Pale Blue Dot (Earth from Voyager 1, 1990) Courtesy NASA

As mentioned below, yesterday I posted in the past. Though it was strange for me, for time travelers it was just another day in the space-time continuum. That would be those who zip to ancient Babylon in a wormhole, or who believe in the Many Worlds theory, which posits that everything that ever could happen actually has — in another universe.

“We have achieved a temporal sentience that our ancestors lacked,” writes James Gleick in Time Travel, a book he penned in his past, my (then) future. “No one bothered with the future in 1516.” In fact, time awareness was dim until the 19th century, and the phrase “turn of the century” wasn’t used until the 20th.

But once we had temporal sentience we could have time travel: H.G. Well’s Time Machine and Robert Heinlein’s Time for the Stars, Ursula Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven, Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life — and scads of other books and films, including “Dr. Who,” the original of which debuted shortly after Time Machine was made into a movie.

What was most fascinating (but difficult to understand) was the physics behind the yarns, the fact that time travel, though it remains science fiction, cannot be totally ruled out according to some interpretations of the universe. Or, as Einstein said, “People like us who believe in physics known that the
distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

One might wonder why we need time travel in an age of cyberspace.  “All answers come down to one,” says Gleick. “To elude death.”

(This entry was posted in … the future.)