Time Travel

I just finished Ronald Mallett's book Time Traveler, which explains how, theoretically, we will one day be able to transport matter into the past...go back in time. When I say I just finished, I actually mean will finish July 20th 2019. But, I is actually my 41-year-old self which is someone entirely different from my young and stupid 31-year-old self. We both now exist in this causal plane, although he/me doesn't know I'm here. Anyway, I figured now would be a good time to zip back 10 years and write a quick post about the future before I continue my tour through history...

I became interested in time travel when I realized that it happens all the time. Scientists call time travel into the future "time dilation," and it happens whenever things move really fast. Sergei Avdeyev, for example, after zipping around the earth 11,968 times on the Mir space station is 1/50th of a second younger than he would have been had he stayed on earth. This is because things slow down as we approach the speed of light, even a tiny fraction of the speed of light. This has practical consequences, like clocks on satellites run more slowly, requiring its operators to compensate for the difference. If GPS satellites didn't take this relativistic effect into account we would all be careening off cliffs and driving into farmers markets and such.

Anyway, it's moving into the past that is difficult, which makes sense, as this is the thing that most of us really want to do. Mallett discovered that, since light can 'drag' spacetime, you can circulate a laser beam to create a vortex which can allow a pathway through time. Now, this pathway was only big enough to allow a neutron through. But, once he turned it on, he immediately started receiving all these neutrons from the future. He took a closer look and discovered messages encoded in the direction of their spin. He was receiving advice from himself and others in Morse code (or some other code) from the future! Well, this made his task far easier. His future guides explained exactly how to construct a working time machine that would allow humans to travel backwards or forwards through time at will. Within a few years they were being mass-produced, and every library and museum had its own public time machine. They became as common as telephone booths (when they were still around).

Now, at first I thought this would cause mucho mayhem too. I've seen Back the the Future, and I know what messing with the space time continuum can do to your guitar-playing skills. Fortunately, those writers tweaked the physics to intensify the dramatic storyline. The plot is not probable. Actually, the moment Marty went back, he would have become part of a completely new universe whose entire future would be irrevocably rewritten because of his arrival. It's kind of like how I came from the future and created this universe where I wrote this post and forever changed this causal plane of existence forever.

The future/present as I otherwise would have known it will never exist again, and the past as I had known it is gone forever. While there is some unimaginably small chance the course of events may turn out to be recognizable if I lay low (i.e. Marty's parents fall in love, get married, and have Marty), probability immediately fucks with everything indelibly changing whatever you remember from history books or heard from your parents. Chance is still chance, and just because the coin flipped heads before doesn't mean it will again. To move ahead to Back to the Future part II, remember Biff got his hands on the sports almanac and then bet on horses until he basically owned Hill Valley? Seems plausible, but that almanac would be completely unreliable seconds after you arrived in the past. The odds of the same horse winning are only slightly better than before, and only because you have access to additional records. But, there is no guarantee the horse that wins in the almanac will even make it out of the gate in your new universe.

Since I have chosen to return to 2009, the past 10 years (2009 through 2019) are gone...a personal fiction which never existed. I am simply 10 years older living in a reality only vaguely similar to the one in which I lived. Even though I have lived these years already, I have virtually the same chance of screwing them up.

Our future is always in our hands, and opportunity is slipping away each moment. Of the infinite number of possible futures, I am perpetually letting all but one slip through my fingers anyway. I find this daunting, even paralyzing. Nonetheless, it is a fact, and one which allows me to take my adventure in time travel lightly. For example, there is the universe in which I post this message on my blog, and, there is the universe in which I save it as a draft and forget about it. Traveling backwards in time was just another one of those irrevocable decisions that may haunt me the rest of my life or lead to enduring bliss. Who knows? The universe in which I had the opportunity to time travel but didn't would be difficult to tolerate.

While I am not actually future Mark, the plausibility of time travel does beg the question: "Are visitors from the future returning to our time to play? Rewrite history as they see fit?" Sounds disturbing, doesn't it? No wonder they don't show themselves. I think most of us enjoy some semblance of order, regularity and free will. And, if we are being subtly influenced by friends from the future, we are largely at their mercy. After all, we might ask why they haven't fixed everything already. We might blame them for all of our problems...the worlds problems from the dawn of civilization. No, they certainly couldn't show their faces, no matter how much suffering they have prevented or how many lives they have saved. I like to think of them as courageous and compassionate individuals, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for whatever past/present they have provided for us. In return, I might see what future I can help provide for them (or rather, their incarnation in this universe), and try not do a whole lot of damage in the process.