On Time Travel

Boredom can do wonderful and terrible things to the human mind. What has boredom done for you? Here's what it's done for me. Its made me think about a little thing called time travel. This is an enormously complicated subject, and people much smarter than me have thought about the same thing and come to many, many different conclusions (mostly that it can never happen). My thinking is along these lines: Wouldn't it be cool? I could see all sorts of things... Real knights in real armor, dinosaurs! Wait... What about... Here is the vision of time travel that I have come up with at this point. It will probably change as I think on the subject more, but for now this is what I have. Many of the questions posed here are ones that I've posed to myself, note how most of the answers are less than satisfactory.

WARNING: The following will not answer any questions. It may, in fact, make things less clear.

Imagine yourself in a world where time travel has been invented. It would is like living in a world where the airplane just came into existence. At first people are incredulous, everyone is asking for proof. Gradually that proof is given. The inventors, clearly geniuses of the highest caliber, bring back knick-knacks from the dawn of time. A living dinosaur, Abraham Lincoln's hat, other brick-a-brack. Once proof is given people start to speculate about what time travel can do for them (because, as we all know, the individual comes first), then slowly but surely they consider what it will do for the world at large. Can we travel to a better future or back to a better time in the past? Yes, of course, it's a time machine.

On the day of the first public demonstration no one works, everyone is riveted to their televisions waiting to see video of... What? Knights in armor? Cowboys? Kennedy's assassination from a different angle, showing once and for all who the killer was? What ever it is, the world holds it's breath. The machine never appears to leave, that's how precise it is, it leaves and comes back before we even know it's gone. The world is confused, that was so very anticlimactic. But no matter, let us see the video that's been brought back. Some people are ecstatic that they chose to show the building of the pyramids, others not so much, but everyone realizes that what they're seeing is real.

Sounds great, doesn't it? On the cusp of a new age of humanity, an age where time is elastic and you can relive any moment you wish. Boeing will probably make the first offer to buy the revolutionary technology, or maybe Microsoft will snap it up, or perhaps Google. There will surely be a bidding war that wil make the inventors of the miracle device the richest men on the planet. Even if the aforementioned geniuses don't sell, those companies will all surely find the technology in their hands by some means. As production begins the richest people on earth snap up the first models. Things go wrong, people die, it's all very high profile. All other news takes a back seat.

Scientists (and pseudo-scientists of course) all offer dumbed down explanations of the workings of the machine, but the one thing they make clear is that there will be no "Back to the Future" scenarios. We've ruled out a single timeline, they explain. Rather any change in past events spawns an entirely new timeline which then carries on with into an altered version of future. Thus would be time travelers can go back to their chosen moment, do what ever they wish, and return to the present with impunity. After all, no one will know what they did in that time, since traveling into alternate realities is not the function of the time machine. So we can go back three or four times to the tomb of King Tut, steal all his gold multiple times over and become rich! What a concept.

Almost before the concept of Temporal Immunity has been explained the human rights groups are all over it. How can people simply travel back in time and change everything. What if, because of the action of an indiscriminate traveler, World War Two dragged on for another ten years? What if the Cold War escalated into World War Three? These are extreme examples, but they could easily happen. Is it ethical to relegate humanity, even if it is the humanity of another timeline, to the horrors that would result? There need to be regulations in place to prevent such happenings.

But they don't understand, the scientists say in rebuttal. One cannot police time travel. If a regulatory body was established they would have to send a representative with ever single time traveler, just to be sure that no shenanigans ensued.

Then make it so! The detractors respond.

While that debate rages across civilization as a whole, other more thoughtful people begin to consider what time travel means for humanity as it stands at this moment. The first conclusion they come to is this: Time is now irrelevant. When you can relive a single moment in time over and over and over time means nothing. Holidays will never be celebrated again, birthdays are gone, the calendar, wall clocks, all meaningless. The only events that hold any meaning are life and death. It is a brave new world. An incomprehensible new world.

Some of those less inclined to think of the consequences, or profits, of time travel pose different questions. Can we go forward? The scientists take a break from their various defenses to give the answer: No. Of course not. If each new event creates a new timeline then trying to go into the future would be impossible. It would be like navigating a road that is continuously changing, or climbing a tree where branches randomly grow or fall away constantly. In other words, the intrepid time traveler who goes forward faces certain doom. In that case, the askers ask, how does the traveler who goes back in time get back to this one? The scientists hem and haw. They have no idea, of course.

Why doesn’t the machine effect our timeline, why create new timelines, those who long to change that single unfortunate moment in their lives ask? Simple, someone answers, if it did that you would have no idea. Perhaps there is a machine that does that and we don’t know it. Maybe your life already has been changed.

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Welcome back to the here-and-now.

There you have it, my vision of a future with time travel. I just reread it just now and realized that I traveled through time several time (past tense to present tense and back) but I fixed that, but that's beside the point. My point is... No, I don't really have one, I just thought that maybe others would enjoy these thought provoking suppositions.