Time Traveling

Time travel is such an interesting topic: all sorts of crazy ideas have been passed around all trying to give a definitive answer as to what the consequences of it might be, how it works or if it is even possible. Today I will give you my version of time travel with the help of Back to the Future’s version since it is a movie I highly prefer and slightly agree with in terms of time travel schematics.

The diagram provided has a description below basically explaining how each timeline is created in Back to the Future. According to the diagram, as some of you may notice, jumping “into” the future will not alter the current timeline at all. This is where my own disagreement comes in. Any sort of prolonged absence between the present and the future (by which we are traveling to) would result in change of the current timeline. Let us say that I take a trip “into” the future twenty years from now. Though the trip was instantaneous for me the people who saw me most, assuming that would be several times a week, would think that I had disappeared; moreover, I pass up a myriad of opportunities to “leave my mark” upon the world due to this absence. In short, I did not exist for twenty years.

The diagram also suggests that traveling back in time is quite different from traveling forward in time. Any sort of time travel to the past that interacts or interferes with something that “inspires” the future will result in an alteration of that timeline and create another, different timeline (as Doc says, “erased from existence”); it really means that any time travel to the past will distort and create an alternate future – in the eyes of the time traveler only because for everyone else the change would be unknown. I agree, and yet again disagree. I agree that time travel to the past will create an alternate future that is unknown to me (if I am the time traveler), but I disagree on another level which I will discuss next.

 The way I see time travel is somewhat like a description I’ve heard of other dimensions – dimensions in the sense of dots, lines, depth, and time. The first dimension is a dot, the second dimension is a line or plane of which we can only see one side (i.e. cartoons on a sheet of paper), the third dimension incorporates depth to shapes and multiple sides, and then the fourth dimension brings time into the formula (i.e. how much time it takes for the image of an actual object to reach our eyes). The further one delves into dimensions the more complicated it gets. Eventually one ends up looking at dimensions that deal with the infinite possibilities of a single universe, then infinite universes, and finally the infinite possibilities within an infinite number of universes. Anyways, I see my life full of infinite possibilities that may turn into outcomes, and other people’s lives are the same; moreover, while there is an infinite number of possibilities for every second of my life and every other life or inanimate object there is also an infinite number of other universes in which the infinite number of possibilities are each tried out for my life alone which is then compounded by the infiniteness of all “other’s” as well.

I see time travel as a type of traveling from my universe to another universe. This means that if I time travel I may arrive in a universe in which another “me” exists and is living out one or more of the infinite possibilities that did not occur in my universe or I arrive in a universe that I never existed in or I arrive in a universe that precedes my existence and any interaction I have in that universe will ultimately change that universe before the other “me” is even born or I travel to a universe in which the other “me” is long gone though my presence in that universe at that time still has some quite profound effects on the future of that universe. Unfortunately, my view of time travel means that the probability of the time traveler going back to their universe is one to the infinite number of possibilities of one universe to the infinite number of universes to the infinite possibilities within an infinite number of universes. 

But since the unknown cannot be spoken of as fact I must say this was merely a play for the mind.