The Weekly Review #2 - Aspects of Time Travel

As promised, here is another sizzling report from the Weekly Review series. In this episode, I will look into everyone’s favorite plot-device: Time Travel! Since I was 5 years old I dreamed of constructing my own time machine. I don’t know why I found it so fascinating so early in my life, but I suppose that I always thought of the same-old Arrow of Time to be slightly constricting and boring. Now I know it also means that sooner or later I would meet my inevitable doom, but that’s not the issue. There’s no doubt about it – time travel captivates our hearts and dreams. It’s simple, it’s powerful – and it’s probably never gonna happen. Still, here’s a funny review to read while you come to terms with your mortal fate.

Grandfather Paradox – The funny thing about paradoxes is that even though we’ve known about them for thousands of years (when Greece actually mattered to anyone), we are still not exactly sure how they should be handled – so we try our best to avoid them. And I’m not talking about those : “this sentence is a lie” type of paradoxes. I’m talking about those incidents where reality contradicts itself in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable. For all we know, these things could lead to anything from ridicule and confusion – to the utter destruction the universe. Naturally, paradoxes play an integral part in time travel, since virtually any trip to the past could create one. A “Grandfather Paradox” is what happens when you travel back in time, kill your grandfather (doing so now would have no interesting effects) and thus prevent your own birth, and as a result – also prevent the murder of your grandfather, allowing you to be born, only to come back and stab him in the back again like a relentless grand-son-of-a-bitch… etc., etc. I guess they are called “Grandfather Paradoxes” because no one wants to find out that he failed to undo existence – simply because he didn’t know who his real dad was. Better play it safe and aim for the elderly.

Sports Almanac – I always wondered what’s the true purpose of Sports Almanacs (for those who don’t know, almanacs are: “annual publications containing tabular information in a particular field or fields”). Well, it seems that time travel would just not be the same without them. They provide us with a way to get rich quickly, impress people with our knowledge or even prove to be life-savers in those nasty cases of toilet emergency (which, as it turns out, can be caused by frequent trips in the 4th dimension).

Arriving in the Nude – For some inexplicable reason, time travel is often depicted as a journey that rids you of your clothes. What may have started as just an excuse to film Arnold Schwarzenegger’s butt – turned into the de-facto standard. I suppose the scientific basis for this must have something to do with the String Theory. In any case, I can already see how this property could be exploited by the adult-entertainment industry and lead to a whole new genre of time-travel porn, with titles such as: “Donna and Goliath”, “Debby Does The Renaissance” and “Jenna Screws With History”.

Altering Histroy – What’s cool about time is that the further you travel backwards in it, the less you need to do to change it. In order to alter all the events of the 20th century, for example, it would be enough to for you to pay a short visit to the stone age and stomp on some guy’s foot. You come back and to your surprise – suddenly everyone talks Chinese; eating Gefilte Fish is all the rage; and Al-Qaeda is a popular Canadian sitcom.

Variety of Methods – It’s good that we have so many ways to travel to the past. Cars, machines, wormholes… My personal favorite is Physical Impact. One hit to the head and bam! you’re in 1997, making people think you’re weird when you roll your eyes as they play Green Day’s “Good Riddance” for the first time ever on the radio. Anyway, I still think there is room for some more time-travel related gizmo’s. My ideas so far include: “Time Toilet” (“Why not dump your excess load – on the unsuspecting faces of the legends of old? Now for only $999.99″), “Time Refrigerator” (“Keep your foods frozen… IN TIME!”) and “Time Wrist-watch” (“Be able to tell… the TIME!”).