Time Travel: The Thorn in the Side of All Science Fiction Fans
Everyone loves to use the idea of time travel, but is it possible? How could it be possible if it is?
Ever since HG Wells wrote The Time Machine in 1895, popular culture has been enamored with the idea of traveling into the past or going into the future with a return path to the present guaranteed. Of all science fiction concepts, this one seems to be the most complicated to pull off, if it can be done at all. I am not one to say it will never happen because I believe in the ingenuity of the human will. Besides, if man is to manipulate spacetime in a manner that can imitate what countless novels, short stories, plays, movies, television shows, and video games have depicted, it means we as a species will have figured out climate change and stopped the Earth from becoming a fiery marble of boiling water and death. That is to say, the manipulation of the fabric of reality itself is a long, long, LONG way off.
However, no one can really agree on what would constitute time travel to begin with. If you want to be technical, and given my audience here consists of many people who subscribed due to my Twitter proselytization, there are a lot of you here who love to be technical like a regular Hermes Conrad, we are always time-traveling. Moving forward into the future, one second at a time, is the most basic and, so far, only possible means of doing so. However, one cannot blame you for seeing that definition of time travel and booing lustily like you were the Veterans Stadium 700 Level and the person giving that definition were the Dallas Cowboys.
The most standard definition of time travel assumes that there is only one timeline, and one can, theoretically, move freely around it, changing events and erasing them from history. You see this in media like the Back to the Future series, where Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel back and forth in time, causing drastic changes to the same timeline. There are plenty of examples of this tomfoolery around all three movies, but the biggest one to buttress the movie franchise’s world-building was in the second installment, where antagonist Biff Tannen steals the DeLorean time machine and gives his past self an almanac full of all the sports results up to his time in the future. Biff uses this knowledge to become a gambling mogul, turning the present from a timeline close to what 1980s suburban America looked like to a dystopian hellscape. Marty and Doc eventually fix these mistakes, and they’re the only ones who remember anything happening. It is the most intuitive way to visit upon time travel, but is it the correct interpretation?
Similar to the “single-timeline theory” is the interpretation put forth by the show LOST. Time-travel was at the core of the later seasons of this show, but showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse and their writers did not treat the timeline as fluid and movable. Yes, there is only one timeline, but they answer the question as to whether you can change things with an episode title from Season Five called “Whatever Happened, Happened.” There is time-travel, as the entire mythical Island is a swirling tempest of temporal energy, but all the time-skips that occur are meant to happen. The movements of the cast into the past are embedded into the history of the Island before they arrive in the pilot episode. If you think that’s confusing, you’re not alone. This explanation of time travel is incredibly self-motorized, but it deals with the idea that you cannot erase deeds from history. It’s not the most fun interpretation, but it deals with the events of the past in the most correct interpretation from the science that is available to humans right now. But is it correct?
Multiverse theory is an actual working scientific hypothesis that the current reality in which we as humans reside is but one of many alternate, parallel universes. How many parallel universes are there, you might ask? The answer could be infinite, or the answer could be a finite number. Either way, comic books and comics media has and will continue to explore this phenomenon, but as it pertains to time travel, the answer is that time travel really is just interdimensional travel after all. This theory, popularized currently by the Marvel Disney+ show Loki, posits that if you “go back in time,” what you’re really doing, unless you’re just a time tourist, is creating a branch timeline different from the timeline whence you came. With Loki, the ominous Time Variance Authority enforces a “Sacred Timeline” and keeps any branches from gaining prominence. Note, I wrote this before the show’s finale yesterday, so I won’t spoil it for you here. However, the idea of a branched timeline combines the first two ideas that you can go to a point in history and mastermind a different outcome, but it doesn’t change that the original outcome happened. You just create a parallel universe.
Going one step further is where I believe the idea of time travel will head in reality, if it can be achieved at all. The Law of Conservation of Matter is that matter itself, anything that consists of mass and volume, cannot be created nor can it be destroyed. If the premise in the previous is correct, then by creating a splinter universe, you are drawing from a well of matter and energy that already exists. Either that well is finite, and you can only create so many splinter universes, or that well is infinite, and there already are an infinite number of universes where a number of outcomes from every action from the Big Bang forward is infinite. If your brain can’t conceive of such a multiverse, congratulations, you’re a normal human being. I can’t conceive of the sheer number of potential universes that exist, but the thing about science is that it works the way it works whether you understand it, whether the smartest and most accomplished of scientists are even interpreting it correctly.
In reality, I’m just a dude with an engineering degree who uses it to study the degradation of metal from its refined and structurally useful state back to the thermodynamically stable ore state in which it wants to reside. I have no understanding of quantum mechanics or the idea of how much “stuff,” for lack of a better term, there is in the known universe or multiverse. However, what makes sense to me in my ravaged-by-time-and-depression brain is that nothing in a given timeline is static. The possibilities are endless, and the science will bear that out. If by some means you can go back in time and change an event while remaining tethered to the point in time where you started, I doubt you will go back to a changed timeline. You’ll just have created a different timeline where a version of yourself that lived there would benefit. Everything that happened here, in this timeline, happened: both World Wars, the bubonic plague, the passion of the Christ, the invention of the wheel, the comets crashing into Earth that brought life-giving water. All of it happened. There’s a gravity and finality to that, and as much as I’d want to change parts of it, like stopping the Holocaust before it happened or preventing the idea of slavery from ever taking hold, it’s unfortunately not anything that can affect the timeline here.
So as much as time travel is this kernel, it’s the thing that even more than cold fusion or interstellar travel in short time feels unobtainable. Time isn’t a dimension that’s meant to be moved in like the other three physical dimensions, it seems. Could I be wrong? Of course! I’ve been wrong before on things easier to understand and harder to fuck up than interpreting the natural flow of time. However, the idea of erasing something from history feels more impossible than traveling above light speed without turning into pure energy or causing an apocalypse upon braking. Whatever happened, happened of course.