Existential Blues

Time Travel, God and The Wizard of Oz.

 

I Believe in Time Travel

 

I’m going to just put that right out there in the open. I know many people will tell me that time travel is some sort of impossibility, but I like to address that as nonsensical gibberish outright. Arthur C. Clarke is known for saying “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and I wholeheartedly believe this to be true.

 

 

 

 

 

If we travelled back in time to the 1950s and presented them with our laptops and iPads they’d be utterly bewildered, if not think we were extraterrestrials in disguise. Likening us to the Roswell incident, and trying to whisk us off to Area 51 for examination. Worse yet, they might think we were communist spies. This is an example of how much changes over a mere 60 years of time. We’ve gone from room sized computers that can do basic math with vacuum tubes to handheld tablets that can access the sum of human knowledge via the Internet on a whim.

 

Let’s go back a little further, to around the 1800s. Electricity was just catching on as a way to power the world and to a latter extent we were just introducing the new fangled automobile as an alternative to horse-drawn carriages (give or take twenty years).

 

Even further still, and what we find to be common would have gotten us burned at the stake for witchcraft.

 

We’re really good at hindsight. We can look back and see how the advancement of our civilization seems so obvious, yet looking forward we immediately discount things we don’t know as if it were impossible. In a way, we’re no better than our ancestors who believed demons had to be let out through the blood in order to cure people. The notion of modern medicine to those people was as impossible as time travel is to us today.

 

In the same manner as proposing that the Earth revolves around the sun and not vice-versa, we brandish those thinkers as heretics for thinking outside of current conventions. What we widely believe is true today is not the sum of all knowledge, and it is all subject to change at an ever increasing rate as time moves forward.

 

So, time travel is definitely possible – we just don’t know all the details at this moment. Possibly.

 

Some would say that if time travel were possible, then we’d come back and tell ourselves about it, thus proving the existence of time travel in some cyclical proof. But of course, this is based on a conjecture about how time travel would theoretically work in our wildest dreams and has no real basis on how it would actually work in some future time. Much like trying to imagine that if time travel were true then somebody would come back in time on a magical unicorn crapping time-dilation rainbows to prove it.

 

Time travel, in a basic sense, would mean that all points in time – past, present and future, are of an infinite nature and do not simply include our own timeline but every variance in infinite capacity in a multi-dimensional infinite expanse. Travelling through time would then include the idea that there is world-line divergence, which is a huge variable in the equation that would likely exclude the idea that at this exact moment somebody from the future would come to have a chat.

 

In the world-line I write this in, there hasn’t been a future version of myself knocking on the door and it is very likely that this hasn’t happened for you either. But the real question is whether or not we’d even know what a time traveler looked like, or if we’d even believe them if they did show up.

 

Let’s say for a moment that a time traveler has actually visited our world-line and there are records of it. First and foremost, as a time traveller I would already assume the above in that the prior generations I’d be visiting would have little to no comprehension about what I was talking about, and would likely say I was a crackpot, so it wouldn’t really be my mission to come back and tell everybody how the next twenty years go. I’d be on an actual mission of importance and you would just be something to amuse me while I was passing through for a pit stop.

 

You Can’t Change Infinity

 

There is also the idea of divergence in that no matter what my future looked like in comparison to yours, there is always some sort of divergence which would make this time-line unfold differently among many aspects, but possibly to a similar outcome. There are many paths to the end-goal, they would say. How you got there is pretty inconsequential if we all end up at the same destination in the end. At least many of us, but not all of us.

 

Being a time traveller doesn’t mean you come back to give yourself the winning lottery numbers. I mean, you could, but that has no value to you in the future because of divergence. The same holds true for trying to assassinate Hitler or kill your parents before you were born. You may succeed but you’ve only done so on a 1 / infinite capacity and wasted that much time of your own in the process, and have had absolutely no change to your own time-line in the process for doing so.

 

So let’s put that notion out of our minds in relation to time travel. In the end, it’s really a lot like traveling across dimensions that have no real connection to your own. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, so to speak.

 

Back to the idea of whether we’d actually recognize that we’ve been visited by a time traveller, let alone believe them if they said so. The answer to this question alone is self-evident. I can cite examples like John Titor and despite the revelations he put forward, most of the world has never heard of him, and those who have are strongly divided as to whether he really was a time traveller or just an elaborate hoax. On a personal level I actually believe he was a time traveler, because I have no real reason to believe he wasn’t.

 

I do not subscribe to the idea that simply because something seems impossible to us today that it will remain impossible into the future. If anything I can quite easily see how somebody like John Titor would make an excellent candidate for time travel, and also how nothing he said while he was here on our world line made any real difference in the grand scheme of things.

 

He was around during 2000 – 2001 and today at 2011 the world is wholly none the wiser for the things he has put forward as indications of what is to come. That doesn’t mean that everything he said was 100% accurate, either. Again, world-line divergence of even 1% will obliterate anything specific that a time traveller tried to tell you about the future, however the base of the information would remain quite true despite the differing details.

 

For instance, John Titor mentioned travelling up and down the coast maintaining wireless internet towers, and in 2000 – 2001 this didn’t make much sense. It barely makes sense today with our limited cell towers and mobile data plans, but in the context of 2036 it makes perfect sense. In the time between 2000 – 2001 to 2011 we’ve gone from rinky dink bandwidth on mobile consumer communications to high bandwidth options just now being standardized but yet to be implemented. IEEE standards have released the specifications for the next generation of Wi-Fi (WRAN) that is 802.22 and has a 60 mile range. I think that is promising to a point where those wireless internet towers that John mentioned now suddenly make sense to have all around the United States.

 

But they have yet to exist, still. As of 2011, those long-range wireless access points aren’t in wide use (though there are some companies that offer it as a point-to-point communications option that is limited by comparison). The underlying idea here is that a self-proclaimed time traveller told the world about long-range wireless Internet towers at least ten years in advance and now we’re at a point where just the standards are in place to start building the hardware required for it.

 

I refer to that sort of revelation as agnostic information – short of a global meltdown, the progress for it would not be changed, thus making it a safe bet to talk about. It still has no real connection to your own world-line in the future, except a commonality thread despite two different dimensional spaces.

 

If a time traveller did come back and happened to cross through this specific world-line variance on his or her way through we still remain to ask the question of whether anybody would notice or care.

 

I apply this same questioning logic to religion where the devoted faithful believe their savior will come back. Let’s assume they already have come and gone, passed judgment and continued on their way. Would we have noticed? More to the point, would we even care until it was in hindsight and too late?

 

Witchcraft Trials

 

We’re about  to make a left turn into religion, please fasten your safety belts.

 

If somebody came up to you and said they were the son of God and were on Earth to deliver mankind, you’d probably think they were out of their mind. Most religious today would still think that person were a heretic and condemn them, and if you’re Christian that’s not too far from what happened the first time around, now is it?

 

I’m not anti-God by any stretch of the imagination. I do believe there is God, but while I have unwavering faith in God, I have minimal faith in mankind. Mankind assumes way too much about God in their attempt to rationalize this entity. God doesn’t play favorites, so your religion is probably null and void. Any entity powerful enough to create absolutely everything on a whim doesn’t really give a crap about whether you’re a Christian or if the neighbors are Muslim. You’re all just humans who don’t play well together, like fighting children all trying to gain favor with their parents as some sort of one-up over the other.

 

Religion, to me, is the ultimate form of global childishness. We tell children that ghost don’t exist, and neither does the Easter Bunny, and that it’s childish to have imaginary friends – but we as adults drag those children to church and tell them about our own imaginary friend who we need to have unwavering faith in. The children at this point are being less childish than the adults, because they give up on at least twenty imaginary friends before they hit their teenage years while the adults can’t seem to give up a single one.

 

Worse still, is that our children never start wars because of their imaginary friends, and never use those imaginary friends as an excuse to hate another human being, or send our fellow humans off to die for that imaginary friend.

 

I am struck by the saying that “The meek shall inherit the Earth”, for entirely different reasons than the common person seems to be. On the face of it, it seems like those who are the most faithful, docile, loving and tolerant of others will in the end inherit the entire planet, and this is true, but we never seem to make the correlation as to what shape the planet will be in by the time we inherit it.

 

It’s like a cognitive chasm that prevents us from putting two and two together.

 

If we read further into things, we find that the planet will be overcome by corruption, sin, destruction and peril. Misery and woe, famine and flood. Disease and suffering will abound. Wars will rage on. A planet ravaged by mankind’s ignorance and malevolence is what the meek get to inherit, followed by countless generations of continued suffering as those who are left try to put it all back together again.

 

That’s a hell of a reward for being faithful. Unless, of course, you believe in the rapture. In this case, people believe the most faithful will be magically whisked away by God during that time, leaving the suffering to all the non-believers who are left.

 

I doubt highly that an omnipotent God would give those people, who spent their lives praying instead of actually helping the rest of mankind through action, who did nothing in their willful ignorance of others of culture, race and creed around the world, a free pass. We’re all in this together, and there is no back-door to sneak out of when the damages are done.

 

No, if anyone is going to stick around for the clean-up, it’s them. Just ask the last batch of people who said the Rapture was coming… everyone is still here, and God didn’t give them a cop-out to shirk their duties on this planet, or to each other.

 

The wages of sin is death, so the most wicked have it coming to them – call it karma. When you sit on the fence, however and let the battle rage on, you end up like Azreal the demon. Preaching things you know to be a universal lie is also a sin, and so I point to religion in that aspect – because a universally loving God wouldn’t choose sides and pit mankind against each other, but instead demand we live together in peace, as one. I’m pretty sure that’s in the Bible already, but it gets drowned out in the political and manipulative crap that it’s buried under which divides us as a people.

 

There is no Muslim, no Jew, no Christian, No Buddhist, no Taoist, and no religion. There is only humankind, on a speck of dirt in the cosmos that we call Earth, with a handful of universal truths meant to foster a global unity. There is only us as a collective consciousness together, sharing the finite resources that this speck of dirt has to offer.  I cannot see that any omnipotent God in any capacity would have wanted it any other way. There is no good or bad, because each fosters the other in duality – mass murderers raise awareness of those remaining to enact understanding that such should not be tolerated and so global awareness is raised in defiance of evil, and so too does good lead to evil through complacency and apathy over time. It’s not about good or evil in the grand scheme of things, but a global awareness of why in perspective of it all. No God would rob you of perspective or wisdom through experience if they truly had your best interests in mind, and so asking God to change things is kind of pointless and of course, as effective as believing a gallon of milk will answer your prayers. In the slim chance you’ve eaten habenero hot wings, the milk may be your momentary savior, but outside of that moment it’s pretty mundane and doesn’t interfere.

 

Our savior… whomever that may be, is simply the sort of people through history who continually try to tell us these truths. It isn’t one man, woman or imaginary entity – it is within all of us, and every once in awhile one of us gives the rest a reminder. Unfortunately we have such low cosmic self-esteem that rarely does anyone ever believe they are equals.

 

The truth is, we are all equals. We’re just too caught up in the fighting and divisions to see that in the end the only thing that matters is life, unconditional love, compassion, and each other.

 

Back To The Future

 

The interesting thing about time travel is that in order to understand it you have to first realize that time is infinite, and so too is existence. This is where the idea of spirituality merges. Infinity in this aspect also plays on the earlier post I did concerning dividing by zero as a thought experiment because in the grand scheme of things, there are multiple infinities within the greater whole of existence.

 

In the context of time travel, dividing by zero to yield a negative infinity is a lot like saying reaching a point where time reverses in correlation to your current world-line minus divergence factors. We can look at black holes as a manifestation of negative infinite, or infinitely small, and dividing that black hole (dividing zero) yields a cross section of two negative infinites.

 

While we’re venturing into the realm of astrophysics and Roy Kerr, just because today we cannot achieve a Kerr Black Hole or divide it for a collapse of causality doesn’t mean it is less possible than the very understanding that predicted the existence of black holes to begin with, even during a time when Einstein himself doubted black holes existed.

 

Is time travel possible? I’d say very much so.

 

Somewhere in infinite infinities it was worked out (and possibly within our own world-line), and with those sort of odds it becomes likely that time travellers in our own world line have passed through. I have the same sort of confidence that time travel is possible that a religious person would have on the return of their savior, and if they can believe in something of such odds that a person would return two thousand years later to lead them, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch so say that time travel should be higher on the list of plausibility.

 

But that’s the fallacy of humanity. We believe in things we cannot prove, and instead demand faith, but when something has plausibility (even if it’s outside our current level of total understanding) we say it’s silly to believe it is true, and mock others for pursuing it. What a strange world I live in. I’d rather believe that nothing is really impossible, just improbable at the moment, and eventually we’ll catch up in all aspects.

 

I say to either side – Tempus Edax Rerum.