Those of us who appreciate science also tend to enjoy science fiction –which is weird because every Sci Fi ever made is unrealistic and usually fails on many crucial points.  Scientists are the worst critics of Sci Fi, but they’re also its biggest fans, because good science fiction opens the mind by posing the question, “what if?”. 

This is especially true of stories involving time displacement.  For example, what if you prevented your parents from getting together?  Or otherwise disrupted the sequence of events leading to the reality to which you belong?  Or what if you found that you grew up in a subsequent reality, and therefore couldn’t change that no matter what you try?  Because everything you’re doing now, you’ve actually already done –when you yourself created this reality in the first place?    

But the problem with time travel isn’t just the plentiful potential paradoxes; there’s also the question of how to do it.  Ever since 1895, when H.G. Wells imbedded the idea into the public psyche, we’ve wondered how that might be done.  Initially it was just a flight of fancy.  But then in 1949, Albert Einstein's colleague, Kurt Gödel proposed that time travel might actually be possible.  Since then, we’ve taken this a bit more seriously.  For example, Professor Irina Aref'eva and Dr. Igor Volovich suggested that the large hadron collider at Cern could create conditions such that it might be possible to fold space to wormhole to some point in the past or future.  Although it has been suggested in movies that the human body might be unable to withstand time displacement for the same reasons that we can’t survive in the vacuum of space.

Some methods of time travel depicted in popular media have been portals of one sort or another, and our favorite ones are usually vehicles.  But H.G. Wells’ original Time Machine is neither.  It couldn’t actually travel anywhere.  It could only sit in one place and let time move forward or backward around it.  That might work if you’re only traveling into the future, but even then only if you put it in a stasis room. 

The stasis room creates a static field of time.

See, just as X-rays can't pass through lead,

time cannot penetrate a stasis field.

So, although you exist, you no longer exist in time,

and for you time itself does not exist.

You see, although you're still a mass,

you are no longer an event in space-time.

You’re a non-event mass

with a quantum probability of zero.

Oh, simple as that, eh?

OK, I’m ready.

See you in eighteen months.

But even if you could keep yourself out-of-time, that still wouldn’t reverse time.  Even if you could reverse time, you couldn’t go back to a time before the stasis room was built.

That’s the problem John Cramer has.  The professor of physics at the University of Washington thinks he may have invented a retrocausal device which can send Morse coded photon messages backward through time, but not forward.  So he can’t send messages to the future.  He’ll have to wait until his future self can send a message back to his present self using this same device.  Otherwise, it would be like making a phone call to a random point of open space where there is no telephone receiver.  How could that work?   

And if you didn’t have a stasis room, some relative or fixed position in space in which to hold stasis still, then where would you go?  Because the earth is turning and orbiting a sun that is doing the same thing in a galaxy that is itself spinning through space.  So the here and now won’t be there then, and it wasn’t here before either.  With nothing to anchor to, a non-event mass might recombine with space-time somewhere in the bowels of the earth, or in outer space, but it wouldn’t be in the same place at another time. 

Christopher Reeve illustrated two proposed ways around this; One was to circle the earth at faster than the speed of light.  Scientists consider this impossible, but at least he knows where the world will be when the time comes.  The other method was presented in another film, Somewhere in Time, wherein all his character had to do was make-believe he was another decade.  If he believed hard enough, his wish would become reality.  Many religionists seem to be under the impression that this method could work! 

A while back, I had my own idea for a different type of time travel than any we’ve ever seen presented before, one based more on Charles Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Past –than on any Sci Fi author; Because my device doesn’t actually take anything back in time.  It only sees that time, as if looking at the shadows of things that have been.  It’s sort of a stasis bubble that can be guided just like playing a flight simulator game.  It could pick up light and sound, but wouldn’t have any perceptible presence in whatever time it looks into, so there’s no chance of communicating with anyone in the past, and it would be impossible to change history even the slightest way.  But it would act as a sort of web-cam transmitting images back through a secured server system accessible through an internet website.  It could fast forward, rewind, zoom in or out and travel at many different speeds.  And because of the pan-dimensional way this device travels, I might call it a TARDIS-cam.

“Tardis, T-A-R-D-I-S.  That’s Time And Relative Dimension In Space”

With new concepts, you get to make up new terms.  For example, I think actual time-travelers should be called ‘anachronauts’, and rather than say that they, ‘go back in time’, we could say they ‘retroject’.

Remember I’m not proposing any new theory of science; I’m only posing the question, “what if?”  What if you could just log onto a website and see for yourself what the past was really like?  No one can see the future because it hasn’t happened yet, and just knowing the future would have changed it anyway.  But you could reflect on the past on that website, either in the associated blogs and archived MPEGs recorded by your predecessors, or you could retroject yourself –at a rate of one year per second.

Now, if I actually had invented this device, I would keep my identity and the nature of that technology utterly secret.  Because I’m more interested in history than in threatening national security, I would also build in a fail-safe prohibiting this apparatus from viewing anything more recent than the last 60 years.  So your screen would go black for the first minute before showing anything.  Then you would view things from a lifetime ago going backward at high speed until you found a scene you wanted to replay properly.  And all activity would be monitored so that people wouldn’t go back to the Forties to watch Marilyn Monroe in the shower.  There would also be warnings posted plainly all over the site, and restrictions placed against minors, because viewing history this way would be uncensored in any respect, and can be really really nasty sometimes.  But your grandmother could still see her own childhood and confirm that this isn’t just some trick of CGI.  So there would be no question but that what you’re all seeing is real. 

Now for the ‘what if’; What impact would such a website have on society?  Any society worldwide?  Would it be blocked immediately by half the planet? 

Because here’s what I predict:  We could see World War II in just over a minute, and those claiming Hitler was an atheist would shut up right there. 

In ten minutes, we’d all know what Muhammad looked like –if we could find him at all.  And if we did, I think that would be a devastating blow to Islam, because we would know what he really said and really believed, and why, and we’d know how the Qu’ran really came about.

Likewise, it would only take a half-hour to get to the time of Jesus, but no one using this software would ever be able to find him, because no one actually knows when he lived or where he died.  You can’t ask directions and wouldn’t understand Aramaic anyway, and there was never any star of Bethlehem, or nine hours of darkness in the daytime, or undead saints wandering around downtown Judea.  You could check public records of that time, but you already know none of them refer to Jesus.

In less than an hour, you’d be in the time of the Exodus, but I’d bet you wouldn’t find Moses either, nor see the Red Sea parted.  What you would see –almost anywhere you looked- would I think be interesting and enlightening, but I doubt very much if any of it would match anything in the Pentateuch, because so far, nothing in history or archaeology ever has.    

In an hour and a half or so, you might happen across one week around 2900 BCE when most of Iraq was flooded, but you could scan anywhere forever and never find a moment when the whole world was flooded.  That never happened.  We know that already, and we can prove it.  So how long would you want to keep looking before you finally give up and accept that? 

Using such a time machine, it would only take a couple of hours to disprove Young Earth Creationism, which is strange because it normally doesn’t take that long even without one.   

But if you wanted to see Australopiths, you’d have to wait at least a month or two.  If you want to see the first whales, you’d have to let your computer scroll back for a whole year.  If you want to see the last dinosaurs, you’d have to let it retroject for at least another year, and you wouldn’t know what caused the Permian extinction until more than four more years after that. 

The Cambrian ‘explosion’ evidently took over 50 million years, and you’d get to see some of that yourself after letting your computer buffer continuously until 2024 –assuming of course that you’re not running a Windows-based operating system. 

And if you set your computer to it today, it would finally be ready to show you a bit of the Big Bang at some point half way into the 25th century.  Well, YOU wouldn’t get to see it, but some grateful descendant 20 generations from now would.  

I would ask whether this sort of proof would be enough to change the minds of creationists.  But I’ve asked them that before, and they responded, no.  Their faith requires that they continue to believe –even when they discover proof that they’re wrong. 

So instead, I will ask anyone interested in pondering such things, what would you do with such a website, if you were one of the first to click the URL?