Time keeps on slippin'

If I had a time machine, I’d travel back to the heyday of the Roman Coliseum so I could watch toga-wearing schmucks use broadswords to fend off armor-plated lions. 

 

Yup.

 

Picture the scene: I’m wearing a homemade robe fashioned out of a faded Care Bears beach blanket I used when I was four. There’s a fig leaf in my hair, which, for the purposes of this fantasy, exists as actual hair. I watch a few rounds of testosterone--percolating bloodsport. Then, when someone notices I’m wearing Reeboks and taking pictures with a fancy metal memory-maker, gifted to me by the gods of Olympus, I dash outta the joint, hop into my flying DeLorean, and punch it right back to 2014.

 

Or maybe I zip back about a billion years and have lunch with a stegosaurus. Or travel to ancient Greece to watch the legendary battle of Thermopylae. Or prevent Nicholas Cage from making “Ghost Rider.”

 

So many different things we could do with a time machine. Most of us have fantasized about it at some point in our lives. It’s one of those hypothetical questions that pops up, more often in youth perhaps, during dreamy, star-gazing conversations late at night with a close friend – one who had the foresight to bring along a few nips of brandy in a pocket flask. 

 

“What would you do with a time machine?” they ask, and you think, “Gee, I’d go back to my childhood and warn myself not to blow my entire allowance on Jawbreakers and Spider-Man comics. Then I’d take those savings, invest in Google stock, and spend the rest of my life on a yacht, sipping Seabreezes from the navels of Florida State volleyball players.”

 

I don’t know whether this is unique to my own experience, or if it’s a more universal thing, but the people I’ve jawed with about this tend to think in terms of visiting the past rather than the future. Maybe they’re afraid to catch a glimpse of themselves in old age, or fear that the coming decades will see society dissolve into a dystopian hellscape, in which Mad Max-style renegades trade arms to terrorist groups in exchange for free bowling passes. Could be that there’s comfort in already knowing what the past has in store. 

 

It’s a pity, because time travel to the future is theoretically possible.

 

Over the past century, physicists have discovered that time is intimately linked with gravitational fields – you know, that old story. There’s a lot of math and technical mumbo jumbo associated with how this works, but the basic gist is that time flows differently in different parts of the cosmos; a year on Earth is different than a year on Mars, which is different than a year on Jupiter, etc. The stronger the gravity, the slower time flows.

 

So if you want to send someone to the distant future, you start by rocketing their butt into outer space and having them orbit a celestial body with an insane amount of mass, like a black hole. (As New Jersey Governor Chris Christie can attest, gravity is stronger around massive bodies. Zing!) If our intrepid astronaut orbits the black hole for a couple of years – or what feels like a couple of years to him – he’ll return to find that, on Earth, many centuries have passed. In this way, by sacrificing a couple years of his life, a brave journeyman could potentially travel to the year 2514, where he’ll likely find that Jay Leno is in his eighth stint hosting “The Tonight Show.”

 

Travel to the past is trickier. It involves contradictions. Physics dorks like Brian Greene and Michio Kaku are fond of invoking what’s called “the grandfather paradox”: Let’s say you go back in time and kill your grandfather. Never mind why; maybe he stiffed you at Christmas. That means he never met your grandmother, which means your mother was never born, which means you never existed and couldn’t have gone back in time to kill your grandfather in the first place. If this is confusing, you can read about it in more detail in my upcoming memoir, “Musings of a Man Who Hasn’t Dated in a Long Time.”

 

What it boils down to is that time-traveling backward is, in all likelihood, impossible. That’s disappointing. It means I’ll never see the sprawling armies of Alexander the Great. Or watch John Hancock sign the Declaration of Independence. Or convince Francis Ford Coppola that two “Godfather” movies were quite enough, thank you.

 

But it’s still fun to think about. One of the neat things about the time travel question is that it teases our imaginations. It forces us to think of ourselves in terms of a broader historical context, and to wonder how things might have gone differently. If a butterfly flapping its wings in China triggers a ripple effect that produces a tornado in Oklahoma, just think what conscious human intervention in the past could accomplish. We travel to the late 1930s and stop Hitler from invading Poland, and back in the present day we find that Americans speak Swahili and commute to work on the backs of genetically modified pterodactyls. We stop Lincoln from being assassinated, and find that Lady Gaga is a straight-laced investment banker, and the federal reserve is overseen by a hard-drinking circus clown named Bubbles. World events are ripples on a pond, and what power we’d wield if we were the stone.

 

And now I pass the flask to you, dear reader, and ask you to consider the following: A crazy-eyed scientist shows up at your doorstep and hands you the keys to a flying DeLorean. What would you do?

 

Go ahead and mull it over a while. You’ve got all the time in the world.