Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem. ~ MICHIO KAKU, Wired Magazine, Aug. 2003

lazy entry today. though i find myself boastful i have remembered to update at all. such low standards!

If we could travel into the past, it's mind-boggling what would be possible. For one thing, history would become an experimental science, which it certainly isn't today. The possible insights into our own past and nature and origins would be dazzling. For another, we would be facing the deep paradoxes of interfering with the scheme of causality that has led to our own time and ourselves. I have no idea whether it's possible, but it's certainly worth exploring.

CARL SAGAN, NOVA interview, Oct. 12, 1999

the rest is all just me pontificating as usual. is also copy/pasted, because my facebook message conversations are like this by nature.

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i assume that Time is the fourth dimension, and subscribe to the block theory that it's like space; we cannot be in more than one area of the dimension at once, and therefore cannot know both past and future. since we're in the middle of the tesseract though, instead of masters of it, as we are the third dimension, we can't see beyond the trees we've past and the ones we're currently staring at.

from that standpoint, time is a measurement not of the volume an object takes up, but the distance between the initial displacement of empty space and the replacement of it (as far as we can understand it, anyway). would manipulating the past then be like affecting an object's mass or girth: impossible (without understanding how to manipulate quantum mechanics)? we instead manipulate our recollection of time, via apologies and histories, much as we blur our account of space with guesstimates and analogies.

that's just talking about the actual possibility, though, not the potentiality.

i suppose the point of time travel (and anything into which effort is put) is to ensure that something of ourselves gets left behind, becomes irrevocably entangled with the universe as is, and therefore finds immortality. and for those who can't actually claim eternity through Achievement or Attachment (which leads into my presumably professional assumptions about human nature + moral psychology, as opposed to this topic, so i'll not detail that) time travel would just be an extension of faking it.

therefore, to answer your question, a perfect paragraph, short though it may be, is technically all we ever strive for. what do you expect to be written in your eulogy, a character testimony which only a relative few will ever hear, as opposed to your obituary, which seeks to notify complete strangers in few words and with little effort, that you have died, and perhaps they might give a shit (forgive morbidity) as opposed yet again to encyclopedic entries, which would detail your relevance in terms of objects/thoughts/etc that you have gifted to the general populace.

my questions are thus: for which reasons would we attempt time travel? to cement our place in the global history, or in the memories of those we have loved? and if we could all access time travel, would we learn to distrust even our own experiences in the face of the outside world? how would we relate to one another if everything was in flux? would we be bolder, knowing that we could simply buy a do-over? or would we cradle more closely our moments with one another, and a lover's promise become "i would never relive this day"?