ElectricSpectre

OK guys, I have a splitting headache right now so I don’t want any fuss, alright? Right. Now everybody sit down and listen, because here be wisdom. TIME WISDOM. (The best kind)

Everybody wonders why, if time-travel is one day possible, we don’t see time-travellers running around in space-lycra every day, messing stuff up and generally being time-vandals. Sceptics will tell you that the fact that we don’t see time-travellers today proves that time-travel will never be invented. These people should shut up.

There are a couple of ways we might counter such joyless scepticism, but I’m only going to give you one today, because frankly the other one is so amazing it’s going to make me astoundingly rich one day, and I don’t feel like giving the secret recipe for fame and glory away for free online. As such, you get the slightly less incredible version. I stress slightly less incredible because it’s still going to blow your mind, so you might wanna put down a towel or something before reading on…

Everyone knows that light takes time to get places. Albeit, not very long, because light travels very quickly. (At the speed of light in fact — yes, that is where we get the phrase) For example, light takes eight minutes to travel from the sun to the Earth. Similarly, if you were standing on the Sun looking at the Earth through a telescope, the light hitting your telescope would be eight-minutes old. It would be eight long minutes since that light bounced off the Earth and flew back towards the Sun.

You would be seeing old light.

What you were seeing would not be what was actually occurring on Earth at that very moment.

(do you see where I’m headed with this yet?)

You would be looking…

INTO THE PAST!

Sort of. You’d be seeing what actually happened eight minutes ago.

OK — my head feels a little better. I’m a little cheered up. Let’s continue:

So the light-distance between the Earth and the Sun is eight minutes. Move further out into the solar system, and you’d be able to see, maybe, oh I dunno, a half hour into the past. Keep on moving outwards, and you’ll be able to see progressively further back.

Somewhere, almost infinitely far away, hurtling through the universe is the light that bounced off of Genghis Khan’s shiny killing-helmet, (every good dictator needs a killing-helmet) all those hundreds of years ago. If you could get to that point with an astronomically powerful telescope, then in principle you could see Genghis Kahn’s helmet, exactly as it actually was.

Now, the reason I put ‘in principle’ in italics is because you’d have to be unbelievably far away, with a telescope that was capable of looking infeasibly far into the distance for this to work. It will not happen in our lifetime.* However, the idea that we could one day break the lightspeed barrier, or travel any distance instantaneously is more palatable to some people than the notion of time-travel. Hop on a spaceship that barrels into space many times the speed of light, then when you get there, use the on-board superpowered telescope to enjoy the ancient world in street view!

If we had portal technology, this whole shebang would be easier. Just get a bunch of portals into space, where they sit like a big net catching all the light that bounces off the Earth and instantly portaling that light into your living room. Put portals at different distances in space to enjoy peering into different eras.

To paraphrase:

There’s no need for actual time-travel because we can see the past happening from our own time, using a complex system of telescopes and lightspeed spacecraft!

I know, I know — it’s madness, but all the technology we’d need will feasibly one day be invented. I prefer good old four-dimensional time-jumping, but if you simply can’t jive on that voodoo, this might just be the next best thing.

*Unless of course we solve the mortality problem within our lifetime.

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