My experiments in time

Add to favorites

Fiction is amazing. Without it, all we would have is the cold, hard truth, and often, that’s a hard pill to swallow without washing down with a glass full of euphemistic diplomacy covered in white lies. And without fiction, we would have no science fiction, and that would be devastating – The History Channel will actually have to deal with real history, and that’s too radical a change for us to imagine.

Ancient Aliens | History Channel

“What’s making the History channel air nonsense?”
“Aliens.”

In the realm of science fiction, one topic is particularly timeless – The phenomena known as time travel. Ever since the late 1800s, it has been a prominent plot device of classic stories. I love these tales. Sometimes, it can be awesome, like when the first two Terminator movies (which are the only ones I recognize as canon) showed us the tangled paradox it can weave. Sometimes, it can be a fun, chuckle infested lighthearted comedy, like when the pre-Matrix Keanu Reeves borrowed famous dudes from history in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

Wikimedia Commons | 20th Century Fox | Warner Bros. | Summit Entertainment

Incidentally, time travel turns out to be Keanu Reeves’ favourite pastime.

One of the most pivotal classics of time travel stories had a recent milestone. Yes, 2015 marks the 120th anniversary of H.G. Well’s timeless classic ‘The Time Machine‘. It was a pivotal work that spawned countless adaptations and inspired a major chunk of modern day works.

Another iconic time travel movie also had an important milestone recently. Last week, the internet literally exploded with comments about the classic movie ‘Back to the Future‘. Almost as violently as it is exploding right now over my abuse of the word ‘literally’.

For the very very few of you who don’t know about the movie, Back to the Future was a 1985 classic sci-fi story of an American teenager, Marty McFly, who, along with his eccentric friend, Doc Brown, uses a time machine to go back in time to hang out with teenage versions of his parents. Marty’s adventure mostly focuses on his return to 1985.

Back to the Future | Universal Pictures

… while struggling to keep things PG with his mom.

It was a massive hit that attained cult status and also made roughly ALL the money in 1985. So Hollywood did what it does best – it made sequels, in which Marty McFly uses his time machine to go to his future and then to the past to continue his whacky adventures with various generations of the McFly family. The future date he visits is Oct 21, 2015. As some of you may have noticed, that date just whizzed by last week, and there was a metric ton of BTTF articles trending on all online media and social networks.

With the internet buzz and spotlight re-focused on BTTF, I started musing about time travel. Now, I am not a real scientist, but hey – Doc Brown wasn’t even a real person, and he managed to crack time travel, so why can’t I? With that fractured, retarded logic, I decided to take on the topic of time travel.

How does a non-scientist have an introspective look at time travel? The logical thing would be to delve into the current researches happening in the scientific community – the principles of wormhole exploits, time dilation, faster-than-light travel, Tipler portals, and other mind boggling theories that legitimate scientists are investigating.

OR… I could just wing it. You know… pretend like I know everything I need to and just use my own private experiments to speculate.

Pixabay.com

I have something that looks like a lab coat. That should give me enough credibility.

Experiment 1

Question: Is time travel possible in my lifetime? Is it accessible to the average guy?

Procedure: I am making a note of the current date and time – October 27, 2015 – 9:00 AM EST, setting an annual reminder for my future self so that I don’t just forget about it. And I am waiting right now for my future self to hop into this time and prevent me from writing the next sentence.

Results: Nothing. Nada. My future self didn’t turn up.

Conclusion: Either time travel is not possible within my lifetime, OR… it’s just too expensive for someone like me to get. It’s reserved for the rich schmucks and jerkwads who rule the world. I guess it will take a LOOOOOONG time for the prices to drop so that regular people can travel too.

Well, it’s a good thing that a ‘LOOOOOONG time’ tends to be immaterial when we’re talking about time travel.

Flickr | Alan Cleaver

Am I wasting time here? It doesn’t matter. Once I get the time machine, I can get it all back.

Experiment 2

Question: Is time travel possible after my lifetime?

Procedure: I am making a note of the current date and time – October 27, 2015 – 9:00 AM EST, marking the time for posterity, for all the time traveling explorers out there in the future. And now, I am waiting right now for this jolly traveler to hop hop into this timeline and regale me with tales of the future, which would then be the focus of the rest of this article. I can’t wait.

Results: What the… nothing again!! Nobody? Nobody at all? Jeez!!

Conclusion: The cost of time travel never comes down. It’s always kept under control by the rich schmucks and jerkwads who keep ruling the world. They would hoard the secrets of the universe and keep it hidden from us regular folks.

That… that just sucks. So, in the future -irrespective of whenever they’re invented – the affluent jackasses are going to keep control of the time machines. They would obviously use it to become richer and more powerful. I wonder why the poor huddled masses won’t just storm the ruling class and take control of the time machine.

Maybe they can’t… because they never find out about the machine. Maybe the rich schmucks just keep a tight lid of silence on the most important invention of all time. Maybe the poor, average guy only ever gets to see time machines in science fiction movies. Maybe…

Hey… wait a minute. If that’s what’s going to  happen, isn’t it possible that it’s already happened?? Imagine that the time machine ALREADY exists. And the rich jerkwards of the world keep this hushed up so that only they get to benefit. They’d keep pressuring scientists to say that time travel is impossible – which they do… They’d continue to grow wealthier and wealthier till this tiny fraction of the population controls a majority of the world’s wealth – which is already the case… They’d become bigger and bigger jerks to the point of being psychopaths – which they already are.

Oh, my God. The time machine already exists, doesn’t it? Dammit, you rich snobs. We need to revolt. Take arms against the oppressive schmucks and get control of everything. Keep the struggle strong. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, we will prevail!

Except… except we won’t, will we? If we ever manage to wrestle control of the machine, even a thousand years later, we would have come back from the future to let us know. We didn’t do that, so we didn’t/ won’t prevail… ever. Now, that’s just sad.