The Last Mimzy part 1:  time travel for kids

Time travel being a staple of science fiction, and science fiction so often connected to either space opera (Star Wars, Star Trek) or thrillers (Terminator, Alien), it is rare to find a time travel story that's geared for a younger audience--but not unknown.  Flight of the Navigator was such a film, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; and more recently John Cross, who did the temporal anomalies analysis of The Final Countdown, called our attention to a new one, The Last Mimzy, a "family film" in which the children are the heroes and the time traveler is a very cuddly stuffed rabbit whose microcircuitry gives it abilities far more remarkable than merely making unintelligible speech-like sounds.

We are eventually told by the precocious preschooler that the people in the future are dying.  The not-at-all subtly laced undercurrent message of the film is that our disregard for the environment is damaging our own genetic code, with the result that our descendants will die if they cannot get a dose of pure human DNA from someone in the past; but they cannot travel to the past themselves, because time travel would kill them.  Thus they have created "many" of these "Mimzys", and sent them to the past to attempt both to gather a bit of pure DNA and to teach someone how to return the package to the future.  It is unclear whether a "Mimzy" is the entire package sent to the past which exhibits technologies which fit Clarke's Law (that they are so advanced they are indistinguishable from magic) or whether it is only the stuffed rabbit who apparently gives itself that name when talking to the girl, Emma.  If it is the former, we might conclude that the package creates its toys in such forms as will relate to those who find it; however, the latter is a more credible position, that the core of the package is the stuffed rabbit, designed to engage a child and collect his or her DNA for transport to the future.  The rest of the package is the instructional materials and tools for building a single-use bridge to the future by which the Mimzy can return.

At first glance, the notion that this is to be accomplished by sending objects designed to appeal to children might seem incongruous with the objective.  Would it not make sense for those in the future to send something to the past that would contact an intelligent adult and explain the need and how it must be met?  However, it is fairly well established that our genes tend to deteriorate as we age.  Thus if there is a pure sample of human DNA available it is more likely to come from a child than an adult.  Further, if it were explained to an adult that this package contains the tools necessary to send an object through time, it would be far more likely that that adult would attempt to understand the concepts and principles and work toward the construction of a time machine or other temporal device for his own use than that he would trust the guidance of the message from the future and send the needed sample.  Such tampering with the past might be considerably more severe, as any discoveries gleaned from the study of those objects would advance not only science but psionics significantly, drastically altering the future from which those objects came, and thus altering the objects themselves.  The appeal to children is thus a defensible decision, even though it, too, includes risks--risks which will be considered in this short series.

From a temporal analysis perspective, the film is quite frustrating.  The most challenging problem is what it does not tell us.  It tells us that this was the last of many sent to the past, and it strongly suggests that one was found by Alice Liddel, who inspired the Lewis Carroll Alice stories, and much more weakly suggests that another wound up in Tibet, inspiring "mandalas" found in ancient artwork that were said to have mystical significance.  How many more are lost is not clear, but they, too, have their place in the story.  What we know poses problems so great that the probability of the future arriving as it should becomes nearly negligible--yet nothing in the story makes the outcome completely impossible, only incredibly improbable.  If each trip to the past creates a new history, then it will be necessary to weave those histories together to get a complete picture.

We begin next time with the weaving, discovering the problems and looking for solutions.