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Time Travel Explained In Simple Terms

Let’s pretend for a moment that I did have a time machine.

I have a multitude of choices infront of me.

Let’s explore a few scenarios in a moment. Firstly, what would be the motivation for time travelling? They probably fall under one of these 3:

  1. To change something that happened
  2. Curiosity 1 – to see what happened in the past for yourself
  3. Curiosity 2 – to see the future.

The major problem with the first, is that if you do successfully change something, you create a new branch in the timeline and cut yourself off from your old one. Travelling forward a week will not get you back to your point of origin, merely one week into the future of the new time line. Dangerous if you were to do something like accidently run down your grandfather before he impregnated your grandmother…

The other two are pretty harmless I spose…

Now lets unwrap a few scenarios.

Scenario 1: Travel back one week.

Now, do you:

  • A: choose to either interact with your one week younger self, or
  • B: not?

1A: What if I choose to instruct my one week younger self not to time travel next week? Would I suddenly blink out of existence? Or would there be 2 me’s running around from that point on? Could be handy for mischief!

1B: If I don’t meet my younger self, in a weeks time he will travel a week back in time to become me. No harm done. The only affect would be that next birthday I will actually be 1 year and 1 week older.

Scenario 2: Save someones life in the past

And then leap back to the present. As we saw in the movie The Butterfly Effect, you never can tell what effect that would have. God might just want that person dead.

Scenario 3: Travel back a week and buy a lottery ticket with last nights winning numbers

Sounds good! You could even mail the ticket to yourself if there were some sort of restrictions on carrying objects through time (The Terminator was naked so you probably will be too)

Scenario 4: Travel forward one week.

If you were to reak some carnage while you’re in the future and then travel back in time to when you left, your timeline will remain unchanged because the carnage was caused by you but you came back so the carnage doesn’t stick from your perspective. It comes back to that line you often hear in movies “the future isn’t set”. If you stayed in the future then you would be subject to the consequences of the carnage.

Summary so far

It is very dangerous to travel to the past because changes you make break the connection with your place in the present. If you travel to the future do what you like as long as you come back.

One more problem

I think time travel technology has one major limitation to overcome. If you were to travel back in time exactly one week, you would appear in the same spot in the universe seven days earlier. Unfortunately, because the earth is travelling at thousands of kilometres a second as it swings around the Sun, it won’t be there to pick you up. You’ll be deposited in deep space, and because you’re naked, frozen instantly. The solution to this would be to travel through time and space. You’d have to calculate the exact point in the universe you want to arrive and when. In that case you could travel anywhere in the galaxy! But really, you are kind of limited to earth, because you don’t want to turn up naked on Alpha Centauri!

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I Got Really Mad Because The Neighbours Were Noisy

This one time, I went to bed at about 10 on a Friday night and was woken by music playing quite loudly at 11:30pm. I grumbled to myself about how inconsiderate the teenage members of family next door were. I had had a busy week and was very tired.

My sleep over the next couple of hours was frequently interrupted by loud bits in the songs they were playing. Several times I considered getting up and complaining but I didn’t quite get around it.

Finally, at about 1am the music died down.

The next morning at about 6am our hard-of-hearing elderly neighbour started blasting out that mornings tv show from her TV! On my sleep-in morning no less! I could not believe my luck. I considered moving house! I stormed out of bed at about 7:30am to take a leak. I threw open the bedroom door and proceeded to walk down the hall on the way to the toilet when I realised where all this noise had been coming from. I had left my own TV on all night. I must have set it to mute before I went to bed.

It’s a temperamental TV and it must have unmuted itself the previous night. I had been grumbling about my neighbours when it had been my fault all along and I had probably kept them awake all night!

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Paperclips Are A Useless Piece Of Stationery

Just last week I purged both my desk at home and at work of the most useless piece of stationery ever evented. The paperclip.

I looked at them in my drawer and suddenly became angry, as I sometimes do when I notice something in my life that I had been blind to until that moment. Somehow I had become accustomed to ignoring the clutter. They had been siting there for 7 years and I hadn’t used even one of them! At that moment I realised they had been cluttering up my life, and it was time for them to go.

For those times that I wanted to attach two or more piece of paper together I used a staple. Make up your damn mind! Do you want the pages to stay together or not? If yes, use a staple. Paper clips are just so damn useless for the purpose for which they were invented.

Ok, ok, I do have one use for them so when I threw them all in the bin last week I kept just one. When you unfold them they can be a quite useful piece of wire for digging into electronics or picking out thistles from lions paws.

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Why There Are Always Spiders In The Corners

Don’t you hate it how you take the time to clear out the spiders living in the ceiling corners of the rooms in your house and then 2 days later they are back again??

Well, think about it from a spiders point of view. They are on the lookout for the best real-estate.  Spiders who manage to acquire and retain premium corner locations can construct the best webs and have the best chance of catching food.

Spiders without locations occassionally cruise around looking to upgrade their lot in life and they come accross a corner they you have recently swept clean. They can’t believe their luck! “I can’t believe anyone else has thought to set up here!” They think to themselves. “Look at the view! I will do well here!”

What we should do is post tiny notices of eviction 24 hours before we are going to clean the current residents out. Perhaps we could also encourage the current residents to graphity on the wall warning future residents of the danger…

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Foot Spas And Bread Makers

I think the creator behind both the Foot Spa and the Bread Maker is the same person.

He woke up one day and thought “Today I will invent two devices that people will clamor for as gifts for themselves and others, that they will think is a great idea at the time, and yet they will only use once before they end up in the cupboard never to be used again”.

Have you seen how many are on sale on Trademe and eBay?

Thousands!!

Learn the lesson and stay away from these products!

And definately don’t you dare buy me one as a gift…

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How To Pick A Trustworthy Mechanic

The simple answer is that they don’t exist.

Lets face it, you go for a warrant, it is their best interest to fail you on something because that way they get more business.

Of course you should go to a independant Vehicle Testing Station for warrants.

I’m an AA member so I’d like to think I can trust a company I partly own (because I’m a member), but at the end of the day, there lies the same incentive.

Damn.

There’s just no getting around it…