Chapter 5: A half informed take on Time Travel

                Let’s finish off the boring part first. What is a Random Number? It’s just a number which you may not be able to predict. While picking a number from 1-20, a perfect random number would be something which has the same chance of coming up every single time as any other number in the sequence. Secondly, Wiki about chaos theory and you will find - “When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future”. Now why am I talking about this here? It’s because, this is exactly what I think that goes into the prophecy, destiny. Though this sounds like a lesson @ high school, it isn’t. These are purely my thought which has a potential to be way too off of reality.

                We talked about time travel and conclusively proving the concept of Fate/destiny. Now, I would say the equivalent of Fate/destiny in life is a Random number in math looking at it at certain point in time. It could be anything and you do not have any idea what’s coming.

Now starting with the premise that time travel is possible… Our man Mr X. goes back in time to a recent past. Just by travelling, he has introduced a new element or a change in the past which would trigger a colossal & random change in the sequence of events later. Random because chaos theory states that an approximate present (because everything is same as the present except for the person who has just time travelled) does not approximately determine the future.  Ie, the changes that are brought about because of a simple change can be drastic and a relative state cannot be arrived at.

Thus we have no idea what the changes that he has introduced just by showing up in past and so, we have no idea of what change it has caused. It might even change the fact that they built a time machine in the future. In which case, he would not exist in the first place. Or it could be that his decision to go to a certain time and place may be different in the next recursion. Maybe the person would again warp through different time and places till he destroys himself so that he’s no longer significant. What I think is, at best, the time machine may be thought of as a machine which instantly vaporizes or erases a person from the present. Or it could also be that since he travels to the present with the time travel device, there is no more of a need to invent or make a new one & progressively improving the time-machine instantly in the past.

Assuming whatever I said, as the subject says, is a misinformed blabber and I am wrong. Let’s take a step forward and look at what are its applications. We can start with energy crisis. The time machine can send people to the past to mine and bring back petrol & gasoline back to the future. This is like creating fuel which is non existent in future. This disagrees with someone who said “Energy can neither be created nor destroyed” unless the time-travel machine compensates for the energy gain by using so much energy. Now if the person is travelling, the amount of energy he can bring back along with him is theoretically infinite. So if it has to still follow the conservation of energy, the machine has to use infinite resources to take a person to the past and bring him back. That’s a weird conundrum as he wouldn’t be asked to bring back fuel if there was already fuel in the future.

Now let’s take a different perspective. Assume there’s some way of time travel without impacting anything in an uncontrolled fashion. There has to be different instances of the life starting from the beginning of time to “Travel to”. Thus what happened on a day has to be recorded at every single instant. Say Mr X travelled to 10:15 PM, that should be exactly the same as how it was back then and it should be different if he had picked10:10 PM instead. Considering the infinite number of divisions of time that he can arrive at, and the infinite number of variables around him, the universe has to record infinite multiplied by the Infinite number of connected instances of life. Really? Who are we kidding?