Time portal

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Time portals are often employed in various fictional genres, such as Sci-Fi and Fantasy. They can be represented as vortices of energy, which allow matter to travel from one point in time to another by passing through the portal, or may appears as an ordinary doorway.

[edit] Time portals in films

In most films, time portals are used to take a group of people or a single person back in time. The most popular of all time travels would be travelling back to the time of the dinosaurs. In some films time portals can also be set as a hazard, for example, they can go faulty and begin to go crazy which makes them accidentally transport something or someone from a different time to the present; again the most popular is a dinosaur being accidentally brought into the present world.

[edit] Time portals in television

In the TV series Mirror, Mirror and its sequel Mirror, Mirror II, the story revolves around an old mirror. At the beginning of the story it is discovered that the mirror can be used to travel back into the past, 1919 and 1867 respectively.

In the documentary Prehistoric Park in which Nigel Marven activates a time portal to travel to different times of the mesozoic era to rescue rare and common species of dinosaurs.

In The Girl from Tomorrow Part II: Tomorrow's End, a time portal called The Time Gate is used by a terrorist from the year 2500 to take water from 1990 to his own time.

The Science fiction series Torchwood centres most on the effects of a rift in both time and space, through which humans, aliens, and devices emerge.

In the science fiction series Primeval, a group of scientists investigate time anomalies, through which creatures travel: see List of creatures in the Primeval series.

[edit] Time portals in computer games

Time portals are a fairly common sight in computer games, most notably the "Timesplitters" series, which involves characters utilising time portals to move through time, and is intrinsic to the plotlines in the second and third installments of the series, where a character called Sergeant Cortez moves through time to complete his objective using these portals.

Time portals are also the original mode of time travel in the SNES game Chrono Trigger. There are quite a few of them found throughout the game and seem to be activated by the use of a "key" made by Lucca. The original one found in the game actually occurs due to an accident occurring at the beginning of the game involving Marle's pendent and a teleporting experiment.

Most time portals are generated via a hand held item such as a watch, or a glove. However, some time portals are such things as mirrors, or other items such as a portkey in the Harry Potter series. Literal portals, which are not items that you would use on a day to day basis, are also common.