Thinking About: Time Travel

I’ve just finished watching my second box-set of Star Trek DVDs – this one being on the theme of time travel. My particular favourites were Yesterday’s Enterprise from ST:TNG (strictly speaking an Alternate Universe story rather than a time travel one – although the two are interconnected of course) and Year in Hell from ST: Voyager.

When handled well, tine-travel stories are amongst my favourite SF sub-genre. Not only do they allow the reader/viewer to visit possible futures they also allow access to the past and allow for the possibility of actually changing things. Of course that’s a particularly enticing idea. I’m sure we all have past experiences that we wish we could go back and change or the ability to leave messages for our past selves written with the hindsight of our present selves. I know I do! Then, of course, there’s the possibility of changing historical events. As all good SF shows this is fraught with problems. Not only ethical issues of, to use that old chestnut, of killing Hitler as a baby but the very real possibility that no matter how badly things really turned out any meddling with the past could actually make things much worse!

Being able to simply observe past events would certainly clear up a lot of historical mysteries – but we have to remember that the past started a second ago so future historians could be watching any of us right now. Viewing the past means an end to any kind of privacy. Then there are the countless missing artefacts lost in time – or maybe in some time travellers vault! Of course if time travel is even possible (which it might be) the question is: Where are all the time travellers? Is it like the Fermi Paradox which asks the question: Where are all the aliens? Maybe time travellers are indeed amongst us – just very well hidden or very well policed.

It would certainly be fun (if not actually profitable) to travel in time. I like the idea of creating countless alternate universes every time I travel back (or forward) in time. The question arises though about how I would actually recognise my time line from any of the alternates – and would it really matter. Maybe I could create an ideal world in the present by manipulating the past. I wonder if the ends would justify the means.

The idea of time travel is fascinating. It opens up literally endless possibilities and the real prospect of fixing our past mistakes. It is however a very dangerous game to play if it ever becomes reality. Maybe too dangerous for the existence of site-seeing tours or holidays in past ages – to say nothing of dinosaur hunts. Maybe a giant rock falling from the sky didn’t finish off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Maybe it was time travelling big game hunters…..