Simplify the Web Small and Simple things

I like Science Fiction. I especially like to examine writers' creative attempts at explaining time travel. Their theories are often interesting, but they never hold under deep scrutiny. The reason is simply that we don't exist along a continuum of time, we exist only in the present. What we call the past is simply an aggregate of memories and records of events that have occurred (or that we think have occurred). What is past no longer exists in its past form, there is nothing to "travel" back to. Similarly, the future is entirely non-existent. Although we all agree that some events can be accurately predicted, the most part of our future is fluid, subject to billions of daily decisions and random events. It is a theoretical impossibility to leave one's present to go into another, because the present is unique.

Of course, according to Einstein's theory we could alter the speed at which we age relative to other people, if we could travel away from them at the speed of light or close to it, and then return at equal speed. But this would not violate my postulate: the voyage would be irreversible, and would resemble more the experience of a comatose person who awakes 20 years later in a transformed world from that which he remembers.

Another theory of time travel in the past involves the concept of an ancestral memory. We visit the past through lived memories, not by physically leaving our present sphere of existence to enter a former. This assumes that memories are somehow passed down, in a repressed form, from one generation to another, and that these memories can be somehow unlocked and re-lived, perhaps through hypnosis. An extended version of this theory goes beyond the simple heredity of memories, which limits to our direct ancestors' memories. It involves the idea of collective consciousness, which allows us to share the ancestral memories passed down through the ages. If these theories were true, they would come as close to time travel as I can imagine. Yet, considering the extremely subjective nature of memories, this could paint a rather confusing picture, especially if we are not able to isolate specific memories.

Despite the rather airy-fairiness of these notions, I find the idea of revisiting the past absolutely fascinating, much more than visiting the future. Anyway, the future is pretty much bound to be some form or another of repetition of past events, predictable as human nature tends to be. Only by understanding the past can we accurately predict the future. We can then visit the future of our choice by living according to the lessons learnt from the past.

It would also be great fun to see how creative our historians have been...