Was Gene Roddenberry a time traveller?

Something people don' tunderstand about Gene, and it's something I've come to realize working on the program. He was more about "How cool can you artists make things look and still make us money"

Time traveller, probably not, he had teams of writers and concept artist working around the clock to create for him, and he was a taskmaster as I understand it from some that have been around much longer than I. He did know how to captivate the audience, and he was an incredible salesperson, but he was hardly a visionary in the strictest sense of the world.

Gene was vocally very anti-communistic, however he patterned the Federation as a semi-Communist governmental body, he wrote that only when everything that we need to survive is controlled by the state, shall man be free to create and explore. Not what you would really expect.

There are a lot of contradictions in his spoken words and written words.. Of course none of this takes away form the respect and admiration I have for his creation, but sometimes, the creation outshines the man, or in this case the team of men (women) that worked upon it.

reply to post by iRoyalty


That is a Paradox. The man goes back to kill his grandfather as a child. Therefore the grandfather never grows up and marries, does not have a child. That child would be the man's parent. If the parent never exists, the time traveler can not go back and kill the child, his grandfather to be. The Butterfly Effect is the law of Unintended consequences; it is part Quantum Theory. The observer as initiator of an event can not know all the effects that event will cause or lead to. Does the Butterfly flapping its wings in Tokyo cause an air current, that morphs into a hurricane in the Central Atlantic?

But if he went back in time and did something as drastic as creating a series about technology in the future, thus sparking a demand for this technology sooner, how do we know the future would not change so he does not travel back in time?

A good point.

I would like to add, that what the OP suggests creates an 'impossible loop', just like the watch in the movie "Somewhere in Time". A cute, though syrapy and silly, and pretty ridiculous and predictable romance movie (aren't they all?), but the non-manufacturing of the watch makes it impossible for the watch to even exist. I mean, for something like a complicated watch to even exist, it would have to be painstakingly manufactured. It can't just exist. Someone has to make it.

The same way, if Roddenberry came from the future, where cell phones were inspired by his tales from the future, where did the cell phone idea come originally? No one created it, because Roddenberry learned it from the guy who created it because he was inspired by Roddenberry's visions of it, who only had those visions because in his reality, cell phones were created, because a guy was inspired by Roddenberry's visions of it..

It would be another impossible loop, just like the watch in 'Somewhere in Time'. It's one thing to make a sloppy script and not explain a phenomenon like that in a silly movie, but it's a completely different thing to have to accept that such a thing could 'just happen' in reality, without any explanations.

It's a lot like the japanese comedy movie about a time machine, that a scientist in in the future will build, because he saw the blueprints of the time machine that came from the future.. so where did the tech/blueprints/time machine originate from? It can't 'just exist', without someone ORIGINALLY getting the idea and working through it and creating it.

To clarify:

1) Time machine came from the future.
2) A scientist researched it and created blueprints for a time machine based on the actual time machine
3) In the future, the scientist manages to create the actual time machine, that goes into the past..
4) .. to inspire the scientist -> go to 1)

That is impossible, because for the time machine (a complicated machine) and its blueprints and plans for it to exist, someone would have to create it FIRST, and only then it could inspire SOMEONE ELSE. It can't exist because its existence inspires someone to create that very machine itself..

For this same reason, Roddenberry can't have come from the future to inspire the past to create the future he came from, because someone would have had to create the cell phone in the first place, before it can become something Roddenberry could use and bring past to inspire someone to create the cell phone..

Time travel is not impossible, but 'impossible loops' are. Which renders time travel very problematic, and time travel stories almost always very flawed in various ways (even the 'predestination paradox' has a major flaw in it; the information from the future would change the past! I mean, in "The Terminator (1984)", for example, why would Sarah just blindly OBEY Kyle Reese and call her son JOHN? Why wouldn't she at least have the human tendency to TEMPT THE FATE and see what happens? Does she have absolutely zero curiosity? Even if you think the whole reality would be destroyed, wouldn't you still want to see what happens? I mean, it's pretty impossible for a regular human being to believe that the whole fate of all existence could be suddenly on their tiny shoulders.. reality is vast and complex, and a human being is cosmically smaller than a grain of sand.

(I mean that the way human beings think of a grain of sand, cosmically thinking, human beings are even smaller than that size, by comparison to all other sizes)

And even if reality does get destroyed, so what? It hasn't been such a great reality anyway.. - another example is the short story "By his Bootstraps", where the protagonist gets a book from his future self, and then when he actually becomes that future self, COPIES the book to another book, BY HAND, and then hands THAT version to his younger self (this would already ALTER the sequence of events, because now it's no longer the same book! The writing would be different, and in any case, the atoms would be in different order. He would have HAD to have gotten that book from somewhere ELSE first for it to be possible), destroying the otherwise plausible and well-working paradox completely).

Time travel just requires a lot more thought than story-writing people are seemingly willing to give it. I think in higher planes, these things become different, and easier to understand. In the astral plane, for example, the concept of time is completely different from what we think of it here - we only see through a tiny slit, and we imagine time being a straight line, going forward at a certain, LOCKED PACE (which of course doesn't have to be - why would it? What sets the pace anyway, and what force locked it?). But in higher dimensions, time becomes more 'multidimensional' and 'all-encompassing' instead of just a separate, easily drawn, straight line.