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This question has been the fascination of filmmakers and authors ever since it was popularized in H. G. Well’s The Time Machine. The question is not Is Time Travel Possible? and if it is or isn’t, what are the reasons for it. But perhaps the more pressing question is not if it is, but if it should be. Should time travel, in all its fatalistic glory, be possible? Should we have this doorway to the past and the future at our will. Before we answer this question, let’s us look at some of the major aspects and paradoxes regarding Time Travel.

Forward and Backward Time Travel

Forward Time Travel is even now theoretically and in some cases, even practically possible. If you want an example, watch any movie with space travel that ends up with the character resulting several years into the future in a matter of minutes. Light Years is one example. This is just a matter of physics. The closer we travel to the speed of light, the faster time goes for us. If you get into a spaceship today and make a round of the solar system at a very high speed, by the time you make it back on earth thousand of years would’ve passed.

In the first Avengers movie, Steve Rogers wakes up 70 years into the future while his body was preserved by the ice he crashed into. It is technically the most basic way of forward time travel. Decades might pass in the real world while no time at all passes for the traveler. They end up skipping years, in a way.

Backward Time Travel is a little more complicated, because it comes with an onslaught of possible paradoxes that need to be dealt with. But if one can find a way out of these paradoxes, it is highly possible that even backward time travel is, at least in theory, completely possible.

Time Travel Paradoxes

Consider the first Jumanji film. Alan and Sarah are two kids who start playing the game, but then Alan gets pulled into it for as long as someone comes and rolls a die that gives either a five or a seven. 26 years pass with him stuck in the forests of the game, and it is only when another pair of siblings play the game they find in the abandoned house that Alan comes back as an adult, Tarzan like, unshaven and dressed in leaves. Sarah who is also an adult now helps them finish the game and as soon as is it finished, everything goes back to where it and always been.

Nothing that had happened has happened and Alan and Sarah are kids once again, with all the memories of 26 years only in their head. They grow up again and knowing how the parents of the siblings would die in a plane crash, prevent it from happening. In a way, they change the future. But how can they change a future that has never happened. Moreover, we’d think that there is some sort of paradox here—some sort of never ending time loop.

How can Alan and Sarah throw the game in the river and then grow up in a world where the siblings never find it to bring them back? But it is less than a paradox and more of a pocket of time that everyone slips into when you actually think about it. Two kids experienced something that happened in an isolated pocket of reality that didn’t stick—a 26 year hole in the fabric of time that simply sealed itself around the seams. Things like this are easy to explain in fiction. 

What isn’t easy to explain are things like the Grandfather paradox—the bane of time travel enthusiasts everywhere.

If you’re already familiar with the grandfather paradox, consider one other. One day a man is visited by a mysterious old man who gives him a guide to making a Time Machine. He uses this guide to build a Time Machine in about 30 years and now an old man travels back in time to give himself the guide book that helped him throughout. It’s a classic time loop.

The question is this: Where does the guidebook come from? It was not written by the man since he clearly got it from his older self. There is no other explanation for the origin of the book.

It cannot simply emerge into existence out of nowhere. Furthermore, if the book is used then it must be worn over the years, but then how is it preserved over time. Let’s say that the man received a new, clean book. But over thirty years, he must have used it in a way that would’ve made it older, dirtier. How then can he go back to give himself the guide in the new, clean state?

Should Time Travel Be Possible?

The real question, the philosophical question, however, is not if it is possible. The question that we should be asking first is: Should time travel even be possible?
Is it an invention that should be made, if it can be made?
Let us look at this question from a few angles.

Let us assume that time travel is possible, both backwards and forwards.
There are two ways this can go. Either the traveler can go into the past and change it, or the traveler can go into the past and their actions change nothing.

Traveler Can Change Past and Future

There are two ways this can go. Either there is only a singular, linear time line that stretches line a thread from past to present to future, or there are multiple timeline emerging from points where history diverges because of alternate events.

Linear Timeline

Either we have a singular, Linear Time Line, in which case going into the past will have direct effects on how the future turns out to be and there would be no stable reality. The fabric of reality itself would be subject to every individual traveler’s whim and action. Anyone could go back in time, do something that hadn’t been done originally and the future would alter itself according to that event.

Most of us would agree that this is probably not really practical. There would be no history, no stability, not even a memory we could trust. Everything can change anytime, any moment. There can be no persisting reality in this case.

Linear time travel is also subject to the Grandfather paradox. It is a self defeating time loop where one event contradicts itself. The action prevents itself from happening.

Multiple Timelines

The other option is that time is not just a single line going from the beginning to the end and that there are multiple timelines and multiple universes. Every universe is a universe where something happened that didn’t happen in another universe. Every trip back in time causes a new divergence and gives birth to a new world.

The plus point about this is that there are no paradoxes. It is free of paradoxes. A person can both be alive and nonexistent, in different world. One could potentially go back in time to make it so that they were never born and still exist in their own world. The future would diverge from that point of change so that there would now be two worlds rather than just one.

This version also admits the possibility of infinite such world, each diverging from some other at one point or other in the course of history.

Traveler Cannot Change Past and Future

It is a daunting, terrible possibility to consider a world where you have invented the means to go back in time and still your actions can change nothing. This possibility will have stripped us of our free will. We cannot do anything because everything is predestined. Everything that has happened was meant to happen, just like everything that will happen is already set in motion.

Fatalism or Causal Determinism—whatever we call it—the end result remains the same. Nothing changes because nothing is in our hands. Choices become meaningless and actions lose all momentum. After all, if nothing we do can make a difference, why even try?

We would struggle to accept, struggle to grow as individuals, and would probably be terrifyingly chaotic as a society.

Should we have this ability to change something that has been done? Personally, I think that would be disastrous. Despite the whole fantasy of it, the way we imagine controlling the complete causal chain of actions on our fingertips, despite the wonder and the amazement, the idea of Time Travel is nothing short of catastrophic. It is not exactly Time Travel that is so horrifying, but what it implies in terms of the stability of this world and of our minds.

The Ethics Of Changing The Past

A consideration here that we cannot help but look into is the ethical aspect of this time travel. It might eventually become feasible to change the past, but would it be ethical? Can we reconcile ourselves with the ramifications of such a control on the fabric of time and reality itself? Can we give justifications for this intrusion into the metaphysical nature of our cosmos and of the way the universe has evolved itself? Can we, at a more local and probably much more practical, even begin to form an organized way to manage the inherently chaotic nature of time travel?

Assuming it becomes possible and accessible, then who’s to decide that what exactly gets to change and what doesn’t? There must be a structure to it, a plan or some sort of restrictions that would keep everything from devolving into complete upheaval. There must be some of laws and rules that everyone must adhere to, otherwise there would be no stopping anyone from doing something that could threaten the existence of millions of other.

Let’s take an example. What if someone decided to simply go back in time and do something that would result in a war. What if someone did something even accidentally that would lead to a chain of events resulting something catastrophic. These scenarios are only fictional as long as we lack the means to make them a real possibility.

The string of time that loops around our cosmos is a fragile, volatile thing. We have no right to destroy the precarious balance we currently stand upon, and no reason whatsoever to ever assume that we are entitled to do so.

If you’re interested in reading more about Time and its philosophical theories, click on Theories of Time—A Walk Through History to find out more.