Avengers Endgame (Contains ALL THE SPOILERS)

[MGuy]

I'm assuming that bringing their ship was an act of reverse engineering whatever pim particles past nebula collected from future nebula and along with the tech to shrink his ship. I'm pretty sure that you can travel back and forth from both ends since Stark and Cap go further back in time and have to get more pim science juice to go back into the future.

Additionally I think all the alternative events, Loki teleporting and Thanos coming to the future, and whatever else may have happened is supposed to have been negated by Cap when he goes back in time. The movie straight up says that you can erase alternate lines of you place things back and I would assume future cap is just assumed to have reversed everything. Returns the hammer, replaces the pim juice, etc, effectively going through the motions to erase whatever time travel footprints were left behind. The only problematic thing I see with this is the Nebula network thing, since I don't know how you could cleanly erase that and him actually staying behind in the past. I'd guess that there is some threshold of allowable alterations you can make before spawning a different timeline fully and Cap somehow skirted this in some way.

Maybe the explanations will be in some deleted scenes or director's commentary.

[Prak]

And maybe the Russos just suck out loud when they're not writing political thrillers about a kinda super dude and Marvel shoulda found someone else to take over after shitcanning Joss Wanker.

[Josh_Kablack]

Putting any individual race onto a path to sustainability is in no way impacted by large scale mass murders. Halving the population can be undone by simple family reproduction in two generations. Over the long run, the Thanos snap wouldn't even be noticeable - since all of the people in question would be dead anyway in a hundred years.

The bigger issue is returning the dusted billions to life after five years of having an economy and infrastructure running at half of that.

[Mord]

Wait, Whedon was fired? I thought he quit after Avengers 2 because he was tired and had enough dump trucks full of money (not that this prevented him from accepting more dump trucks full of money from Warner to reshoot Justice League).

[Josh_Kablack]

But my biggest question is what easter egg the phone number leads to. The sign on the impound where Ant-Man's van is has a non-555 number on it, but it wasn't on screen long enough for me to write or memorize.

[Username17]

Wait, Whedon was fired? I thought he quit after Avengers 2 because he was tired and had enough dump trucks full of money (not that this prevented him from accepting more dump trucks full of money from Warner to reshoot Justice League).

He got outed in a sexual harassment scandal where it turns out that he was "casting couching" a bunch of the starlets from Buffy and Dollhouse. He was quietly shuffled off of major projects as multi-billion dollar franchises decided he was too radioactive to risk continued association with.

-Username17

[Dogbert]

Am I imagining a paradox that doesn't exist? Did anyone else have a problem with that?

If we viewed it from a quantum mechanics' perspective, from the moment past Thanos travels to our present the whole thing became an alternate timeline (i.e spawned a parallel universe).

"Paradoxes" aren't these "universe destroying things," a paradox is a paradox because it just can't happen. There are three theories about travelling to the past, and they all have one thing in common: You can't change the past.

Let's say time is a pool table and pocketing a ball sends it back to the past, and back to the table. Once back at the table, the ball can do anything -except- preventing its past self from entering the pocket. If you travel to the past to kill baby Hitler one of three things will happen:

1) You'll fail, plain and simple (probably you yourself ended up causing the holocaust with your efforts). Because the universe says fuck you.
2) You "succeed"... but that wasn't the real Hitler, or perhaps the Hitler we knew all along wasn't the "real" Hitler... because time has a way of self-correcting.
3) You "succeed"... except you'll never see those changes in your timeline, because the moment you killed him you spawned a new parallel universe (or "alternate timeline" in marvel-speak), and the changes happened specifically there, your base timeline remains unchanged (remember the whole Cell thing in DB-Z?).

This is the real paradox here: If you travel to the past to kill baby Hitler and succeed, then Hitler never caused the holocaust. If he never caused the holocaust, then you never had a need to travel back to the past to kill him... and thus you never traveled back in time, and thus Hitler caused the holocaust.

Having said this, comics have always ignored quantum mechanics, they're worth jack shit there, so whatever the writer says, goes.

[Dogbert]

Additionally I think all the alternative events, Loki teleporting and Thanos coming to the future, and whatever else may have happened is supposed to have been negated by Cap when he goes back in time.

I'm sure we'll get a passable explanation on what happened with Loki and how he lost the tesseract in the upcoming Netflix series.

[SlyJohnny]

This is the real paradox here: If you travel to the past to kill baby Hitler and succeed, then Hitler never caused the holocaust. If he never caused the holocaust, then you never had a need to travel back to the past to kill him... and thus you never traveled back in time, and thus Hitler caused the holocaust.

They explicitly had a conversation about the possibility of killing baby Thanos, and established that it wouldn't work because it would just create an alternate timeline, and that the only way to keep a single timeline AND bring everyone back is using the infinity stones. This was later amended to "we can do this using Infinity Stones we've retrieved from the past", with the caveat of "but we have to put them back afterwards, otherwise we still end up with multiple crap timelines".

[Username17]

"Paradoxes" aren't these "universe destroying things," a paradox is a paradox because it just can't happen. There are three theories about travelling to the past, and they all have one thing in common: You can't change the past.

That's not remotely true. It's entirely possible that the past can be changed and has been/will be changed all the time. There'd be no way to know unless you could somehow set up an observation from outside time.

In any case, one of the core assumptions that people tend to make is that memories correspond to past events. And there's no particular reason to believe that's true. If you go back in time, your memories are just chemicals and electrical impulses no different from those of anyone else. Sure, they probably mostly approximate the past that created you, but while you're in the past they are just physical properties of the present at that point. When you go back to the future your memories would still be properties of the present at that point, but they'd correspond to a past that no longer ever existed. Depending on how much has changed, there may be no place at all for you in your original time, but the changes will certainly have happened. Cause and effect don't stop working normally once time starts flowing in the normal direction.

The real issue is how quickly changes in the past propagate to the future. Because if they happen quickly enough, a slightly different "you" will travel back to the past that you're in while you're still there and that will repeat like a gajillion times and the Earth will explode because of all the mass sucked in from potential futures to a very mass-overloaded present. If they propagate at like one year per year or something, then any act of time travel that obviates its own motivation or prevents the traveler from ever being born would create only the single time refugee.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

Wait, Whedon was fired? I thought he quit after Avengers 2 because he was tired and had enough dump trucks full of money (not that this prevented him from accepting more dump trucks full of money from Warner to reshoot Justice League).

He got outed in a sexual harassment scandal where it turns out that he was "casting couching" a bunch of the starlets from Buffy and Dollhouse. He was quietly shuffled off of major projects as multi-billion dollar franchises decided he was too radioactive to risk continued association with.

-Username17

My understanding that Joss's scandal wasn't casting couch, just massive infidelity. Cheating on his wife with a lot of women, ranging from cowokers to fans. And then, after their divorce, his ex-wife wrote a piece for her perspective, including choice quotes from his explanatory letter.

https://www.thewrap.com/joss-whedon-fem ... cole-says/

Not Me Too bad, but still pretty sleazy.

[Prak]

Wait, Whedon was fired? I thought he quit after Avengers 2 because he was tired and had enough dump trucks full of money (not that this prevented him from accepting more dump trucks full of money from Warner to reshoot Justice League).

He got outed in a sexual harassment scandal where it turns out that he was "casting couching" a bunch of the starlets from Buffy and Dollhouse. He was quietly shuffled off of major projects as multi-billion dollar franchises decided he was too radioactive to risk continued association with.

-Username17

My understanding that Joss's scandal wasn't casting couch, just massive infidelity. Cheating on his wife with a lot of women, ranging from cowokers to fans. And then, after their divorce, his ex-wife wrote a piece for her perspective, including choice quotes from his explanatory letter.

https://www.thewrap.com/joss-whedon-fem ... cole-says/

Not Me Too bad, but still pretty sleazy.

I think I'm conflating Whedon and Louis CK a bit, so my bad. But, Whedon was definitely being a shitheel.

[Dogbert]

That's not remotely true. It's entirely possible that the past can be changed and has been/will be changed all the time.

Really? Tell me how. I listen. I mean, it's been about five years since I last read on the subject, so it's entirely possible what I knew may be obsolete by now. So please, enlighten me.

[Dogbert]

"we can do this using Infinity Stones we've retrieved from the past", with the caveat of "but we have to put them back afterwards, otherwise we still end up with multiple crap timelines".

Exactly, they pulled a variant of the Stein's Gate gambit, they both "changed and not changed things." They messed around with things in a way that what people saw happening in the past did not change. I did approve of that.

[Username17]

That's not remotely true. It's entirely possible that the past can be changed and has been/will be changed all the time.

Really? Tell me how. I listen. I mean, it's been about five years since I last read on the subject, so it's entirely possible what I knew may be obsolete by now. So please, enlighten me.

The idea that information cannot be sent backwards in time is an assumption, not a proved fact. Many of the bits of kludge math and "made up shit" in physics theories are there to bolster the idea that our timeline is in some meaningful way persistent - that we aren't already being copied over by an unending feedback loop of changes to the past overwriting our present and creating new futures which then change our past in different ways.

There's no reason to believe we aren't living in that kind of interference pattern - our entire timeline being just an iteration that has no more or different lasting significance than a splash in a pond. People just really really don't want to believe that. Everyone wants to be in timeline prime or some shit, but it remains frustratingly possible that you simply are living in a time shadow and that if you were able to step out of time and observe you'd see a radically different timeline devouring ours from behind at precisely the rate our own timeline is moving forward.

As to interacting with things in the past, we do it all the time. When things move at different speeds, they experience time at different rates. Anyone who just flies around in an airplane for a while will experience a minuscule but measurable amount less time than people on the ground. When you meet your friend at the airport, you are meeting their "past self." But nothing special happens when that happens. Their present and your present interact in a frustratingly straightforward fashion, and your interactions affect their future which is your present in precisely the same way as if you had had synchronized clocks the entire time.

-Username17

[maglag]

The idea that information cannot be sent backwards in time is an assumption, not a proved fact. Many of the bits of kludge math and "made up shit" in physics theories are there to bolster the idea that our timeline is in some meaningful way persistent - that we aren't already being copied over by an unending feedback loop of changes to the past overwriting our present and creating new futures which then change our past in different ways.

Related, all the fancy tech in Marvelverse able to travel and communicate between planets faster than light can already time travel thanks to the laws of casuality.

Basically relativity claims that light speed is the top speed, the faster you go the slower time goes for you and if you reach light speed then you won't even notice time traveling... And if you input a speed higher than light in the relevant physics equations, then the output is negative time.

Considering how everybody in Avengers is casually traveling between planets in a matter of hours if that, then there was zero need for any fancy pym-based new time machine. They could've traveled back in time just fine with just one of those FTL ships.

As to interacting with things in the past, we do it all the time. When things move at different speeds, they experience time at different rates. Anyone who just flies around in an airplane for a while will experience a minuscule but measurable amount less time than people on the ground. When you meet your friend at the airport, you are meeting their "past self." But nothing special happens when that happens. Their present and your present interact in a frustratingly straightforward fashion, and your interactions affect their future which is your present in precisely the same way as if you had had synchronized clocks the entire time.

Those are not really different pasts, just different timeframes, and there's always a "lag" of at least light speed at how fast you can send information to each other so you can't really use it to warn somebody about their own future nor change your own future-unless you somehow got FTL.

[rasmuswagner]

The idea that information cannot be sent backwards in time is an assumption, not a proved fact. Many of the bits of kludge math and "made up shit" in physics theories are there to bolster the idea that our timeline is in some meaningful way persistent - that we aren't already being copied over by an unending feedback loop of changes to the past overwriting our present and creating new futures which then change our past in different ways.

Related, all the fancy tech in Marvelverse able to travel and communicate between planets faster than light can already time travel thanks to the laws of casuality.

Basically relativity claims that light speed is the top speed, the faster you go the slower time goes for you and if you reach light speed then you won't even notice time traveling... And if you input a speed higher than light in the relevant physics equations, then the output is negative time.

Considering how everybody in Avengers is casually traveling between planets in a matter of hours if that, then there was zero need for any fancy pym-based new time machine. They could've traveled back in time just fine with just one of those FTL ships.

Relativity is obviously not true in the Marvel universe. Or most universes that deal with space travel at all.

[maglag]

The idea that information cannot be sent backwards in time is an assumption, not a proved fact. Many of the bits of kludge math and "made up shit" in physics theories are there to bolster the idea that our timeline is in some meaningful way persistent - that we aren't already being copied over by an unending feedback loop of changes to the past overwriting our present and creating new futures which then change our past in different ways.

Related, all the fancy tech in Marvelverse able to travel and communicate between planets faster than light can already time travel thanks to the laws of casuality.

Basically relativity claims that light speed is the top speed, the faster you go the slower time goes for you and if you reach light speed then you won't even notice time traveling... And if you input a speed higher than light in the relevant physics equations, then the output is negative time.

Considering how everybody in Avengers is casually traveling between planets in a matter of hours if that, then there was zero need for any fancy pym-based new time machine. They could've traveled back in time just fine with just one of those FTL ships.

Relativity is obviously not true in the Marvel universe. Or most universes that deal with space travel at all.

Heh, Gunbuster actually did a nice effort in enforcing relativity with pilots returning to find everybody else on Earth significantly older than themselves after each mission.

For everything else, once you throw relativity out the window, then all bets are off about anything physics and it's actually pure fantasy. Relativity is kinda necessary to explain a lot of stuff about how our universe works, so an universe whitout relativity should look like something completely alien to us.

Although hey, magic does exist in Marvelverse, plus the plot is finding the magic infinity stones, which just makes it extra weird that the heroes pretend 'physics' work. It's all magic by any other name basically.

[schpeelah]

So the thing about changing history is that you need an extra dimension of time - you have history as it was [before] you changed it, and history [after] you changed it, and these [before] and [after] necessarily refer to a dimension that is orthogonal to regular time and functions analogously to time as we experience it.

And when you look at modern physics involving spacetime, mostly relativity but also quantum, they just don't include that, and thus describe time in ways consistent with stable-loops-only time travel - sure you can trace a closed timelike curve and follow it to the past, but at the end of the day the universe is still a static unchanging 4D object. You can always step back and put all the events on one graph with no contradictions about what occurs at a given point of spacetime, no need for versioning your timeline.

[deaddmwalking]

It's not clear that 'faster than light' travel means moving faster than light. It's pretty clear that there are 'jump points' that they navigate to. If they're wormholes, they connect two points of space in a shorter distance than normal travel.

There were definitely scenes in Ragnarok and Captain Marvel and Guardians of the Galaxy that involved that.

[Shrapnel]

Since when has comic book physics EVER made any lick of sense?

Plus, in Marvel (as a whole) time travel has almost always worked off the "travel in time, changes make a new universe" model. It's simply a way that "second rate writers scientists" get out of dealing with the full implications of time travel physics.

But since discussing how real comic book physics are is extraordinary dull, let's talk about, instead, how Adam Warlock was not in the movie and this was a great thing? Because fuck Adam Warlock. Fuck him HARD with an overuse of emphasis tags. Or that Teraxia the Terrible was NOT in the movie, which makes me sad?

And about how awesome the "all the female characters join Captain Marvel to kick some FUCKING ASS" scene was? Or how it's frankly amazing that they were able to get so many of the actors from past Marvel movies for even just small cameos? And how the movie fucking killed it with the "Hydra Cap" reference, which in turn was a cool nod to the "Cap's in an elevator and kicks all the ass" scene from Winter Soldier? Or how I cried during Tony's death scene because I'm a big huge softie? And how balls-to-the-wall fan-fucking-tastic it is that Thor joined the Guardians of the Galaxy, which was something that Darth and I had figured might happen?

Even better, let's start trying to guess who will be the next Big Bad in the MCU? My guess is either Thunderwing, Darth Traya, Darkseid, or Circuit Breaker.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Of the Phase 4 projects that have been announced so far, all are sequels and spinoffs, except for The Eternals. This suggests to me that the next big event will be the Nth Host of Celestials coming to Earth, and the big bad will be Arishem the Judge.

[maglag]

Sooooo, will the Avengers remember they now have time traveling magic to take care of all their future, present and past problems, or will they conveniently never talk about it again?

[Prak]

I mean, they couldn't even manage to figure out a way to get everyone back with literal reality warping powers in their hands, so...

[maglag]

They could just grab a Black Widow from another timeline, they did just that with Gamorra.

Meanwhile Captain Hydra even used time travel magic to get his second chance of marrying and living with his original love crush from the past. If even Captain Hydra can fall to the temptation of using time travel magic for personal pleasure, anybody can.