Mick's Muses's

Have you ever really thought about time, not in terms of whether you have enough of it but if time really exists? When most of us think about time, what is really going through ours minds is a man-made concept for measuring a period that has elapsed between one event and another. The start and end of a race, the beginning and end of a journey, how long since the universe was created down to how long it took the kettle to boil. All of these are a few of the many millions of ways that we measure the man-made concept of elapsed time every day.

There certainly is a form of time called Spacetime mentioned by Einstein in his Theory of Relativity. One of the effects of spacetime is for time to pass more slower the faster a object travels. Passengers travelling by a jet between New York and London apparently age milliseconds less during the course of their journey than people on the ground. This poses the question is some sort of force called time being manipulated by speed and gravity or is this some more natural physical, (mechanical), phenomena?

Many people have written about time over the centuries, from H.G Wells fictional novel “The Time Machine” to others who propose that time may be another dimension. It seems logical to myself that if time is some sort of force that could be manipulated, then assuming mankind continues to survive, future generations perhaps a million years from now will eventually manage to harness it and want to use it.

If time and time travel were a possibility, would we not have numerous future time travellers walking amongst us now? If time travel existed it would also raise an enigma. The presence and inter-actions of a future person in a past time, however innocuous, would effect the future yet to come. For instance, a future persons presence in a past time might cause another man to turn his head to look at him instead of noticing a pretty girl walking on the other side of the road. That man and pretty girl might well have been some of the future travellers ancestors who then never married because they never met, as they were distracted from seeing each other by the time travellers presence. The enigma is if this couple never married then the time traveller could never have been born. If the time traveller was never born, then he could never make the journey back to the past. If the time traveller did not make the journey into the past then the couple would have met and the time traveller would have been born in the future to make his journey back into history. There are numerous variations on this theme all which end in an impossible contradiction.

Science fiction programs are often based around man made laws forbidding time travel due to the possibility of creating unforeseen and irreversible consequences in the past affecting the current time period of the future law makers. The big flaw in this argument is any such law would only be relevant to the time period of those law makers. It is not possible to pass legislation that will last for eternity and future generations, possibly thousands of years later might well hold different views. People also break laws.

One of the other major problems with supposed time travel is what physical location is a person occupying as they travel through time. Most science fiction programmes conveniently show a person reappearing in the same physical location at some time in the past, or the future dependant on their direction of travel through time. It should be remembered that the universe is in constant motion as it continues to expand and even entire galaxies move independently sometimes colliding with each other. Time travel would not only have to involve travelling through time but somehow also navigating vast distances through space just to arrive at the same location but in a different time period. How would a time traveller know they would not materialise in the middle of a mountain or in outer space?

Another concept that has to be considered if time travel were possible is it would mean everyone’s lives are preordained. If it were possible to travel to the future then that future must have already occurred to be able to travel there in the first place. This would mean that for every second of everyone’s life, every action, thought, breathe would have already been decided in advance for such a future to exist in the first place. If so, who is writing the script? If there is no future, does this mean people can only travel into the past which did exist? Once again there are serious flaws in the argument. If a person was able to travel back in time how would they have any knowledge of their future time which has not yet occurred? How could they exist if they and their parents had not yet been born? There is also the question of the physical matter their bodies are composed of. This matter would have existed in the past they travelled to but is it possible for the same matter to exist twice?

If time travel were a feasibility, then once the knowledge had been gained, billions of people that would be born in successive generations would be using it. It would not even be possible for authorities to hide the knowledge of time travel as it would simply be rediscovered by successive generations.

If time existed and time travel was a credible possibility it would be impossible to walk the streets due to overcrowding caused by the billions of additional visitors from incalculable generations in the future.

When put into perspective the practicable arguments against the existence of time and time travel as some form of force, say like gravity, seem to outweigh the lack of physical evidence that time actually exists. Personally I do not believe there is such a thing as time other than spacetime which seems to me to be a more physical thing and the man made concept of measuring periods between events.

I certainly do not have a closed mind and I am open to all sorts of possibilities. I recognise that many people will argue against my thoughts and may cite additional dimensions, dual planes of existence and who knows what else. All I ask as a simple person is to be shown the proof of the theory.

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Filed under: Thought Provoking, Time - Does it Exist? | Tagged: #time, #timetraveller, time, time travel, time traveller, timetravel |