Twists and Turns of Time

The idea of travelling through time never ceases to amaze us all and has always played an irreplaceable part in science fiction. For the longest time, revisiting the past and journeying to the future have only been possible in our imaginations and seem as if they’ll stay there. Or will they?

Scientists and pioneers the world over have been exploring the theories behind time travel and have made baby steps in the field. Theories such as the Theory of Relativity by Einstein and the Black Hole Theory by Stephen Hawking show us that time travel may become possible. Now hold on a second, before you pack your things and make your way to the closest research facility, I have some disheartening news for you. The working theories behind time travel are still in their infancy, meaning that a working time machine is still far from reality. But let’s say you were able to create a working time machine and all you have to do to become the first time traveler is to push a little button, there are still some things that may prevent you from taking the quantum leap. Yup, you guessed it, the bane of time travel itself, paradoxes.

                Time travel paradoxes are logical problems that occur when a person travels through time, often causing disastrous changes in reality. Because of the uncertainty of the true nature and mechanics of time travel, a wide variety of paradoxes exist that each present problems in their own unique way. One of the most famous time travelling brain twisters is the Grandfather paradox. The paradox goes like this, if you were a time traveler and you decided to go back in time to kill your grandfather before he gave birth to any descendant, then that would mean you wouldn’t have been born and that you would cease to exist.

Another paradox is the Endless Loop or the Bootstrap paradox where a cause leads to an effect which then leads back to the original cause, creating an infinite loop of events. For example, an accident in a laboratory caused a deadly virus to spread throughout the country, causing a disaster of epic proportions. You decide to send back critical information about the virus and its cure to your past self in hopes that he/she will find a cure. However, your past self turns out to be the person who caused the accident in the first place, causing the epidemic which was only possible because you sent back information from the future. Mind boggling right?

The Hitler’s Murder paradox is another popular tale which presents the fickleness of reality. In this case, you go back in time to kill Adolf Hitler thinking that it will prevent World War 2 and make the world a better place. The paradox states that anything determined will always come to occurrence in one way or another. This means that by you going back in time, you did prevent Hitler from rising but in the process your actions influenced another person other than Hitler, to take Hitler’s position in the timeline or possibly become someone even worse.

One last paradox is the Butterfly Effect which comes from a theoretical example by Edward Lorenz where a hurricane’s formation was caused by a butterfly flapping its wings weeks prior. Basically, the butterfly effect states that even a very small, near insignificant action done in the past may result in a huge change in the present. Imagine you time travel to the past and accidentally make a girl fall in love with you and who decided to never love anyone other than you. The girl turns out to be the mother of the person who will discover the cure for cancer in the original timeline, where you don’t make the girl fall in love with you and where the girl marries someone else and gives birth to the person. This shows that your simple action of accidentally seducing a girl resulted in great consequences in the future.

All these paradoxes may be too much to take in but these aren’t all of them, there are many others out there that tackle the problems faced by something as complex as time travel. Of course for every problem, there’s a solution. Theories like the multiverse or many worlds theory and the world line and attractor field theory negate the interpretation of time as a single linear line that passes on through a series of causes and effects by stating that many different realities exist and our reality is determined by what choices we make throughout the course of time. This interpretation that “anything that may happen, will happen” gives many possibilities that time may take thus nullifying most time travel paradoxes, giving the time traveler less to worry about.

Nevertheless, time travel is still a very risky thing to do. Aside from leaping over the scientific and technological barrier and dueling the paradoxes, the consequences that your leap through time may pose on our reality are all too real and they just escalate in severity as your actions become more distinct. A time traveler carries the burden of the fact that even one mishap may alter the timeline and reality forever. He/she may start World War III, unleash an epidemic, and other disastrous events. It may even be possible that a time travel accident may cause the entirety of space time and the entire universe to collapse. Despite this, the possibilities of good that time traveling may bring even out the odds. Imagine finding the cure for terminal diseases, discovering scientific and engineering concepts never known before, and solving the mysteries of the past by just weaving through time.

Time travel certainly has the potential to change the world. It can either be the ultimate blessing to human kind or become the worst curse to ever befall humanity. What will it be? Only time will tell.