Time Travel: Past & Future...

Time travel. What a wonder it would be to hop in a strange contraption or machine, program any date and time into a keypad, touchscreen or dial, and with the flick of a switch or the stomp of a gas pedal, be whisked away to that date and time. Of course, there are many consequences to time travel and these can be both disasterous and catastrophic. However, many people are still confused about the possible consequences or disruptions that can happen if one person ever traveled to the past. However, let's examine time travel in depth and see what sort of things can happen or can't happen when traveling around the timeline.

FUTURE SHOCK


One of the iconic wishes of any willing time traveler is to jump ahead to the future, and see what humanity has made of itself in the coming years. Often known as the "history of things to come", as people like to put it. Imagine now, it's the year 2011. Now you jump ahead in the timeline in your time machine, and you end up in the year 2021 or 2026, ten to fifteen years in the future. Your ideals and the technologies you grew up with are now considered highly obsolete, and the new technologies are considered highly advanced and too confusing for you. Your favorite team has won one or two championships in your fifteen year absence. This is what's known as "future shock", or the "rapid rush of emotions resulting from a sudden burst of trauma and fear". Basically, future shock, if it ever occurred to you, would basically floor you and render all brain activity inactive. Returning to your present time is highly disregarded, as the knowledge of knowing what humanity will become and what technologies will be available, will basically ruin your life. Knowledge about the future is not pretty to have, and therefore travelling into the future is disregarded and probably would be frowned upon...

PAST PARADOX


Now, the other biggest request or objective of any time traveler is this: they wish to go to the past, and change a certain mistake that affected the course of their lives in a negative way. Thus, they wish to build or commandeer a time machine and travel into the past and change this. However, this must be stressed and stressed well so follow along!
Let's say the timeline your living in now is TIMELINE 1; you were 12 years old. Now, your brother loses a rubber ball he was playing with in your driveway on a Sunday afternoon. Like any other kid, you'd run after it regardless of your surroundings and possible hazards. Suddenly, a car come screeching down the road at an insane speed. Unfortunately, both the driver and your baby brother don't see each other. The car slams into your brother, killing him. Fast forward 15 years, to the age of 27. You have now pattented your own time machine for the sole purpose of changing this event, as it has ruined your life and you now live in the gutter praying for salvation. So, you program your time display and travel back to the faithful day 15 years in the past, when your baby brother was hit and killed by the driver. You have just erased TIMELINE 1 and have now created TIMELINE 2 with your unexpected presence in the past. Now, you step in front of the ball rolling out in the street, and hand it back to your brother. The speeding car careens down the road as scheduled, but this time it roars by without hitting anybody. Suddenly, BOOM!! You return to 15 years into the future, and your baby brother is now just as old as he should have been, as if he had never died. Unfortunately, there is one major issue with this: According to several scientists and philosopher's, preventing something in the past or changing something cannot possibly work because of one reason, and that's that when you prevent or change something, of course it will not occur. Because of this, it will shatter the space-time continuum. Why? Let's think about it real quick. Your little brother's death is what motivated you to go back into the time-stream and stop it, but now that it didn't occur, 15 years roll by and now you see no point in going back into history to stop the death, as now (IN TIMELINE 2) it did not occur, so you find yourself no longer motivated by the trauma to go back and change it, as the trauma is no longer there. Basically, for the good of humanity, nothing in the past can be changed, even if time travel was possible. For your safety, and the safety of the universe, your little brother must unfortunately face his makers when God made it his time.
One other thing is that it will be very unwise to travel back to the same spot in time more than once. Think of this addition; you now want to go back and instead kill your brother to fix the timeline. Your traveling once more into the past now destroys TIMELINE 2 and creates TIMELINE 3, where there are now two of you in the same time. You watch as your past self succeeds in coming to the past, and pushing your brother out of the way of the car as you did. Now, you watch as you disappear, returning to your present time. Then, you yourself succeed in killing your brother after moments earlier you saved him from his death. You return to the future, and now, you live in TIMELINE 1-A; a slightly altered original timeline. Now, your brother did not die of a car accident, but by an unknown murderer who got away and was never identified (which would, of course, be you).

See? Time travel and its consequences will make your head spin. It makes you wanna sit down and not give a single shit about any of this madness. Quite frankly, we can all count our blessings that time travel isn't a possibility nor even a reality. Our lives would continue to change without us even noticing. One day we'd be us as we are now, and tomorrow (due to someone's tampering), we wake up completely different. One day you're into computers, and the next day you're buff and into sports. It's weird how time travel can work...

The universal medium for time; a clock.

The Flux Capacitor
"It's what makes time travel possible"...