Time Travel – And what to do about it

I was thinking a bit today about time travel. In particular, the method of winding back and forward the years, so everything moved around you in a blur as you stood still. Tiny stems of trees coming up from the leaf mold, growing mighty, and falling like soft rain around you.

Stephen Hawking makes the excellent point that we will never create a time travel device, because if we’re going to, tourists in time would be proficient now. People would be appearing and disappearing, and we’d be overrun by the equivelants of the elderly American couple in Vietnam (“Oh, you still use land cars! How quaint! And look, Hank, MacDonalds hasn’t had the great income crash of 2197!”) making patronising comments all over the place.

And I say, What the hell, because we can all dream.

One of my favourite time travel daydreams is the “Who to Save” question. Would you go back, and save Jews from the holocaust, innocent women and children from the Norman Conquest? Or would that be disrupting history? Is the fact that this man died in a concentration camp, which allowed another man to marry his fiancee necessary to your exsistence?

Anne Frank. Would you save her? Stand in The Anne Frank House, and wind back, until the small frightened girl and her small frightened family appeared before you?

Or would the fact that you were only saving one of many poor poor children be terrible for your conscience?

I’ll never know. And I’ll never have the chance to for two reasons. First, the car has pulled up outside the school gates, where I am writing this, and Second, Stephen Hawking has proved otherwise.

And he knows everything.

Everything