Science (Fiction) Friday

Time travel is possible. All you have to do is go out in a spaceship, travel near the speed of light for a while, and then come back to earth. Thanks to the theory of relativity, lots more time will have passed for earth than will have passed for you. How does this work? You’re asking the wrong blog. But the point is, scientists have conceived of time travel as possible.

Of course, this is time travel in only one direction, that is, into the future. No one has figured out how you would go back in time yet. It has been imagined, but not conceived. Nevertheless, it might happen someday, which is why some students at MIT have gotten together and planned the first, and only, Time Traveler Convention. That’s right, there will never be a second Time Traveler Convention. Why should there be? If you’re capable of traveling back in time, there’s literally no way you can miss the first one.

Here at the Blasphemy Blog, we love this idea. We love science fiction, and, in our opinion, time travel is the greatest of all science-fictionary themes.

Why? Well, consider the Time Traveler Convention. Assume that, sometime in the future, someone has invented a time machine. They know about the Convention, even though it happened way back in the early 21st Century, so they decide to go. What happens when they arrive in Cambridge, Massachusetts? Well, one possibility is that the traveler can literally never go home again. If, after enjoying some 21st Century party food, the traveler jumps back in the time machine to go back to the future, the future will no longer be the future they originally came from. This is because, by traveling back in time, they made a new future. Because, when the original history books of the future were written, there was no time traveler in Cambridge in 2005. But now, thanks to the traveler’s meddling, there is. The two timelines might be very like each other, but they would still not be the same.

Unless, of course, there is no such thing as an alternate timeline, and the whole record of the past and the present and the future is already written. In that case, the time traveler’s whole life has taken place in a world that contains the record of them having traveled back through time. If that’s the case, it means that the time traveler has grown up knowing that they were going to invent, or at least participate in, time travel. After all, since they already did it, there can be no doubt. How odd that must be, for our friend the time traveler, to go through life knowing that they were destined to travel to Cambridge 2005, because they already did it. Talk about predestination. I bet it makes it hard to study for a math test…I mean, since I already know I’m going to be one of the greatest scientists of all time, do I really need to learn this stuff?

Another possibility is that time is too fragile to handle being folded back on itself, and if anyone travels back in time to go to this convention, reality will collapse under the weight of contradiction. If this is the case, a party in Cambridge, Massachusetts is going to be the focal point for the destruction of reality. (It turns out the Republicans were right all along.)

The first possibility, the multiple timeline possibility, was the one they used in the movie “Back to the Future.” While we love that movie, we prefer the second possibility as a fictional starting point. The idea that someone would grow up knowing their eventual fate strikes us as timeless and weighty. The third possibility, that is, complete disaster, is not without its charms, either. Maybe we can figure out a fourth possibility, if we work on it a while.

You either love this speculation, or it makes your brain hurt. For us here at the Blasphemy Blog, thinking about it is like listening to “Louie, Louie” for the first time…that is, a transcendent experience of the universe in its most basic, beautiful form. Like those three chords, played over and over again, the contemplation of time travel is so useless that it has to be meaningful.

We wish we could be in Cambridge on Saturday. In fact, hopefully, we’re already there.