This is a post I wrote on Quora in answer to a question, where I gave all the reasons I don’t. It’s a far-ranging post, including science fiction tropes and real science speculation. I also managed to contradict myself, but rather than correct it, I left the error to highlight my lamentable memory. How could you forget your first sci-fi story?
Have you ever wanted to time travel?
There is both a philosophical and psychological component to this question, as well as a scientific one. As a sci-fi writer, I have not entertained it, though I have written a story where characters living on different worlds aged differently, which was also done in the movie, Interstellar, albeit different storylines with different consequences.
I’m also a longtime fan of Dr Who. I especially like the 50th Anniversary episode, The Day of the Doctor, where we have 3 Doctors, played by Matt Smith, David Tennant and John Hurt, though Tom Baker has a cameo appearance towards the end. Jenna Coleman as Clara Oswald is the companion, but Billie Piper (Rose Tyler) has one of the best roles as Bad Wolf, when she’s the conscience of a sentient Doomsday machine; a brilliant, innovative plot device, especially when she plays the foil to John Hurt’s Doctor.
But arguably one of my favourite episodes is The Weeping Angels (who make reappearances, like Daleks) so I’m talking about the original episode. It’s David Tennant’s Doctor with Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman), one of my favourite companions, and one of the cleverest uses of time travel I’ve seen.
Probably my favourite time-travel movie is Predestination, based on a short story, All You Zombies by Robert A Heinlein (rejected by Playboy, apparently). It starred Ethan Hawke and a brilliant Sarah Snook, before she became famous, and was made in Australia.
The psychological component is that I have no desire to go back and change my past, because it would make me a different person. I’m a strong believer in having no regrets despite making some terrible mistakes in my life; I own them. The alternative is to live in self-denial and eternal name-blaming. Do not go there: the destination is self-pity if not self-destruction; I’ve been down that path and came back.
The other scenario is to time-travel to somewhere in the past or future, a la Dr Who. But here’s the thing: the culture, the language and the customs are so different to what you know, that it would be next-to-impossible to adjust. Our morality is more dependent on social norms than we like to admit. It’s hard for us to imagine living in a time when owning slaves was socially acceptable and women were literally treated like children or intellectually backward compared to men. So, no, I have no wish to go there. And I don’t want to know what the future is either – it could be dystopian, catastrophic or a kinder more forgiving world. I prefer to live in the present and try to impact the future in whatever small way I can.
I almost forgot. How could I? I actually wrote a screenplay involving time travel, where a teenager is taken to another world in the future, titled Kidnapped in Time. So I just contradicted my first paragraph. Here’s the thing; spoiler alert: when he’s allowed to return to Earth and meet his father and brother, who have aged more than him, he decides to stay on the world he was taken to, because it’s now his new home. I still think it’s a good story, well told, and not dated, even though his Earth childhood is set in 1960s, like mine, though his family life is nothing like mine.
Scientifically, there are some scenarios. For example, Kurt Godel worked out, using Einstein’s field equations, that if the Universe was rotating, we would live in time loops. The thing is that if we lived in a time loop, we wouldn’t know, or would we? I think the CMBR (cosmic microwave background radiation) from around 14B years ago says we don’t. The other possibility is via multiple worlds, but I don’t believe in them, either quantum or cosmological, and if you changed worlds you wouldn’t know, because only the future would change and not the past. And then there is causality, which I argue underpins all of physics, though others might debate that, which I’m happy to oblige. Even QM has a causal relationship with reality when the wavefunction collapses and is irreversible.
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