Skip to main content

Cosmic Theories about the TIME QUAKE

How did this happen? Will it happen again?

Published onApr 17, 2022
Cosmic Theories about the TIME QUAKE
·

What happened… one more time.

What we know is that around Noon UTC on September 2, 2019 the planet Earth jumped back in time to around 9 a.m., UTC August 19, 1967. This time leap included the planet and also the solar system and beyond. All orbiting and exploratory human-made space vehicles, satellites, landers, space stations, even the Pioneer and Voyager spacecrafts disappeared. So, we do not know the full spatial extent of this event. Since time simply returned to a prior state, the only traces of this event happening are the intact memories for this time interval belonging to individuals living on September 2, 2019 and born before August 19, 1967.

There is no good science to explain this time reversal. All we have are conjectures and disputable (or non-falsifiable) theories about this. It does seem to disprove the notion that time and entropy are rigidly connected and cannot be reversed. It suggests that memories, and probably thoughts too exist as quanta.

Here are some of the current theories attempting to explain the time reversal. Please feel free to add your own.

time comet

The Time Comet theory

The first announcement of this theory posited that something like a “time comet” has passed through our solar system on its way to other parts of the galaxy. This event reset the time continuum back approximately fifty-two Earth years; like rewinding the tape on a time recorder. In current, 1967 speak, it’s like the time phonograph needle got picked up and moved to an earlier song. One minute we are listening to Hiatus Kaiyote, the next, we are back to “A Winter Shade of Pale.” People call this a “time quake.”

For some unknown reason, individuals still alive at the end of this period maintain an active memory of their former lives when the reset occurred. I would venture this means that consciousness—that hard question we never answered—exists independent of time. We do not know if long-living, non-human species, such as elephants, whales, turtles, parrots, sponges, etc., have individuals who also remember the lost fifty-two year interval.

We do not know how big this event is. Perhaps it encompasses our whole galaxy, suggesting some undiscovered time/gravity well that is both stable and, so far, undetectable until it happens; maybe time is a form of gravity, combined with a spooky temporal quantum phenomenon. Which is another way of saying we don’t know shit.

Some speculate that the time comet has rolled through our solar system before, around about five-thousand years ago. This event fostered the advent of the bronze age and also the invention of writing systems in various parts of the planet, and provided the logic for the Mayan calendar, which measures time in units of fifty-two years. Some say it started the Kali Yuga (you can look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls, because Wikipedia is decades away). Certainly, there has been no previous time comet after the advent of writing systems, or we would know all about it. Some say the last time comet is when writing systems developed. I guess people had something to write about.

Star Trek watchers are soothed by the dozens of time-regression episode plots that are supported by this theory. If Kirk can travel from the Twenty-Third Century to 1968, why can’t we all skip back a few decades? Given our lack of understanding about how the universe operates at this level, this theory is highly theoretical. Still, this is the theory supported by Occam’s razor. It’s the least-complicated explanation. You can stop reading now… or…

The Metaverse theory

There’s a corollary to the time comet concept that claims the event pushed us into a parallel metaverse that happened to lag ours by fifty-two years. Dozens of corollary theories emerged from this thread. Mainly, they appeal to those who returned to a time before they became parents, and it offers hope that their children are alive in a different metaverse. Physicists keep this theory in their back pocket; it’s too close to their multidimensional models of the cosmos, but too ambiguous to actively support. Metaverse explanations are facile, philosophically loaded, and unfalsifiable. College dorms on winter nights ring with its possibilities. This is the theory supported by Occam’s bong.

The AI Simulation theory

This is another unfalsifiable theory stream. Here it goes. The perfect simulation in which we are all sprites has a control program that tracks the trajectory of the simulation’s progress toward some super-duper future state. When this trajectory points to either near-term breakdown, or prolonged stasis—when the perfect simulation hits a point where its perfection is uncertain—the control program reverts to an earlier moment in the simulation, while allowing the sprites to maintain their active memory of their future state. This makes them super-actors, with an ability to either push stasis into dynamic change, or redirect the activities that led to the breakdown into another course where breakdown will not happen. This is the theory supported by Occam’s Uncle Morty.

A less exciting version of this posits that God did this for his own reasons. Don’t ask, they say, he won’t tell us. This version requires Occam’s Kazoo.

The godlike alien intervention theory

This is a grand “Groundhog’s Day”style theory, with an alien twist. Something you might hear in a Century City elevator on the way up to film producer’s office suite.

An alien race with enormous power and wisdom has been watching Earth, waiting for humans to get up to speed in their intellectual evolution so that humans could join the sentient, star-traveling, galactic club of kindred species. But then this alien species learns that Earth will be destroyed—solar storm, giant asteroid, whatever—some time in the next decade. They decide to put the solar system into a time loop to allow humans to grow our culture, society, and technology up to the point where humans can perfect our own star travel and leave the planet behind, just in time.

That means this current loop is just the first of many loops, each one starting on Labor Day (in the US) in 2019. Because only those who live long enough to stay in the loop will get regenerated to 1967, this first loop should concentrate on planet-wide health and fitness, and on the end of all wars and violent social conflicts. Longevity research will help olders stay alive extra decades.

This theory has generated enough popular speculation to become a force for moral behavior in the new now. If you’re going to venture into the dark side this time around, you will be punished in the next loop. In its own twisted way, this theory is helping to open up a civil society that is far more, well, civil, than it was in the future/past.

The telos of this is clear. Humanity can use hundreds of time loops to learn and build a regenerative culture and the technology that will carry us to the stars, so that we will avoid the destruction of our home world. This theory is verifiable to some extent; all you need to do is stay alive until the next Labor Day, 2019 and see if you wake up again in 1967. This is the theory supported by Occam’s agent at William Morris.

Default solipsist theory

This type of theory is always available to explain anything weird. I put it here to get it off the table. This theory holds that I am the only reality and I spin up the universe as I please. All of you are vomited from my consciousness. For some reason I pleased to vault back into my teens. It’s all me, all the time.

I would hope that, were this true, I’d be having a lot more fun right now. Smartass junior high students would be TicToking this in 2019. This is the theory that kicks Occam under the bus.


ADD YOUR THEORIES HERE:

Comments
0
comment
No comments here
Why not start the discussion?