Journalism / The Clock Talked Loud

The Clock Talked Loud
A Discussion of Time Travel

     Personally, it’s my strong belief Doc Brown and Marty McFly may have been full of shit. Of course that’s just an opinion, but it can be reasoned through rather simply and concluded that not only is time travel an excellent basis for a movie plot, but also completely ludicrous. It is highly unlikely that anyone in the future (let alone in the eighties) will have the capabilities of traveling through time.
     The first and most obvious argument against the reality of jumping the space-time continuum is that if it were to be our races future, then where is the proof of their explorations? Surely if it were possible then someone must have gone back to a time before today, so then why hasn’t anyone or anything been uncovered? As far as I’m aware very few future residents have popped up out of thin air. Of course I admit not to regularly reading the newspaper, but still you’d think one would have at least heard by word of mouth.
     A counterargument to the lack of proof could be that such evidence was effectively covered up. My single answer to that would have to come in the valued voice of Al Franken, “Mistakes are a part of being human.” It is simply absurd to assume that the presumable decades of future generations, having the luxury of shifting back in time, ran everything completely smoothly with no tiny blunder to trip up the current beings they were visiting. People error. It’s in our blood. It’s simply impossible that nothing would go wrong, otherwise Murphy would be the one being questioned. Of course that’s not the case as he was ultimately right, “Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way.”
     A common misconception associated with the theory of time travel is that if one were to travel back they would be risking the future. Even if the ability to travel through time was possible, the idea that the future would be altered because of the actions of someone who arrived there unnaturally is ridiculous. If one were to travel back in time, they would have already done so. Therefore their reality, and other’s future, would remain unchanged because the occurrence already had to have happened in order for the future traveler to even be able to travel back.
     In addition, in concurrence with the idea that time travel is possible, one must view time as an infinitely looped reel. So for to be able to travel back there would have to be a reality for them to travel back into, another frame of the reel. However, this time loop isn’t alterable as everything that may be changed by the future has already been done so because the past, having obviously already taken place, to be jumped into implies the future reality is occurring concurrently and are unable to change each other as each are completely separate. Therefore, in the plausible time travel theory there would have to be an countless number of realities, each infinitely miniscule amounts of time, all happening at the same time, over and over and over again. Each nanosecond replaying itself presumably forever.
     Other perks in the space-time continuum package include dandy little paradoxes that make the whole theory even less appealing. One such idea, the Grandfather Paradox, theorizes a man going back in time and killing his grandfather before said man’s conception is possible. The contradictory thought in this little scheme is that if this man were to kill his grandfather, he would never be born, therefore his grandfather could never have died, however if that’s the case then he would be able to kill him, and so on and so forth. Painful to think about and damaging to the possibility of time jumpers.
     I personally can’t swallow the idea, it simply doesn’t fit. I prefer the far more plausible idea that time travel is unachievable. That time is a single strand, rather than a loop. It plays out as we imagine it to do so. One second at a time. Even the phrase “time travel” is misleading, for time is not a destination and therefore cannot be traveled to. In fact the way most people view time is actually in the form of the completely human devised phenomenon. Time itself is not physical in any manner. I suppose it’s, though false, easy to say time really doesn’t exist. For it’s untraceable to all human senses. Clocks, calendars, measurement units of time, are all singly for people’s benefit. However such devices should not be confused for what time actually is. They allow us to distinguish the exact moment of an entire reality’s decay in a specific point. Our earth is decaying constantly, changing, and re-growing. The only mildly feasible chance of ‘time travel’ would rely on the ability to literally change back the molecular structure in every single thing in the entire reality to their former point of decay. This, currently, isn’t available in modern science. The future looks doubtful for such advancements.
      Though it is unlikely we will ever be able to truly speed back to the fifties in a DeLorean ourselves, it is admittedly fun to watch others play with the idea.

You need to log in to urbis or create an urbis account to review this writing.