We all have moments in life we regret and wish to change; be it having never worked up the courage to ask that girl to the prom back in high school or not picking 42, 15, 72, 17, 28 and 6 for our Powerball numbers last week, if only we could somehow alter events in the past. Or perhaps we would like to skip ahead into the distant future where we can fight space aliens using our Lightsabre app on our smartphones (hopefully the battery life is better by then). These possibilities all boil down to the following questions: Is time travel possible? And if so, would there be any point to the limited availability of the McRib?
Can We Travel Forward In Time?
Now obviously I don't mean in the trivial sense - I very much realize we're all technically slogging along through time at 1x speed with no choice in the matter. But is there a way to hit the fast forward button through all the boring parts in life like in that Adam Sandler film Click, which ironically represents 2 hours that most of us who've seen the movie wouldn't mind having back? Well according to science (the Bible remains silent on this issue so we don't have anything else to go by), the answer is a surprising yes. Unless you already knew that, then the answer is an unsurprising yes.
It turns out the elapsing of time, just like the pronunciation of the word tomato, isn't universal for everyone. Special relativity dictates that the rate at which one experiences time with respect to others is dependent on the speed at which one travels. If the Flash felt a little guilty about his triple cheese burger lunch and decided to go for a jog around the park for say, 6 years at 90% of the speed of light, the rest of the world will have aged 15 years in that very same period of time. This phenomenon is known as time dilation - the faster you travel, the less time you experience relative to everyone else. Theoretically you can travel infinitely into the future if you hit light speed. So if you've just been convicted of a serious crime and are looking at a good chunk of hard time, just ask for a cell travelling near the speed of light and you'll be back on the streets selling crack to kids again in no time.
The time dilation experienced increases exponentially as you approach the speed of light
Can We Travel Backward In Time?
While many of you would argue that we'd already managed to set the clock back 20 years in the last election, what I'm referring to is the 88 miles an hour Marty McFly type of time travel. Things are a little more controversial here, but there is some indication that this is impossible. Take the old Grandparents Paradox for instance: if you go back in time and prevent your grandparents from ever meeting, you wouldn't exist; but if you didn't exist, you couldn't go back to prevent them from meeting and therefore you'd still be around. Say what you will, but considering the state of my love life, I'm starting to suspect my future grandchild very likely succeeded somehow.
There are some who disagree however, and subscribe to very elaborate theories including infinite cylinders, cosmic strings or wormholes. The latter is often explained by punching a pencil (wormhole) through a folded sheet of paper (space-time) and is about as useful to understanding time travel as watching your 7th grade teacher put a condom over a banana was to attracting girls.
I'll show you my infinite cylinder if you show me your wormhole
Yet if unconditional time travel into the past was possible, the full body of knowledge, technology and resources accumulated throughout the ages will be shared across the entire timeline of the universe. Every single moment since the dawn of time will be perfectly optimized to the maximum extent allowed by the pinnacle of science. Every elementary particle will be meticulously and immutably arranged in a way that provides the greatest perpetual existence for all. Therefore, either travelling back in time is impossible or someone has to explain to me how the molecules arranged into a piece of Lego and strategically placed where I would tread with my barefoot last night represents this optimal arrangement. So while we may be stuck with global extreme poverty, climate change and genocide, rest assured that it is highly unlikely the future leader of the human resistance has been assassinated by a robot sent back in time by SteemNet.
Oh and give us the McRib all year round dammit!
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