What is time travel? Time travel is the act of going to a specific 'location' in time, whether it be the past or the future. It involves a lot of theoretical ideas and is possible only in the world of fiction. However, if we are to understand and create a means of transportation through time, we are going to have to understand the potential consequences of the journey itself, whether those consequences be to one self or to existence as a whole. But to understand time travel we are to first understand what time itself is.
Time is a series of events that are linked together by the previous set of events. Whether these set of events take place over a matter of seconds or a matter of decades, they exist on what is known as a time line. A time line as we know it now can not be altered once it has occurred. If you were to draw a line on a piece of paper you can not <em>un-draw</em> a line on the piece of paper. You can erase that line, but it does not mean that that line never existed in the first place. It is part of a time line that is linked to the overall time line of existence.
This is where memory comes into play. When you do something you retain a mental image of what you did known as a memory. This memory can stay with you for as long as it is relevant or until the mind overwrites it with more relevant data. The importance of the event will determine how long the memory will stay with you. There are different types of memories, each one having its own relevance to your own existence (as well as the existence of those around you in your environment).
Time travel and memories go hand-in-hand. If you were to go back to the very moment before you drew the line on the paper and altered the time line so that you did not draw the line, not only will the event not have happened, you will have a memory of the event that never happened.
Theoretically, you could retain both the memory of the line not being drawn and the memory of the line being drawn with no problem. However, the memories themselves will have been relocated to separate instances in the brain as two things can not exist within the same point in time and space at the same time. Going on the theory that memory works solely on relevance, the event that is relevant to your time line (i.e. whether the line was drawn or not) will more than likely be the dominant memory and will then be the sole existing memory of the line. If you drew the line, you would have a memory of it. However, going back and making it so that you never drew the line will have overwritten the now irrelevant memory of drawing the line since it never existed in the time line you have now created.
This is not to say that this will have the same effect on memories that are not specific to you own time line. If you were to go back and alter somebody else's time line that you had a part of or didn't have a part of, then you could probably retain both sets of memories. And as for time lines that you yourself had no part of, the memory would be new since you had no prior memory specific to that time line.
As for time travel itself, the possibility of visiting a future that is constantly changing is almost impossible unless you first take into account a few things.
Let's take another look at time lines and the possibility of traveling to a certain point on a time line. We'll use a 24 hour period as the time line. Hour 1 will be the birth of the time line (12:00 am) and hour 24 will be the end of the time line (12:00am on the following day). We'll set ourselves in hour 12 (12:00 pm) and set an instance from there.
Using time travel we will go back to the birth of the time line but we will not do anything differently. If were able to do this, then theoretically, we would be able to witness everything that had already happened, as it happened, again. If we do not interact with anything in the past then everything leading up to the point that we went back will remain the same.
However, the mere fact that we went back in the first place has altered what will happen after the moment we left. What we have just created is an alternate time line. (Don't confuse this with alternate dimensions as alternate time lines deal only with events and not reality itself, although the two are very similar in nature.)
Now, assuming we never made the trip back, let's make a trip forward. This is where our problems with time travel will begin. First off, the future you will visit will not be a time line that is 'for sure' but only an idea of what events will transpire.
As we live our lives, we make decisions. There are plans that are made ahead of time and then there are plans that are made 'on the spot'. Visiting a future that is constantly changing has the potential of not only flinging you into an alternate dimension but also introduces the notion of fated existence, or rather, an existence that warrants no room for independent thought. If you were to go 100 years into the future, write down everything that you saw, and then bring it back to the present and then 100 years from the present somebody found your writing and it was exactly the way it was written, that would mean that no matter what decisions were made in the 100 years leading to that exact moment, none of them would have mattered because existence was fated to be where it was at that moment in time when it was. So this leaves only three options: either visiting the future is impossible, we live in a fated existence, or you will be put into a reality that is constantly changing as decisions are made in the time line leading up to the point in time that you went to in the future. For instance, with the third option, if you were standing next to a tree 100 years from the present that had existed when you left it would either be 100 years old or you would see the effects of the 'past' in real time, i.e. if somebody cut it down or it was destroyed by a bolt of lightning.
Time Travel: The Past and The Consequences
Now that we have a little bit of understanding as to what time travel is and the possible outcomes and drawbacks of time travel, let's take a look at traveling to the past and the possible outcomes and drawbacks of doing so. instead of 24 hours, we will broaden our time line to 100 years, using the present as our departure point. And we will also be taking a look at evolution (briefly) and how it pertains to the ideals of time travel.
Human evolution is the process through which society goes through every second it exists. We as a society are constantly moving forward, gaining knowledge and insight as we go, and are constantly bringing into existence the birth of new ideas and ways of thinking. With advent of technology, we are making this process faster and faster every day. If you were to tell somebody 100 years ago that man would be setting foot on the moon, they would have called you crazy. Now we're sending un-manned crafts to planets years away from our planet.
The possibility of going back in time has a very real possibility of not only introducing ideas that had not existed to a society that wouldn't be ready for the existence of the ideas themselves, but also the possibility of speeding up human evolution.
Taking a closer look at the latter argument that it could possibly speed up human evolution, let's first take a look at how society as a whole moves forward. As society moves forward, we gain insight and knowledge. Some moves forward take years while others take merely seconds. If we were to go back a century an introduce in full the technology we have now, we would have a chance of bringing society forward 100 years so that the society we know now would be the society that was then, thus rocketing our society as we know it now 100 years further. If we were to continually do this, eventually we would reach a point where our society would be so advanced we could very well end common things like disease, war, hunger and other problems we face today as they would no longer be a present problem but a problem of the past. There are no foreseeable drawbacks from these actions.
As for the former argument that society would not be ready for these ideas, if we were to introduce them at the so-called 'right' times and then speed up the introduction as we go back each time, this problem would be irrelevant.
When we take another look at time travel to the past, we must also take into account the role that morality would play in this and who would ultimately have the say-so in this technology's usage. Who's to say what is right or wrong for all of human existence? This question is harder to answer unless we first break down the boundaries between our nations and consolidate every single problem we have ever had so that a large percentage (90-95% of the overall population) agree on the fundamentals of existence itself. There are always going to be those who don't agree, but it is my opinion that if we can get that majority vote we can then go on to debate the rights and wrongs of time travel and then move on to the core of the morality of its use, such as when and why to use it.
We would have to then keep the technology under major security to keep it out of the hands of criminals and people who would use it to do nothing but evil, which would again be dictated by the majority vote as to what 'evil' is considered to be.
We would have to agree on what events were 'meant to happen' so that we do not go back and destroy the very events that led up to the point to where we are now. If we take another look back at time lines, we realize that certain events tie our overall time line together. Such events as the individual births of every person and the individual births of their parents and so-on each coming from a central event that ties it all together, which leads us to another major roadblock to time travel. We would have to know every event in the history of history to safely alter the past.
In the interest of keeping history in its perfect form, we would have to set up a committee of people that do nothing but record every moment of the past from hour zero to the point at which the committee was formed. These events, in ever minute detail, would then be stored into a computer that would then have to have the ability to calculate outcomes and possible paths that each potential action from the recorded past would have to take, allowing us to plot a course of events to safely alter the past without destroying existence itself.
Of course, all of this would have to be done within the idea that society could progress to such a state that it did rally beneath one flag, one language and one ideal which, according to history, will never happen, for this all to come to fruition (also taking into account that time travel itself were possible).
Time Travel: Time travel and the individual as opposed to society as a whole
We've been looking so far at time travel on a global scale, but what of time travel performed by an individual, not sanctioned by any government and not conformed to any rules of conduct other than that individual.
To start this argument, we would first have to realize that each individual person would have a different idea of what right and wrong are, thus creating the possibility that whatever changes they may or may not inflict upon the past would be beneficial to society as a whole or beneficial to that one person.
The Back to the Future film series focused on an individual who saw it fit to make sure that they didn't change anything in the past for fear that it would alter the future in horrible ways. But what if that person had ideas of changing the future in detrimental ways? The possibilities for personal gain by traveling to the past would be limitless as the imagination itself.
One could go back to the 80's and buy stock in Microsoft to set themselves up as billionaires in the present. One could go back to the Renaissance and steal major works of art, putting their family name on the painting instead of the original painter's. One could go back, with the proper knowledge, and put themselves up as the rulers of any nation or people that they see fit.
Of course, one could also go back and alter the events of such tragedies as both World Wars and 9/11 by forewarning the right people to the events that were about to take place.
The possibilities, again, are limitless as to what one could accomplish through the means of time travel. But with no sense of what it could do on a galactic scale, one could very well end up going back and wiping out existence as we know it.
A few more things that need answers
Whether we assume that time travel is indeed possible, we need to take a look at a few more things.
In this essay (more or less) we have assumed that "time" creates snap-shots as it goes, or, if you prefer, freeze-frames, of each millisecond that passes. Supposing that this is not true, then time travel in itself, for all intents and purposes, would not be possible as there would not be a point to travel back to.
If all of human consciousness were connected, and time travel were possible, but time did not create such freeze-frames, time travel might be possible as we would have a possibility (very low) of not traveling back to a time in a reality as we know it, but a time in <em>human memory</em> as it was collectively constructed.
We know that ideas in and of themselves can do no harm. It is only when we introduce actions that they take on a sort of life force of their own, then willing to do harm or good in the greater sense. If we were to travel back in time and travel into a <em>memory</em>, then it would only be our actions that could do any harm, not just our mere presence.
Also, taking into account that time can only be measured by distances traveled in regards to your surroundings, and we <em>did</em> travel back to a sort of freeze-frame in memory, then we could take no actions as memories are not tangible, therefore not interactive in a physical way.
However, if we did say that time <em>did</em> create freeze-frames that were tangible, and not memory based, then our actions could do harm (or good) depending.
Yet another problem we run into with this is that we could screw up the events that have already taken place in such a way that we change our own future, possibly even destroying the moment we left.
Let's say that you left exactly at 2:45:40 on June 30th and returned to the previous time of 2:44:40 on June 30th, and changed your routine from what it <em>was</em>, one of a few things could theoretically happen.
1. You don't go back in time at 2:45:40 on June 30th (which hasn't happened in the time line you are in now, but has already happened from the time line from which you came). If you didn't go back in the future to get where you are now, then you wouldn't be where you are now; you would be back from where you came.
2. You meet yourself doing the same thing that you were doing 1 minute before you went back to the past, thus fundamentally changing all events from then on, which would bring you full-circle back to 1.
3. You don't interact with anything and you don't interact with yourself. You simply sit by and observe. We can draw a few more conclusions from this scenario.
3.1. That by not interacting with anything and not doing anything, you wouldn't fundamentally change anything. Also acting on the theory that by going back in time you would be able to meet yourself, then the past you would do the same thing you did up until the point at which you went back. Once the past you has gone back to 2:44:40 (where you, the current) are, you would either wind up meeting each other anyway or you would create a continual loop of yourself going back to the same point in time and possibly doing the same thing over and over until there were so many of you, you meeting <strong>all of yourselves</strong> would be unavoidable.
3.2. That by not interacting with anything and not doing anything, you would fundamentally change <strong>everything</strong> just for the fact that you went back in the first place. How are you to be able to know if where you stand to watch from the sidelines didn't hold some vital piece of your future to which you just may or may not have altered unaware?
There are still plenty of things that need to be discussed on this topic (not just the ideas behind it, but the technology that may be able to drive it into reality) that are far beyond my knowledge and education. But if we are able to grasp even the fundamentals of time travel, we are well on our way to turning it from fiction into reality. |
