Delving into Time Travel Time travel theories can be fascinating and the fact there are those who believe we have time travelers on this planet and they might also be responsible for the UFOs in our skies makes it even more so. The problem besides the fact we don’t know if time travel is even possible and many of us suspect it isn’t, is the fact the theory of how it would work is very complicated. There are a lot of strange parts to the theory, we call them paradoxes. I have to wonder how many people have even heard about the bootstrap paradox? The bootstrap paradox is interesting because it has to do with the future influencing the past. In order to understand it, you would have to believe that time does not travel in a straight line, but can oscillate. Let me give you an example of what I am talking about. An object can loop into the past and be responsible for its own creation. There is no way with all this looping to tell where the object actually came from. It will seem to be invented at an earlier time, but would it really be from there? One of the reasons there are so many time travel theories is the fact when we look at Einstein’s theory of relativity there is nothing in it which rules out time travel. I have said this before, I don’t believe if we traveled back in time, we would see live people only shadows of their past existence. I am not a scientist, it is just my intuition talking, but I can’t help but think when people die, we cannot revisit them while they were alive. Sorry for digressing. The next paradox I want to mention is the predestination paradox. This happens when someone travels back in time and then becomes part of past events and can even cause the event he or she is trying to prevent. This causes a temporal causality loop where the past influences the future. If one believes this it would show you cannot prevent something from happening and if you got into the past and try to prevent it, you will cause it. I guess the most famous paradox is the grandfather paradox. If one goes into the past, they would never be able to kill their grandfather because they would never have been born so not able to go into the past in the first place. Some have said they could kill their grandfather but they would disappear as would any of their accomplishments and no one would ever remember they existed. This is interesting because it makes one wonder if this every happened? How would we ever know if our memories of the person are gone because they never existed. This is just too much to absorb. It aliens or future humans could travel into our past, they could be altering it right now and we would never know. An assassin is sent into the past to kill someone. It doesn’t matter who. There is a problem however and it is if he does kill this person then there would have been no reason to go into the past to kill anyone because they wouldn’t exist. Time travel theory is very tricky isn’t it? Maybe we are over thinking the whole thing? There is a paradox theory which was named after an American physicist. His name was Joseph Polchinski and thought a little different than most other theoretical physicists. He had a theory which stated if a billiard ball entered a wormhole and came out the other end it would bang into its younger self and be stopped from entering the wormhole. Are paradoxes forbidden in time travel, maybe not? How do we know they are not taking place all around us on a daily basis wiping out people here and there who are immediately forgotten? Or maybe they are not. There are millions of people who disappear from this planet every year and we don’t know what happened to them. Could these people have been subject to some paradox in the past which destroyed them. There is another solution which has been proposed and if something in the past is changed, a process takes place which forces things in the future to remain the same. Some believe if we change an event in the past it will not register in our time but it will create an alternate universe where the event happened. Here is a chilling theory, it states if someone in the future travels to the past their timeline in the future would be erased. I have to wonder how that would work when they went back. Can you imagine them going back and no one knowing who they were anymore? Their relatives wouldn’t recognize them, their husbands or wives would be married to other people and so on. Some say all paradoxes can be avoided, but others think this is impossible. They point to a fact which is better explained in an old television show. The show was based on the idea tourists could go back in time as long as they stayed on a path which was generated by a machine. Guides would guide them along the path. One rich tourist wanted to go back to when dinosaurs existed. While he was on the path he got startled and fell off, but immediately the guide got him back up. When they got back to their own time everything had changed. It turned out the tourist had crushed an area in a tiny spot on the ground. This somehow prevented a tree from growing there many millions of years later. The problem was the tree was needed for the creation of bows and arrows and because the tree didn’t exist the English lost a battle they had won. This changed all of western civilization which in turn changed the time period the tourist had come from. While many theorists believe there are causal loops such as the bootstrap paradox, many others do not believe they are possible. Every once in a while, there are pictures of people put up on the internet which are people suspected of being time travelers. I have seen at least three such photos and I am far from being convinced. One even goes so far as to take a scene from the old movie with Henry Fonda titled Fort Apache. It claims in a stagecoach scene Fonda is talking into a smart phone. It just proves people can be very silly at times.
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