A Time of Magic

Well, actually, no, it isn’t impossible.

One of the features of Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity is that time is allowed for by the equations. So, although you might think that time travel is the work of science fiction it is scientifically possible.

That’s not to say that you will be able to nip out and buy a time machine anytime soon. At present, we’re pretty much in the equivalent time to that some decades before the Wright brothers took to the air. That’s to say, it’s a time when the only potentially possible technologies which would enable time travel involve black holes and naked singularities and various things that, at the moment, appear to lie well beyond our capabilities for the forseeable future.

However, the “forseeable future” can be very near-sighted sometimes. Already experiments are going on in CERN which deal with things closer and closer to naked singularities.

But surely all the paradoxes (killing your own grandfather before you were born etc.) mean that time travel is impossible? No, just as it was often “proved” that it would be impossible for a lump of a metal to fly through the air in the decades pre the Wright brothers, just because some armchair philosopher “proves” that it’s impossible doesn’t mean anything. The fact is that it IS allowed for within Einstein’s theory which, so far, has been proven at every juncture.

Ah, but, if time travel were possible then how come we aren’t knee deep in time travellers? Good question. Perhaps we are but they’re very good at concealing themselves or perhaps our era just isn’t very interesting. Or maybe it’s just something trivial like they just don’t have enough power to get back as far as us. None of those mean that time travel isn’t possible though.

In the Seven Days series, the time travel technology came with the limitation that they could only go back at most seven days which, of course, knocked out all the normal time travel tricks that various pundits have came up with.

However, if you think about it, chances are that if/when someone does build a time travel machine then it almost certainly would have limitations along those lines. More than likely the first experimental use will involve travel back/forward just a matter of seconds or minutes rather than centuries. My guess is that it will have limitations for quite a while as the technology is worked on. After all, the first plane didn’t go terribly far and the top speed of the first car was a fairly sedate 10 miles per hour.

Chances are too that, regardless of who develops the technology, that it will be grabbed by some government organisation because, let’s face it, time travel would be a pretty serious weapon in the hands of the “wrong people” (whichever way you define that).

Anyway, let’s suppose that we do have such a technology and that we can’t go back more than seven days (in the absence of any logical way of deciding what the real limit might be initially). Would it be any use?

Perhaps the best example of how you might use it would be to prevent 9/11. After all, that was an event that could have been stopped had the relevant information been available as little as a day ahead of time. Or could it? Were the planes used the only ones with terrorists onboard? How do we know that there weren’t more people who would have boarded other planes for a similar attack later the same day but couldn’t as everything was grounded? We could go on for ages with such assumptions, but let’s assume that those were the only planes that would ever have been involved.

Had the technology been available then, would it have been used? Your first reaction is probably “yes, of course”. Think about the implications if it had been used though. Yes, thousands of people would have been saved that day, but that single event changed a number of significant events afterwards. Wars were started based on the premise that they had to be to prevent further 9/11s, security in airports around the world was tightened up presumably preventing various attacks, more significantly perhaps the public attitude towards terrorism in America changed dramatically making it quite dangerous to be labelled a terrorist (hence the likes of the IRA downing tools for example).

In fact, what you’d really need would be the capability to analyse the full impact of removing 9/11 from history before you said “let’s erase that event”.

If you were a conspiracy theorist, you might wonder how come there don’t appear to be any events in the recent past where a Seven Days style time travel device could have been used (for that matter, how come the series was cancelled just as it seemed to be getting closer to reality). All we’ve had of late have been ongoing events that look rather difficult to resolve and certainly going back seven days wouldn’t fix any of them. Interesting, eh?

Anyway, forget about jumbo jet time travel capability and think more Wright brothers and you’ll get closer to what the very first time travel machine will be able to do.

Tags are things that are only worn by criminals, aren’t they?

Well, no, chances are that you are carrying around just such a tag right now. You probably call it a cell phone or mobile phone but it tracks your movements all the same.

They have to do that because of the way the technology used to implement the cells works. Essentially they need to know where every phone is so that they can pass phone calls aimed at it. A side-effect is that your mobile phone works as a reasonable accurate tracker of your movements whilst it is switched on. OK, not down to a few feet or anything like that but certainly the phone company knows which areas you pass through and if you’re in a car then it could almost certainly work out which roads you travelled along, roughly where you stopped, and so on.

And, yes, this information is available to the police. So even though you’re not a criminal they could still be tracking you.

Worrying, isn’t it?