that heals all your wounds and brings people back from the death too (probably?) right there on level 1. And it's probably not as much of a protection mechanism as it is a way to not release the powers of the fountain until future people discover some sort of way to link the time cave up to their own speed, which must at least sort of have happened to explain the ending. It's... not the best thought out plot device in the film.
But wait a minute... These conquistador guys can't possibly have found the cave more than 500 years ago or so, which would have given them around 500 seconds or 8 minutes and 20 seconds inside layer one. Say they only took a single minute to run through the first layer as if they had a plan, that would have given them 7 minutes and 20 seconds of layer one time inside layer two. That's not enough time to do anything. The battle inside layer two looks like it has been going on for at least 30 seconds, if I'm being generous. This would mean that while that battle was raging in level 2 30 years must have passed on level 1. But even the cavemen have only been here for hours, not days, let alone years. 30 years of layer 1 time in fact comes down to around 946 million years of outside time. (I'm using years of 365*24*60*60 seconds here.) I really wanted to use the line "those should not be conquistadors, but dinosaurs" here, but the whole concept of a vertebrate is entirely too young to be stuck in that battle.
And that got me thinking. We don't know how many layers the cave has, but for a reasonable number of them, how much time would you need to get out with your eternal youth? Let's say each layer takes one minute to traverse, and another minute back, for two minutes in total. Getting to the end of layer one and back takes you 2 minutes of layer one time is 120 years of outside time. So it might be reasonable to expect people could in the past have made it to at least the level 1 healing water and back out again, long after anyone they knew died, but still inside of an era they sort of recognize. Traversing layer 2 would take 2 minutes of layer 2 time, being 120 years of layer one time, being 3.8 billion years of outside time. It would take you close to the current age of our planet or a substantial chunk of the amount of time the universe has existed to speedrun the second level of this cave.
And the characters imply that they have somehow figured out the rabbit hole goes deeper than that. Spending 2 minutes in a potential level 3 would take 119*1015 years. That's about 8.6 million times the estimated age of the universe. There's no way in the realms of reality or fiction that the cave is going to exist for that long, or the planet it is on for that matter.
This brings me to another funny one: these caves look old. We only get a glimpse of level 2, and I'm not spotting any stalagmites or stalactites in there (there are some pretty big waterfalls, so by my rain logic above level 3 is going to be an underwater level), but level 1 has some pretty decent drip stone columns of at least the size of a person. These things form quicker than many people assume, but they still only grow around 10cm for every thousand years that pass. Which makes a cave with person sized formations at least about 20,000 years old. Not very impressive for a normal geological formation, but 20,000 level 1 years works out to 630 billion (or milliard, whichever you prefer) outside years, just over 45 times the estimated age of the universe. Assuming the ratio between inside and outside time has been constant, that's a rough minimum for how old this cave is.
So yeah, that's what I wanted to make fun of. I mean the subplot about a handful of disappeared people being big deal legends in the far future is kind of far fetched, but the sheer scale of this concept left unexplored is kind of mind boggling, and it was probably left unexplored precisely because it broke all semblances of being relatable. It's a clever idea, and the parts that were visited properly were done pretty well, but the parts that were half-assed show us ones again that wow, sci-fi writers have no sense of scale.
I'm going to be making fun of the concept behind this movie a few paragraphs from now not because this was a movie that demanded to be made fun of but because it's a concept with honestly some pretty wild implications that deserve to be thought through far enough to be lampooned.
I've recently seen this movie on Netflix. It's about some people finding a cave in which time runs slower than in the outside world. At first it looks like time passes at the pace of around one outside day per every inside second, but the big shock of the movie is that it's actually one outside year per inside second. Probably the first hint we get at this is that the first character we see going in sees a cowboy looking kind of dude with a revolver on his belt standing near the entrance. As the character pushes through the thick air that marks the start of the slow zone, the cowboy speeds up and walks off. Now why would a cowboy lost in a creepy time cave be there at that moment, being near the entrance just to walk off? The fridge logic here is that this guy entered the cave probably around 150 years ago or so. (For one, revolvers like several other mothern-ish gun technologies started becoming widespread around 1850. I could try to identify more details and look into which American state this plays out in and such but that's a close enough idea for me so I'm not going to.) So during the 150 years that passed on the outside of the cave, only 150 seconds, 2.5 minutes, passed inside. Not a weird amount of time to spend cautiously looking around after entering a weird cave with a strange thick layer of air in front of it. There are cavemen in the cave as well. Which makes sense given the amount of time dilation involved. They're not a population or a family who made it to the modern day by hiding out, they've literally only been there for a few hours. There has been quite a lot of scientific debate and all sorts of evidence in recent years that the America's may have been inhabited much earlier than previously assumed, but let's just say the writers played it a little bit on the safe side and imagined these cavemen being from 13,000 years ago, at the rate of 1 year per second that would have given them around 4 hours and 7 minutes inside. No matter when you're from, everyone enters the cave in sequential order, but still more or less at the same time.
Now there are some holes in this logic. Several characters entering the cave together for instance do not end up a year apart simply because one walked just a tad ahead of the rest. (Edit: wait, no, they'd end up on top of each other, you would end up years apart if you left together, but that's a thing that doesn't happen in the movie until the magic presumably synching thing happens.) And I don't really get how a large object like a human can step through a layer where time speeds up this much without either squashing together, tearing apart, coming out the other side like some sort of age-Frankenstein creation or [insert other horrible effect here]. Nor do I get what happens when it rains outside the cave. i would expect the place to be positively flooded. But mostly the film does an okay job of keeping the movie magic intact. Three people/groups entering the cave days apart from each other all use a different entrance, for reasons, so they wouldn't see each other frozen in the doorway.
Which brings me to the part I wanted to make fun of. At some point, inside the cave, they come across a second layer of time slowyness. There's a bunch of people hanging still, stuck in time, presumably taking another year to do what takes a second in the first layer of the cave. Some people are stuck at the border of the layer, having just run in. But there's also a battle going on, between cavemen and conquistadors. Apparently this time stuff is all a protection mechanism for the fountain of youth, which is hidden inside an unspecified number of layers of slow. Even though there is a fountain that heals all your wounds and brings people back from the death too (probably?) right there on level 1. And it's probably not as much of a protection mechanism as it is a way to not release the powers of the fountain until future people discover some sort of way to link the time cave up to their own speed, which must at least sort of have happened to explain the ending. It's... not the best thought out plot device in the film.
But wait a minute... These conquistador guys can't possibly have found the cave more than 500 years ago or so, which would have given them around 500 seconds or 8 minutes and 20 seconds inside layer one. Say they only took a single minute to run through the first layer as if they had a plan, that would have given them 7 minutes and 20 seconds of layer one time inside layer two. That's not enough time to do anything. The battle inside layer two looks like it has been going on for at least 30 seconds, if I'm being generous. This would mean that while that battle was raging in level 2 30 years must have passed on level 1. But even the cavemen have only been here for hours, not days, let alone years. 30 years of layer 1 time in fact comes down to around 946 million years of outside time. (I'm using years of 365*24*60*60 seconds here.) I really wanted to use the line "those should not be conquistadors, but dinosaurs" here, but the whole concept of a vertebrate is entirely too young to be stuck in that battle.
And that got me thinking. We don't know how many layers the cave has, but for a reasonable number of them, how much time would you need to get out with your eternal youth? Let's say each layer takes one minute to traverse, and another minute back, for two minutes in total. Getting to the end of layer one and back takes you 2 minutes of layer one time is 120 years of outside time. So it might be reasonable to expect people could in the past have made it to at least the level 1 healing water and back out again, long after anyone they knew died, but still inside of an era they sort of recognize. Traversing layer 2 would take 2 minutes of layer 2 time, being 120 years of layer one time, being 3.8 billion years of outside time. It would take you close to the current age of our planet or a substantial chunk of the amount of time the universe has existed to speedrun the second level of this cave.
And the characters imply that they have somehow figured out the rabbit hole goes deeper than that. Spending 2 minutes in a potential level 3 would take 119*1015 years. That's about 8.6 million times the estimated age of the universe. There's no way in the realms of reality or fiction that the cave is going to exist for that long, or the planet it is on for that matter.
This brings me to another funny one: these caves look old. We only get a glimpse of level 2, and I'm not spotting any stalagmites or stalactites in there (there are some pretty big waterfalls, so by my rain logic above level 3 is going to be an underwater level), but level 1 has some pretty decent drip stone columns of at least the size of a person. These things form quicker than many people assume, but they still only grow around 10cm for every thousand years that pass. Which makes a cave with person sized formations at least about 20,000 years old. Not very impressive for a normal geological formation, but 20,000 level 1 years works out to 630 billion (or milliard, whichever you prefer) outside years, just over 45 times the estimated age of the universe. Assuming the ratio between inside and outside time has been constant, that's a rough minimum for how old this cave is.
So yeah, that's what I wanted to make fun of. I mean the subplot about a handful of disappeared people being big deal legends in the far future is kind of far fetched, but the sheer scale of this concept left unexplored is kind of mind boggling, and it was probably left unexplored precisely because it broke all semblances of being relatable. It's a clever idea, and the parts that were visited properly were done pretty well, but the parts that were half-assed show us ones again that wow, sci-fi writers have no sense of scale.