Time Travel

Okay, let's talk about time travel because why not?

First of all, as we've said before, we probably experience time differently than you. To be sure, we don't know how you experience time - or anything else for that matter - but we suspect that you probably experience time the way that we used to.  That is, you experience time sort of like a current or a river that you're floating along on, and that time is something outside of you that inexorably carries you on from the present into the future.  From that perspective, sure, why can't the current flow the opposite way, from the present into the past? 

To you, time might sometimes seem to move more slowly and at other times to move more swiftly, but logically you realize that it always moves as the exact same rate, one second per second, but it's just your perception that's different.

We don't experience time that way.  To us, time is not something outside of us but instead it's something inside of us.  We are not something floating long on the currents of time, but time is something we create inside of ourselves.  In so many words, we are not in time; time is in us.  When we perceive time as moving slowly, it's not just perception, time is actually, literally slowing down, and when time seems to go by fast, we are actually accelerating it.  If you can accept that time is in you instead of the other way around, the fact that you can control its pace isn't nearly as fantastical as it might sound at first.  But that has nothing to do with time travel.  It's just setting things up to explain our perspective.  

In most time-travel science fiction, the protagonist goes into or on some sort of time machine, and the machine flashes forward into the future or zips back into the past, taking the protagonist along with it.  But that's from the perspective of an outside observer.  To the person inside of the time machine, time is still moving forward at about the same rate as it was before - said protagonist might be in the machine for what might feel like five minutes or many hours, but they're still moving forward in time.  When the machine stops at its past or future destination, the protagonist is either five minutes or several hours older than when they started and they would have only moved five minutes/several hours into the future.  How could it be any different for the world outside the machine?  

Since time is inside of the protagonist, it couldn't have moved any differently outside of the protagonist than their own perception of the passage of time.  In other words, they got into a machine for, say, 10 minutes, and when they get out, it's the same world but 10 minutes later.  

Time can only be different outside of the time machine than inside of the time machine if both the traveler and the machine were moving along currents of time (the time-is-outside-of-us  assumption).  But since time is exactly what we experience it as, nothing more, nothing less (the time-is-inside-of-us experience), that pretty much negates the possibility of time travel.

Hope we made myself clear.  These things are not easy to talk about.  But in any case, whether we were clear or not, that is totally useless information, as time travel doesn't exist.  We might as well be talking about hobbit dentistry, or unicorn training, or compassionate conservatives.  

But regardless, these are the things we think about when we think about things like this.