#43: Time Travel

Covid-19 related travel restrictions are in place almost everywhere. Hard to decide where to go next. And yet, one particular journey might actually be out of scope. Any guess?

Time travel.

The scientist Stephen Hawking was seeking proof. Not mathematical proof, but practical evidence. It was 2009 and he hosted a party. Nothing unusual if not for the invitation protocol. Hawking would send out the invitation only until after the reception had passed.

Why would he have done that? Only those invitees with a proven ability to travel back in time would be able to show up on time for the party.

Nobody came.

The End.

What if that was indeed the end of Hawking’s time travel story but not your own?

Let’s look beyond his experiment and assume for a moment that you had a time machine in your backyard ready for take off.

Would you get on board?

What would be the coordinates of your destination?

Back in time of your own life or way before then?

Personally, I find this very hard to imagine. The one question that keeps popping up in my head is whether the time machine performed only regular one-way or VIP return trips.

One thing is for sure, I wouldn’t want to go back to my younger days. What happened happened. No way would I want to tinker with my own life. I would target a moment in time before my own time, if at all.

What comes to mind is aboriginal land in Australia before European settlement in 1788, indigenous people of the Americas prior to colonization or the San tribe in Southern Africa, believed to be the world’s most ancient race.

Why those and not the Golden Ages during the Roman Republic or the Byzantine Empire?

There were certainly better times in Italy, Greece and England centuries ago compared to what they are today.

No matter what, I wouldn’t want to experience another time when we already claimed to be in control of planet earth, humans behaved as if they ruled the world and we no longer considered ourselves a part of nature.

That thought made me see something I hadn’t seen before. I realize how impossible time travel is in real life. That doesn’t preclude me from exploring the idea in my mind, does it?

So time travel is possible after all!

The universal «time machine» also has a name.

It is called imagination.

I have the key.

Not My End.

Gratitude to my son Maël for telling me the story of Stephen Hawking’s time travel experiment.