This post is the latest in our critically-acclaimed Using Middle School Writing Prompts to Dredge Up Blog Content ™ series. You can read about its origins here, but that’s not necessary because this week’s question is the only one that has ever mattered.
“Pretend you had a time machine and could travel way into the future or to the past. Where would you go? What do you think life would be like?”
YES. *rubs hands together* FINALLY. The culmination of decades of modest consumption of both pop culture and pop astrophysics. The Denali of useless information. It is time to talk about time travel, and if wormholes exist, you can bet I’ll be irradiating my way back to this moment any time I need to feel alive.
Okay, but first, I do understand that the key word here is “pretend.”
Of course it is, because I don’t have a time machine and neither does anyone else. But I think “pretend” is also meant to keep question answerers—again, middle schoolers—out of the quantum physics weeds and inside the border grasses of historical curiosity. Or speculative fiction. This card was designed to generate creative writing, not dissertations.
Fine.
But before we start pretending, I need to liberate some thoughts about time travel itself. I have many. Not because I’d ever do it, but because Benedict Cumberbatch narrates much of the best time travel content available on the internet, and now that I’ve come through the back door I can’t seem to leave.
I don’t think traveling backward in time is possible. Even if we had the technology to survive a trip through a wormhole, going to the linear past would create too many temporal paradoxes in our otherwise neatly constructed physical universe to contend with. (Unless we’re talking time travel to multiverses, which we won’t. It’s impolite.)
Backward time travel would break apart the law of cause and effect, and then we’d be in a pickle, wouldn’t we? Particles can do it, maybe. But particles don’t have to live and work and get the dog to the groomer on time. What are you going to do without cause and effect? Bake cookies and then go buy the ingredients? Inhale and then…inhale again?
And then there’s the whole matter of why we aren’t currently overrun with time travelers from the future. Perhaps it’s because they’re very good at hiding, but probably it’s because you can’t do it.
Renowned time-travel-hater Stephen Hawking thought that even if we could build a time machine, we wouldn’t be able to travel further back than when the machine was built. This is due to a temporal paradox that I can understand occasionally, if I’ve had a couple of Diet Cokes, and can explain never.
So yeah. Throwing the TARDIS in reverse is going to have to live in the realm of pretend.
In PRETEND backward time travel, though, I wouldn’t mind having a Jurassic Park moment. I’d like to be staggered by the sheer size of a long-necked dinosaur or a giant ground sloth. I can see skeletons at museums and gape over the lip of my Hydroflask, but a concrete belief in something that big walking around, chewing foliage is beyond what my brain can do. I want to see a brachiosaurus and get light-headed. I want my heart and upright posture pierced by sudden knowledge of my own puny, recent existence.
I think this would be good for my mental health.
Ideally, the Jurassic Park moment would also be a Bill & Ted moment. It would be nice to have crammed John Williams and a full orchestra from 1993 into the time machine with me, so they can play the swelling notes of the score as I reel from my newfound sense of insignificance.
Then we’d leave. Quickly.
Or I might like to nose around in pre-Christian Europe, maybe on the Isle of Avalon. Just to see if anyone looks familiar. Or swing through first-century France and visit Mary Magdalene, ask to meditate in the cave of eggs, and hear her side of the story.
Other than that, I’m not sure I’d have much use for a backward time machine. I mean, there are great swaths of human history in which being an unaccompanied woman in anachronistic clothing seems like a bad idea (Outlander and Sam Heughan notwithstanding). And I’ve played enough Oregon Trail to know you can’t just go around drinking water before Louis Pasteur shows up.
All that’s left would be to warn myself about my eighth-grade boyfriend, but the prompt precludes personal timeline meddling—and the possibility of killing your own grandparents—with “way” into the future or past. I’m wary both of regret and of the butterfly effect, so that’s probably for the best anyway.
Besides, to travel backward, you’d have to account not just for your movement through time, but for the earth’s movement through space. We’ve changed our address since The Big Bang, and I’m afraid my math skills would land me either on the edge of some precipice or a couple of feet to the left of the breathable atmosphere.
That’s a pretty big risk to take just to get accused of witchcraft.
On to future time travel, then, and some good news! Traveling forward in time is absolutely possible, as long as we have the help of our good friend special relativity.
Now we’re talking. Actually, later we’re talking—future time travel is for my next post. You’re busy readers, there is so very much to discuss, and I have to emotionally prepare myself for the tenth Doctor’s regeneration.
Stay tuned! And stay on this temporal plane!
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