A random topic, I know. But I often sit and think about random things, so you get the pleasure of reading it.
All of us grow up watching movies and tv shows about time travel and thinking about how cool it will be to someday have the ability to fling ourselves years away in just an instant. Some are intrigued by the future and what type of advances it might hold for us, while others would like to experience an age long before our time.
A nice bonus is that movie based time travel also has the ability to put you in a different location.. seemingly anywhere on earth. There’s never fear that you will emerge inside of a wall or a hundred feet above the natural ground line, not yet developed by a hundred years of city development. In fact, movie based time travel easily plops you down precisely where you want to be.
But all of this is just a pipe dream. It will never happen. None of it. Ever. You don’t have to be a rocket science to come to this conclusion. Just think about it logically. If time travel were possible, people from some time in the future would have access to it. It’s irrelevant how near or far we are to it today, humanity has a nearly limitless amount of time to develop it, and we would be seeing the results of it already. Barring the extinction of humanity or the destruction of the planet, there could be tens of thousands, perhaps a million years left to develop this technology. And yet.. no time travelers have surfaced(unless you believe John Titor).
I know, I know,.. “but scientists know that altering the past would affect the future, so they would be careful not to expose themselves”. This is true, but again the limitless timeframe presents a problem. Just like it used to be that only the government had access to the internet, air travel, and nearly every other technology, these types of things start out in the hands of officials and then filter down to the public years or decades later. Surely there’d be plenty of lackey’s traveling around on their family vacations, ignorant to the repercussions of altering our current time.
So, sad as it may be for the science fiction hopeful, time travel just isn’t in the cards for us. Hopefully it’s not linked as tightly into fast space travel as scientists believe, because it would be ashame if we never find a way to make it to the edges of the solar system(or beyond?)
I’ll sit and think about that some other day.
