Editing 1716: Time Travel Thesis

Cueball, however, continues to ask her if she knows basic facts about time travel (like {{w|closed timelike curves}}, {{w|wormholes}} and {{w|exotic matter}}), like he is investigating if he has discovered facets about it that she would have overlooked while writing a thesis about it. Megan keeps trying to say that since she wrote a '''Time Travel Thesis''', (hence the title of the comic), she already knows all of this and much, much more, and she is obviously getting frustrated by Cueball's attempts to impress her with his "knowledge".

The reason she arrives is only to tell her younger self that this conversation with Cueball doesn't go anywhere and isn't important, and so present-Megan can leave and not waste her time anymore. Up till then, Megan was presumably reluctant to break off a conversation on the topic of time travel, since the conversation could potentially have improved, or perhaps because he at least had read about time travel which is a subject she would have a clear interest in since she wrote a thesis on it. But once the conversation began to run off track, it came as a relief to know that she could quit without the risk of missing out on anything important. Also, since Megan took the effort to time travel back to this exact moment, that must mean the conversation was so boring and uneventful she kept regretting having this conversation even far into the future to the point where she remembers it as one of the moments that need to be changed with her acquired time travel abilities.

In either case, future-Megan finished this conversation before inventing time travel, and thus knows this conversation's outcome. So by coming back, she now changes her own (and Cueball's) future. Of course the general implications of being able to travel like this are enormous, and the paradoxes arising from such a possibility are endless, the most pressing (at the moment) being the {{w|Grandfather paradox|grandfather paradox}}, where a time traveler creates circumstances that negate their existence (such as killing their own grandfather), in this case, Older Megan going back in time to stop Younger Megan from finishing this conversation, who will eventually become Older Megan but with no reason to go back to tell Younger Megan to stop this boring conversation. It is worth noting, however, that the comic does not inherently cause a paradox: so long as the Megan who ''didn't'' finish the conversation stills travels back in time with the ''knowledge'' that the conversation needed to be stopped and still saves her younger self from wasting her time, a time loop can be logically sustained. (It is also worth noting that a [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XayNKY944lY&ab_channel=minutephysics "Mobius" time loop] is also perfectly possible, the grandfather paradox isn't a paradox if quantum entanglement is taken into account - something Megan would no doubt know)

In the title text present-Megan asks future-Megan about her futuristic googles and what they are for, presumably assuming they are needed for the time travel (maybe it is the backpack?). People from the future wearing weird clothing, often involving {{w|tvtropes|GogglesDoSomethingUnusual|eyewear of some sort}}, is a common trope in Science-Fiction. Movies like ''{{w|Back to the Future Part II}}'' (which tried to predict the fashion of 2015 back in 1989) didn't get it right, so this might be a commentary on those movies. However it turns out it's just some old and broken {{w|Google Glass}}. The only reason future Megan wears these is that she attended a party at the club that had a 2010s' night theme, possibly one at which similar futuristic gear is worn by other xkcd characters in the future, in [[318: Nostalgia]].

 

This is an indication of how far from the future she has traveled, as Google Glass was first released in the 2010s. It is not clear whether she is wearing Google Glass because it became popular in the 2010s or because it was an esoteric piece of hardware that people would readily associate with the 2010s. Consider that it is the 2020s, and we celebrate '90s and '00s parties. So it is safe to assume that Megan is at least from the 2030s. Also people attending retro dress-up parties frequently make mistakes and do not dress up exactly in-style, creating some anachronisms, especially if they dress up like they did many years ago.