Time Travel - A Different Direction?

If the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis is the suburban Wal-Mart of theories about what the UFO phenomenon might represent, then time travel is the small boutique shop that's still in business downtown. Sure, it doesn't get a lot of attention, but it's got some pretty cool stuff to look at nonetheless.

Is time travel possible? Some of our smartest scientists tell us that yes, indeed, it is possible, although not for us, given the amount of energy it would take. Michio Kaku is one of the most prominent exponents of the idea that time travel could happen... someday.

Here's the thing, however - Kaku, and almost anyone else who discusses time travel as a possibility, talks about it from the persective of someone coming to our time from the future.

Things are usually no different when time travel is applied as an explanation for UFOs. It almost always comes from the same perspective - that our descendents are coming back in time to observe / interact with us.

But that creates all sorts of potential paradoxes.

Now, there may be answers to the various paradoxes that would result, but even supporters of the idea that you can travel back in time admit that it would be risky. What if you screwed up, and somehow changed all of existence?

Sure, you would wind up safe and sound in a newly created parallel universe, but there's no guarantee that any of your loved ones would still be around. Going back in time to kill Hitler and prevent the rise of the Nazis, for example, seems like a good idea, but there's no guarantee that the new world you would create would be any better. Who knows? Maybe it would be worse. One thing you could pretty much guarantee is that everything you knew would be different, or gone.

No thanks.

So even on a theoretical level, I don't buy the idea that people are traveling back in time, for any reason.

But what about people traveling forward in time?

That's an entirely different proposition, because there's no risk of altering your reality, so there are no paradoxes to worry about.

But if we don't have the technology to travel in time now, nor can we reasonably imagine having it any time soon, then how could someone in our past travel forward to our time?

The answer is that they couldn't - not from our past, as we know it. But here's the thing - our knowledge of the past is pretty dodgy. We still don't know everything that happened within the 20th century. We know even less about what happened two thousand years ago.

One hundred thousand years ago? One million years ago? One hundred millions years ago!

We might like to think we know how everything happened, but we don't. Anyone who tells you that we would definitely be able to detect remnants of a civilization that inhabited the Earth a million years ago is dreaming - particularly if that civilization was sufficiently advanced to have taken on a different form from ours, and then suffered some calamity that wiped it out. 

What if there was, as some people have speculated, and as legend would have it, a civilization on this planet that pre-dates our own, one that was indeed highly advanced, to the point where it had figured out how to travel through time? Maybe human, or maybe something else... post-human, perhaps.

So let me throw a scenario out there for you, as a thought experiment if nothing else.

One billion years ago (just picking a number), a non-human civilization arose on this planet that advanced far beyond our own, to the point where their existence was in essence virtual, not physical. At some point, they merged into a single consciousness.

With their combined intellect, they eventually discovered how to travel in time, and possessed the power to make it happen - and so off they went, to their future. Not as a physical being, however, but rather as consciousness - only their thoughts could travel through time. They could interact with whatever or whomever would follow them, but only indirectly - a burning bush that talks, perhaps, or lights in the sky that baffle us, or maybe something even more complex and interesting, that deals with us on a subconscious level.

In our dreams, maybe.

Then, once they had finished exploring the future, they decided to explore other things. The galaxy, perhaps, or other dimensions. And then, when it was all finished, they returned home for one final journey... a voyage past the "grey wall" that even they could not see beyond - the one thing, when all other things are known, that would still hold a mystery for something / someone like them.

Death.

Having seen all that there was to see, and experienced all that there was to experience, except their own mortality, they opened that final door, and disappeared forever.

As I said, it's just a thought...

Paul Kimball