Time Travel. Fact or Fiction? You Tell Me.

Most would say the very idea of time-travel is preposterous. Others would disagree.

Personally, I’m open to just about anything. Granted, I write about time-travel so no surprise there. However, I fully recognize that technology is moving forward at breakneck speed. I can assure you that I was unable to hop on the internet in eighth grade. Nor was I able to text my mom to say that I was at a friend’s house. Nope, I was too busy playing ‘Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?’ on my DOS computer. That big, clunky box that cost my parents (bless them) a whopping $2000.

That was only twenty years ago, folks. Pretty darn amazing how far we’ve come since then, eh? So if technology is advancing so quickly what's to say time-travel doesn’t become possible in the future? Hey, Einstein believed it’d be possible! And just look how far we’ve come since the beginning of the twentieth century…

“According to Kurzweil's The Law of Accelerating Return, since the beginning of evolution, more complex life forms have been evolving exponentially faster, with shorter and shorter intervals between the emergence of radically new life forms, such as human beings, who have the capacity to engineer (intentionally to design with efficiency) a new trait which replaces relatively blind evolutionary mechanisms of selection for efficiency."

"By extension, the rate of technical progress amongst humans has also been exponentially increasing, as we discover more effective ways to do things, we also discover more effective ways to learn, i.e. language, numbers, written language, philosophy, scientific method, instruments of observation, tallying devices, mechanical calculators, computers, each of these major advances in our ability to account for information occur increasingly close together."

"Already within the past sixty years, life in the industrialized world has changed almost beyond recognition except for living memories from the first half of the 20th century. This pattern will culminate in unimaginable technological progress in the 21st century.” (Read more about this via Wikipedia’s Accelerating Changes)

Albert Einstein said, "With the proper technology, such as a very fast spaceship, one person is able to experience several days while another person simultaneously experiences only a few hours or minutes. The same two people can meet up again, one having experienced days or even years while the other has only experienced minutes. The person in the spaceship only needs to travel near to the speed of light. The faster they travel, the slower their time will pass relative to someone planted firmly on the Earth. If they were able to travel at the speed of light, their time would cease completely and they would only exist trapped in timelessness."

So what’s to say at such a startling rate of technological advance, humankind won’t soon unlock the key to time-travel? If we do, is that a good or bad thing?

A few years back when vacationing in Vermont I met a woman visiting from China. We got chatting about not only books but the idea of time-travel. While I was always a fan of the concept she made some excellent points. Her concerns were that if it did someday become possible it could quite possibly be a terrible thing. Why? Simple. Imagine what that technology would do if put in the wrong hands.

She feared that our very civilization might be different now. Our loved ones might never have been born because of a change in the sequence of events prior to their births. Hence, we were never born. Just imagine if the ability to time-travel was put into the hands of extremists? Scary thought.

It’s hard for me to believe that we won’t eventually figure out how to do it. Ever the optimist, it’s my hope that when we do it’ll be a world much different than the one in which we currently live. Because if not, my friend’s words will most likely prove true. The mind-blowing thing? We won’t even know it because we’ll already be living a different life than what we now know. In fact, we might already be living in a world manipulated by our future descendants and their ability to time-travel.

What are your thoughts on time-travel? Do you think we’ll someday have the technology or is this too much of an ‘out there’ concept? If we do figure out how to travel through time, is that a good or bad thing?  I’d love to hear feedback on this topic.

Best,

Sky