(especially in science fiction) an imaginary distortion of space in relation to time whereby people or objects of one period can be moved to another.
If a tree was planted every time I wished to travel back in time, I would have my own personal Amazon forest-sized forest, you would be welcome to visit of course.
I’ve been obsessed with the idea of time travel for as long as I can remember. I have fantasised, theorised, researched, debated, considered and dreamt up more scenarios than I could count. Usually, the aim of travelling back would be to change certain things so that my life and the world, in general, would be a better place.
For personal gain, I vividly remember wishing I could go back to around 2015 and buy a ton of bitcoin to sell at its peak, as many of us must have done at one point or another. I also regularly wished I could go back to try and convince my younger self to take my health more seriously. Nothing crazy, just to exercise more often. Have a diet that consisted of some vegetables, not just hamburgers and french fries.
After my grandfather passed, I often wished I had made the effort of taking him on one last road trip. That one still haunts me. So of course I have wished to go back to prevent that regret many more times than I care to admit.
Then there are a few ‘bigger picture’ things. One of which is to help our oceans and all of the landfills across the planet by going back in time to convince governments to use a suitable replacement for oil-based plastics, like hemp plastic, which they did have at the time but that is a complete rant all on its own. Finding and changing the life paths of monsters like King Leopold II, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler and so many more people that have made truly misguided choices resulting in the deaths of millions and millions of people.
Naturally, with all my daydreaming I have come up with my own opinions on what would be possible in regards to time travel. Travelling to the future is impossible in the sci-fi sense, where you jump into some sort of stationary device and it takes you 200 years into the future. It is however possible in the scientific sense where you travel out into space on a space shuttle at a great speed. You travel for 5 years and upon your return to earth you find that more than 5 years have passed on earth, this is scientifically possible.
Travelling backwards in time is however left all to my imagination. The scenario I hold onto the tightest is that should we be able to travel back in time, we can only travel as far back as our own birth. And none of that getting to travel back and meet your younger self nonsense, no. In my head, it’s more like waking up one morning to find you are 15 years old and you have to relive all of those years. I use to love this idea, I made lists of everything I would do differently and how much better my life would be if all of this was able to happen.
Like I said, I loved this idea, until one day a few weeks back. That loving idea turned into one of my greatest fears. And yes, I am completely aware that this is an extremely irrational thing to fear, but aren’t most of our fears completely irrational?
Let me explain why this turned into fear. I enjoy looking at my wife, it fills me with so much love and happiness to see her just being herself, like no one is looking. We really met at exactly the right moment. In the beginning, she was quite the flight risk and with me being overly cheesy there were a lot of touch-and-go times. Eventually, everything worked out and I feel extremely lucky to be able to share my life with her. And this is exactly where that fear came from.
I became filled with dread at the idea of waking up at 15, knowing that I would have to do everything exactly the same, if not, I might not end up here where I find myself today, next to the love of my life. I would have to live through the same pains, I would have to repeat the same mistakes, make the same decisions, do everything exactly the same, all of it to find my way back to her. And I would.
RATIOCINATION 