OK, boys and girls, it’s time for a lesson. Sit down and relax because you are about to witness one of the nerdiest rants in your long life.
Time travel doesn’t exist. It can’t, and it won’t because it hasn’t.
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Now, I realize this can be a pretty controversial subject. Many of you may be instantly angered by this very strong and opinionated claim, and I understand. Time travel is one of those trendy subjects right now, and everyone and their mothers seem to have something to say about it. So, if you disagree with me, again, I understand. This is just my personal opinion, and I’m not the kind of person to force my beliefs down others’ throats. So, I’ll just give you dissenters a few moments to leave this page and continue happily along your previously scheduled destinies.
Are they gone? OK, good. Are you guys ready?
Let's say you invent time travel. Maybe you’re some exiled scientist with a creepy friendship with a spunky teen, or maybe you’re part of some spooky government funded program. Maybe you’re someone who gets warped into the past every time you hiccup. All of these are reasonably possible situations, and all of them could happen to you. So, what do you do first?
Well, if you’re a teenager with a time traveling car, your first order of business is to almost sleep with your mom. If you’re some kind of historical hero, maybe you try to assassinate Hitler. There have been an endless number of stories like this, and we can learn from them if we try. There are always rules to time travel, such as where you can go and what you can change. Sometimes, there’s a butterfly effect, and every action you make down to the most silent of farts or the most egregious sexual acts with your own grandmother, has some sort of disastrous influence on the future. Other times, time self-corrects or is somehow resistant to alteration; no matter what you do, the pattern of events that already exists will never change.
Choosing between these two is more a matter of opinion than anything else, but I choose to believe in the second theory. Let me think of an intuitive analogy for how time works. Jello. Perfect. Imagine time as a big block of jello, slowly spreading forwards, absorbing the present into its fruity spongy depths and into the solidity of the past. We exist at the forefront of this big jelly tsunami, scrambling around until our actions are trapped in that sweet strawberry past.
This vision of time is continuous; there is no changing what has happened. Time travel, within this analogy, would be like jumping out of the way of the jello and landing somewhere farther backward or forward. Everything you do there has already happened because there is only one past and only one future. Confused? Me, too. So, let’s just move on and leave this complicated stuff here.
OK, so, you have time travel technology, and you are now able to jump wherever you want in the great progression of time-jello. So, what do you do? Well, you travel back to feudal England to pick up some royal babes, immediately get coughed on by a random peasant and die 49 hours later of an extraordinary compilation of dysentery, leprosy and the common cold. What happens to your technology? If you die in the past, eventually even those medieval dudes will figure out which button to push. If you die in your present, what’s the likelihood your childhood friend will really only use it for good and not sell it the next day?
The point is, the technology will eventually spread. And once that happens, time travel won’t truly have just been invented, it will always have existed. This is when the language around causation and tense get messy. This is also when history gets messy.
Imagine all of the natural resources wasted or ignored in the past. Imagine all of the greedy bastards who will exploit those resources, heedless of consequences. Imagine a friendly American in a construction hat assuring a caveman that, no need to worry, that giant, whirring death machine is just an oil drill. Nothing to worry about at all.
Technology, culture, history, ethnicity, everything would be lost into the merging, continuous stagnant progression of humanity, existing in exactly the same uniform way throughout every inch of our jello timeline. Humanity would defuse, spreading through both space and time, becoming unrecognizable, unimaginable.
The good news is this is never going to happen because it hasn’t happened. If time travel existed, it would always have existed, and our lives would be very different. No one can keep a secret that big, especially with literally all the time in the world for it to get revealed. So, everyone calm down. We’re safe from time travel. Let the movies and books just be entertaining, rather than ominous omens of our future and past. What we really have to worry about are those lizard people.
