Meta-Time Travel

By Matt Pike

Humanity is marked by our desire to expand, to progress, and to advance. It would seem that as a species, we are engrained with a sense of wanderlust. Every moment that passes is a new experience, a new perception of all that is, and every action that we take is a journey towards a new place. Life is an "ongoing mission to explore strange, new worlds". Some random television show I saw once opened with "Space&the final frontier", but they were lying. Space is simply a minor detail in the universe. The true final frontier lies in time, and in traveling it.  

            Time travel to the future would be considerably easier to accomplish, given the fact that we are already traveling into the future. Each moment that passes propels us another moment into the future, for we are in constant motion towards the future. It seems it would be relatively simple to accelerate that rate of travel into the future, since all that is involved is finding a way to prevent someone from aging for the desired amount of time. If the traveler could be accelerated to the speed of light, time no longer exists for them until they slow down again. If someone were to travel at the speed of light for a thousand years, when she stopped she would not have aged at all, and would step back onto Earth a thousand years in the future, having experienced not a day. Travel to the future simply involves the slowing of someone's perception of the flow of time, without dictating anything about the nature of time itself. If an individual were to fall asleep and then be put in cryogenic stasis, when that individual was awakened in the future, they would experience having traveled into the future. One thing to be noted, however, is that a person traveling into the future in this methods is still a participating member in the timeline. Even if someone is in stasis, her matter is still occupying space from one moment to the next, and affecting every other part of the universe by its presence and atomic interaction. If an individual were to vanish completely from the present and then suddenly reappear out of thin air in the future, this would necessitate many of the same characteristics about time I will be discussing in regards to travel to the past.

             Moving from the present to the past presents more interesting problems. Hanley and Lewis raise the issue of possible paradoxes that could occur with travel to the past. The feasibility of these paradoxes depends upon the nature of time itself. If time is viewed as a one-dimensional, linear time line, then paradoxes could be encountered. For example, if someone travels into history aiming to kill his grandfather, it is already apparent that this cannot happen.  The fact that the traveler was born, and the grandfather was alive in the past the traveler is familiar with, proves that in fact the grandfather was not killed. Thus something exists that prevents the traveler from taking this action, and thus his will is not completely free. He may be free in his desires, but the outcome of his attempted action is already written.

At this point, I would like to propose a change to the one-dimensional, linear model. There may be a second "time" dimension where the single time line could be rewritten. If a traveler goes to the past and kills his grandfather, obviously he will not be born in the future. However, he is still there at the time he kills his grandfather, and thus for a chronoclasm to occur and suddenly make him "disappear", the consequences of his actions would have to somehow "travel" into the past themselves. In other words, he will not be born in the future, but how is this going to "catch up" to him in the past? If he is in the past, the fact of his not being born will have to travel back into before he would have been born to cause him to not exist. This suggests a weird kind of origin loop where, in effect, the traveler can exist despite never having been created. This deals more with the feasibility of the actual techniques involved in the travel of time, which is best left to the physics that would make it possible. Anyway, if the traveler kills his grandfather, there is no reason to believe he will absolutely disappear. In this case, given the one-dimensional model of time, the timeline would then overwrite itself. If it is linear, everything that happens must be expressed only in this solitary time line, and therefore, if something is changed, the remaining timeline must be cleared and then rewritten to express what happens. The single timeline we experience could have been rewritten many times in this manner, but all that we are aware of is the "final" post-alteration timeline. This points out one of the many weaknesses in the linear model, because it raises the question of where those other line-changes occur.

Some would object that it is outside of the linear model altogether to have multiple rewritings of the timeline. These rewritings, however, still occupy only the single timeline, and thus are linear. Additionally, if time is truly a one-dimensional line, the traveling of time is impossible in terms of time "jumping". Consider using a pen to draw a line on a piece of paper. In order to then move your pen from one point on the line to another, it must be lifted into the air, which is another dimension. In order for an object to leave one point of the timeline and reappear elsewhere on the line, it must move outside of the line itself. Otherwise it is simply following the line, and is not traveling time, except in the sense that we are time traveling with every second that passes. If a linear model is adopted where limits would be imposed on the traveler's actions, time travel itself is not possible, and thus it rejects itself as a feasible model for analyzing travel in time.

The clear and obvious answer to this, and all of life's questions for that matter, is Multiple World Theory. (I'm a big fan, in case you couldn't tell.) One example of the complexity found in this model lies in the analysis of the universe as an infinite expanse. If the universe comprises everything, it must encompass every physical thing that is, as well as every world that anyone has ever imagined or dreamed about. If someone dreams of a purple submarine floating in a sea of chocolate with toasters swimming past, this world is also a part of the universe. It exists in some form, and is therefore a possibility of what could be.

 If one considers that every action and reaction can take many forms, the fact that there are these possibilities makes them real. In order for possibilities to actually be possible, they must exist. If we step outside of conventional four-dimensional space, we conceive of a multi-dimensional realm where every choice branches into numerous different timelines, which then continue branching on their own. Consider this as an infinite matrix of possibility where our perception of "what is" is simply the assignment of our consciousness to one particular path through this matrix. If we then consider Julian Barbour's theory of time as expressed in "From Here to Eternity" we see that each timeline is actually a progression among eternal "now"s, with each instant existing forever. Thus we further divide each of these varied timelines into eternal instants within each possibility, which are each possibilities in themselves. Again, in order for any to exist, every possible one must also exist. We find ourselves multiplying an infinite matrix by an infinite matrix, which, if my math is correct, is one big matrix. Thus we arrive at a conception of the universe as an infinite matrix with infinite space, infinite progression through that space in time, and infinite progression through that time. (I can't even begin to explain, but I've concluded this matrix is thirteen-dimensional.) Given this conception, time travel is a simple and unlimited traversing of just a few of these dimensions within the matrix.

The best question to be raised at this point is that of consciousness and how it ties these infinite points and combinations within the matrix together into the perception of a single, four-dimensional, or perhaps even presentist, realm. This perception is a result of our limited ability to be cognitive of all the possibilities in the matrix. At least at present, our minds have to channel everything into a nice, orderly structure, which then is no more than a limited representation of reality.  In traveling time, we are no longer traveling back to a different point on a line, but are simply altering the course of our consciousness as it moves through the matrix. If we could ever expand our minds to the point where we could conceive of the entire matrix and understand our "cognitive travel" (and I do know people who have taken enough LSD that they must be close to this point) then time travel would occur simply by thinking of a different point in the matrix, and assigning our consciousness to that point.

Now, once I have that ability, I'll go back to medieval Europe, build myself a beautiful castle on a high cliff overlooking a mountain lake, search through every single point in the infinite matrix until I find my soul-mate, and at sunrise, the moment of our first kiss, I will freeze my consciousness, and remain in that instant for all of ETERNITY...