Time Travel: A Scientific Dream or Waking Nightmare?
Every writer has a niche, things they like to write about more so over others. My thing is people. I’m fascinated by people. When I was a young girl, I was very observant and liked to people watch. I still do, but life commitments and busy days rarely afford me the luxury of sitting on a bench at a park observing the world around me. Plus, well, I moved from a walkable, dynamic city six years ago to a commuter town where I am frequently in my car on the highway that runs through the main corridor of the island I live on. Not ideal, but a choice I made for several reasons. Human contact is now relegated to watching people walk on the side of the road while I’m at an intersection waiting for the light to change or observing others while I’m out running errands. It is hardly enough time to get a true sense of the soul life of an individual or extract meaning from body language and conversations, or even my environment.
I haven’t abandoned my love of observation altogether; it’s just evolved into observing others online and studying the lives of individuals I find fascinating or relevant in our collective consciousness. This evolution has led to my interest in studying the lives of people that are readily accessible that I oftentimes write about it. It has also led me down the path of observing those that have passed, a process that can bring up feelings of helplessness and pain, particularly if someone has lived a complicated life and faced a premature death.
Life became complex and difficult in my early to mid-20s. At some point the decisions I was making were leading to a meaningless life. I needed to find purpose to dig myself out of the abyss of solitude and despair common in the life of 20-somethings. I gravitated towards philosophical books, religious texts, and people who could teach me about the profound meaning of life — artists, musicians, poets, vagabonds, sci-fi nerds, conspiracy theorists, and thought-provoking university professors. Anyone with deep wisdom or curious questions about the greater meaning of life had my attention. It was an invaluable and humbling experience that has formed who I am today and made me a better human being. It has also piqued my interest in the idea of time travel via the study of history and the individuals that exist within those stories.
When I was in elementary school, I loved reading Choose Your Own Adventure books in the school library that laid out a series of choices and would lead you to a variety of outcomes. I liked that the stories narrative could change simply by making a choice and I would go back and choose something different just to see the outcome. I could control the character’s story. It was a new concept I hadn’t considered as a child and one that many don’t consider in adulthood. It is easy for us to forget that life is just a series of choices influenced by our reactions to certain situations and conditions.
When I explore history and the lives and deaths of others, I frequently wonder what their lives would have been like if they made a different choice. If only they understood something they hadn’t considered or knew a piece of information that was integral to their wellbeing, would it have changed the course of their life? Would they have lived longer or lived a better life? In some sense, I want to go back and save them just as I would go back in the Choose Your Own Adventure books and change a character’s story. But the reality is, time travel is a complex subject that is not as fanciful as we dream it to be, and it doesn’t work the way we think. It’s less fantasy and more mathematic.
Scientists who study time travel say that from our current understanding we can only go forward in time a few minutes, not back. Going back is merely a thought or memory. From our current understanding it is impossible to physically travel back in time.
To take the topic of time travel further, I have pondered what it would be like to go back in time and try to help someone change a situation. When I do this, I don’t try to change a major event or historical turning point, I try to help individuals by revealing bits of information to them to try to get them to make decisions to change the course of their life. Although this can feel temporarily satisfying, it poses another question. What would it be like to travel back in time? First, I don’t think people have changed all that much in the last one hundred or so years. I don’t think it would be difficult to blend in unnoticed unless you were speaking about the future. I do think our awareness of the limitations of the past would be magnified, which could create the feeling of being suffocated or trapped in a time warp. Imagine being surrounded by people who have limiting beliefs, an outdated value-system, and no knowledge of how our society would evolve or devolve based on the ignorance of those in the past, that is now a time travelers present. I think it would be difficult to navigate certain conversations and could feel like you are dumbing yourself down to try to maintain your cover. I mean, you would have to carry out your time travelling adventure covertly. If someone found out, you could be considered insane, and depending on what you revealed, you could have the feds on your trail or be placed in a psych ward. All I know is I have thought about this in a deep meditative state, and I felt terror at the thought of being trapped in the past with no way out, having to relive history. Would it be worth the risk?
That brings me to the question, how would you return to the present time? Or are you going to remain in the past or future? If you do stay, could this change the whole course of our society? If JFK lives, maybe it has a domino effect, and my parents don’t meet in 1970. I might cease to exist. It’s one example, but there are thousands of possibilities that could change the course of history for better or for worse. Time travel becomes a massive responsibility that requires a methodical and careful approach.
As much as I like the idea of time travel, I think it’s bound to become more waking nightmare than scientific dream. There is a reason we can’t travel through time, at least in this current incarnation. Sure, philosophers such as Rudolf Steiner have discussed the possibility of human’s evolving in the future where the constraints of our material world are lifted, but will they be able to travel through time, and if so, what will that look like?
S. Angell is a published poet, writer, philosopher, and video blogger. She explores various topics, including love, life, death, history, and society from a philosophical perspective. You can find her on Instagram @rainydaypoetess
