About Time

Now, I’m a science fiction fan so generally I’m pretty willing to suspend belief and go with the flow.  I accept faster than light travel on no evidence whatsoever (dilithium crystals.  WTF is a dilithium crystal?) because it really is necessary to the plot.  You just can’t flit around the

Just a fantasy

universe, a different planet every week, without it.

I’m not usually a fan of time travel, though.  They resolve the paradox too glibly and neatly, and yet the paradox remains.  I like Dr. Who.  I guess going totally over the top resolves everything.

I was watching a documentary, though, a week or so ago, which argued the possibility of time travel.  They talked about light moving at different speeds in different areas of space, like ocean currents.  If we could find the interstellar gulf stream, astronauts could sail off for the stars, be gone about 10 years, and come back to an Earth which has aged  1,000 years.

Interesting, but not the stuff of fantasy.  It neither lets us see into the past nor predict the future before it gets here.  The astronauts wouldn’t be changing time, they would be changing themselves.

I suspect that time travel is impossible.  However you define it, like in terms of relativity and light and wormholes and junk, time is still the way we record the passage of events.  One thing happens after another thing and even if somebody came back and changed time, things that have happened would still have happened.  Even if somebody comes back from the future to prevent the holocaust, for instance, it wouldn’t change the fact that the holocaust happened.  In our time, the timeline we know.

So, maybe you’ve got to get into alternate universes.  That would solve the old paradox, by golly.