Time Travel

Time travel has always been a fascination of mine, almost an obsession. What if we could go back to any time period in history? Where would you go? What interests you so much about that particular era?

I have always been an avid reader of science fiction, and many of these stories deal with the topic of time travel. Most people would prefer to go back to the past because we know more about it. Some may even want to venture into the uncharted waters, the total unknown of the future. Brave souls indeed!

I’m thinking in terms of just going back in time because I love history. What happened in the past has a direct and obvious correlation to the present-day modern world. In my perfect scenario, and just for fun, I would be invisible, like a fly on the wall, and just observe famous scenes and events in the past.

What would it be like to witness the building of the Pyramids, the glory and splendor that was Rome? To be able to eavesdrop on the conversations of the ancient Greek philosophers as they pondered the secrets of the universe and the meaning and purpose of life?

If you are religious, you may choose to be present and witness the Crucifixion and Ressurection of Jesus Christ. Or figuratively sit at the feet of Eastern religious and philosophical leaders like Buddha, Confucious, Lao Tzu, or the Islamic Muslim leader, the Prophet Muhammed?

If you are of an adventurous bent, you may want to visit crucial battlefields that shaped and formed our present world. For example, you could go back to the Battle of Hastings in 1066 when the Norman conquest of the Anglo Saxons in England took place. Most historians would mark that as a crucial event in European history.

You could visit the battlefields of the American Revolutionary War and see how George Washington made his decisions at the famous battle of Yorktown. You could visit the Civil War and see the carnage of Gettysburg, and listen in on the strategies of Abraham Lincoln as he was devising them. You could be present when Dwight Eisenhower launched the invasion of Normandy, turning the tide of WWII and ensuring Allied victory.

You may like to go back to the time when Cleopatra reigned in ancient Egypt. Or you could go back to medieval times and be present at the court of Queen Elizabeth, and see her and her notorious father, King Henry VIII in action. You may choose to witness the reign of the powerful Russian Empress Catherine the Great.

The choices are literally endless, depending on the scope of your imagination and your interests in different time periods. I doubt anybody would choose to go back to the horrible days of the Black Plague in Europe or the inhumane Jewish death camps of the Hitler regime, or the nuclear holocaust that enveloped Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This is all based on the premise that time travel is actually possible. Most scientists scoff at the very notion of being able to travel in time. But others like Einstein thought it may be theoretically possible as part of his general theory of relativity. Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawkins scoffed that if time travel was possible, we would be overwhelmed with tourists from the future!

I’m certainly no scientist, and the nice safe fantasy of just being an invisible fly on the wall I would prefer may very well be impossible. Maybe, like many scientists cautiously acknowledge, if time travel were even possible, it would be a physical one-way trip with no return.

People throughout the centuries have mysteriously disappeared without a trace. Some people think that these people may have traveled through time portals like in the popular Netflix TV series Outlander, and are a staple in romantic fiction. Maybe they fell through wormholes into another dimension, or just took a souped-up Delorean like Michael J. Fox in the wildly popular “Back to the Future” trilogy.

I think in my own head that if time travel was actually possible, it would have to already exist. I think that the past, present, and future would all have to be part of the same time-space continuum. To me, it would be like walking along the banks of a winding river, a concept I probably absorbed by reading so many science fiction books.

You would start from here, by the side of the riverbank and if you liked being here, just stay here. And if you wanted to go back in time you could walk one way or if you wanted to venture into the future you would walk the other way. Because the river is winding and twisty, you could not see all the different dimensions at the same time.

I think the appeal of all these time travel musings and fantasies that make them so attractive to so many people is that many people don’t especially like living in the hectic madness and constant danger of today’s modern-day world. But in fact, there has never been an absolutely safe time and place to live in anyway.

That’s why I prefer the fly-on-the-wall fantasy, where I could just observe and not participate in any meaningful way or be in any danger. The world has always been a strange and dangerous place, but as humans, we have an insatiable curiosity and thirst for knowledge.

There has never been any proof that I know of that anybody actually ever traveled in time. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t at least theoretically possible.

You can approximate the experience by reading a good book, like a historical novel, watching tv, or seeing a movie. The Time Machine by HG Wells or the more modern Michael Crichton novel “Timeline” are both excellent adventures, as Bill and Ted might have said. It’s really up to you, or not.

But if you could, where would you go if you could pick any time period in history?