The 5 o’clock club is published from time to time during the season, and aims to provide a forum for reader-driven discussion at a time of day when there isn’t much NFL news being published. Feel free to introduce topics that interest you in the comments below.
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The Terminator and the multiverse theory
I’m going to assume, after 42 years and at least 5 Hollywood movies in the franchise, that most people are familiar with the basic plot of The Terminator and that I’m not spoiling anything for
anyone by revealing that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “character” is a time-traveling cyborg that returns from the future to kill Sarah Conner before she gives birth to her son, John Conner.
The reason is that John Conner will grow up to be the leader of the Resistance in a post-apocalyptic world where Artificial Intelligence has undertaken the extermination of humans. That AI system (Skynet) has identified that with John Conner leading the fight, the humans have already won the future war, but that if he were never to have been born, the humans would instead, lose the fight for survival.
If you and your mom were planning to celebrate Mother’s Day by watching Terminator together for the first time in your lives this afternoon, I’m sorry to spoil it for you.
Even if you have never seen seen the Terminator movie (or set of movies), similar themes have been explored in Back to the Future (3 films), Star Trek (every TV series in the franchise, and 2 or 3 films), and Men in Black 3, among countless other movies, series, comic books and novels. In fact, as a wee lad in Norfolk Virginia in the 1960s, I had a Superman comic book (sorry…graphic novel) in which he flew around the world — backwards — at more than the speed of light in order to travel back in time and prevent the death of Lois Lane.
What I’m saying is that the multiverse, for all its complexity in the real-world fields of quantum mechanics, cosmology, and theoretical physics, is well understood as a general concept thanks to its use as a plot device in popular fiction for at least 6 decades.
It turns out that Jerry Jones has tinkered with the multiverse
Eh…not really, but work with me here.
Let’s assume that Jerry Jones, owner of the Cowboys (and here, you should feel comfortable substituting John Mara of the Giants or any other human on Earth that makes sense to you), has invested heavily into a company that has suddenly and unexpectedly told him that he is now the proud owner of an AI-powered time machine of limited power and range. Jerry (or Mara, or whoever) has the opportunity to go back a limited amount of time and within a limited geographical distance of the machine itself to change the course of human history without anyone else knowing that the timeline has been tinkered with.
In our fiction, we don’t want to kill or injure anyone, so what will happen as the result of our imaginary time travel is that when we all wake up on Monday, May 11th with a post-Mother’s Day hangover, the world will be exactly the same in all respects except that ONE player from the current Commanders roster will suddenly be on the Baltimore Ravens roster instead. Jones (or Mara, or whoever) has tinkered with the timeline in an effort to critically weaken the Washington Commanders in the same way that Skynet sought to weaken the humans by eliminating John Conner.
As it happens, in our fictional world, only 6 Washington players are within range of the machine at the time that Jerruh (or Mara, or whoever) gets to use it, and Jayden Daniels isn’t one of them. Those 6 players are:
- Laremy Tunsil
- Sonny Styles
- Chig Okonkwo
- Odafe Oweh
- Terry McLaurin
- Trey Amos
If you were Jerry Jones (or John Mara, or whoever) and had to pick one of these guys to ‘magically’, through the power of time travel and the multiverse, become a Raven for the sole purpose of weakening the Commanders roster (à la the critical loss of John Conner in the war against Skynet), which single player would you choose on the basis that it would have the most crippling effect on the Washington Commanders? Why would you choose that player?
Feel free to consider an alternate timeline in which Commanders’ owner Josh Harris has used his venture capital company to make the investment, and it is Josh Harris who now has the ability to use the time travel technology to steal one and only one player from one other NFL team to add to the current Commanders roster. If you were Josh Harris, which NFL player would you ‘steal’ for the Commanders roster? Why would you choose that player?
