Abusing Time Travel

In one of my old journals I found an entry where I had provided the precise time and place I was writing from, and invited my future self to travel back in time and visit me there. The fact that I stood myself up for that appointment proved beyond any doubt in my mind that time travel was never perfected in my lifetime. And now that I’m older, I’m convinced that time travel won’t be happening for anyone (on the contrary, it seems that even ‘air travel’ is becoming less possible than it once was).

Despite this conviction, there are times when even a rational mind can break down in a pleading hope for any technology capable of turning back the clock. This has happened to me twice.

The first time was a situation at work when a badguy committed a break and enter just one block away from an address where I was positioned, waiting to catch him in the act. I had trouble sleeping for a while and kept replaying the whole thing in my mind, thinking, “there has to be a way I could go back and do it over.” I felt a general resentment towards the scientific community for ‘just not trying hard enough’.

The second time that I temporarily believed in and yearned for time travel, it was much worse. I would have given anything for the chance to go back and tell dad all of the things that I should have told him when he was alive. And while the regret has faded a little over the years, if I ever found myself in a time machine with only enough gas, or flux, or whatever, for a single trip, that would still be the coordinates I entered.

But on the other hand…

If I had access to a time machine that didn’t require massive amounts of money or lightning to operate, I could see myself totally running it into the ground. Worse than our Civic, which has worn out two timing chains so far, this thing would have so many miles (years) on it, that the odometer (chronometer?) would max out and roll over again to zero.

[Aside: Everyone knows that it’s important to witness an odometer changing to a momentous number. Once, I almost got into an accident while following my buddy Trevor down a twisty mountain pass in BC because I didn’t want to take my eyes from my motorcycle’s “clock”, for fear that I would miss seeing the numbers roll over to “1-4-0-0-0” (miles). Just imagine how momentous AND IRONIC it would be to see a time machine’s odometer go back to zero.]

I came across this video recently and it shows just the sort of temptation I would cave to.



Now I don’t want to give the impression that Tyson is now too grown up, or not cute anymore, or that he's not a sweet boy (although all he needs to do is start setting fires and he will have exhibited the full “triad of psychopathy”). But he has grown up a little bit, and I feel like it’s happened way too quickly. If I could, I would spend whole days in moments like that one.

Which brings me to the close of this post and the moral of the story. If we were constantly travelling back to all those past moments, we would certainly miss out on all the priceless things that are happening right now. In the end, that’s probably the very reason why the gift of time travel has not been given to us.

Well, that and the risk of causing rifts in the Space-Time Continuum. Seriously, what is that thing made of anyways? Cheesecloth?



- C