According to Lawrence M. Krauss in The Physics of Star Trek, “a surprising amount of modern theo- retical physics research,” clustered in the area of astrophysical wormhole studies, is directed towards establishing the scientific and mathematical prerequisites for timetravel. “Wormhole time machines are easy to design,” explains Krauss. He lays out a detailed blueprint of one. After holding forth for as many pages as possible about time warps, Krauss informs his readers that, in fact, he agrees with original scientific hero Stephen Hawking (circa 1988’s A Brief History of Time) that the laws of physics do not allow for any paradox-instigating disturbances of chronology-as-it-has-already-unfolded. Hawking disclosed his change of mind about the feasibility of time travel in his foreword to Krauss’ 1995 best-selling book.
There is a standard rhetorical strategy employed by Lawrence M. Krauss throughout The Physics of Star Trek. First one endorses and justifies a keyStar Trek technology of disappearance. This takes care of the money business of filling up pages, exciting the Trekkers, and selling book copies. Then one eases one’s scientific guilty conscience by denying the technology’s practicability in a real science confession. The maneuver manifests deep ambivalence towards an enterprise that can be called pataphysical. As defined by Alfred Jarry, pataphysics is the painstaking elaboration of imaginary scientific solutions, expressed in persuasive language. Many skillful contemporary popular science writers are caught in the duplicity of a hybrid Zeitgeist, intellectually arrested between the Stoic modernism of defending hard science truths and the cash cow postmodernism of spinning pliable exotic possibilities, as culturally requisitioned by science fictional television and its spinoff consumer products.
In a complementary and symmetrical way, books with serious scientific content are promoted and sold based on their alleged contribution to the breakthrough physics of making Star Trek real. Amir D. Aczel’s book on entanglement in quantum mechanics makes no claim to any possibility of teleportation beyond the scale of subatomic wave-particles, yet is advertised as endorsing the coming realization of the Star Trek transporter. The serious cosmological work of João Magueijo, arguing that the variable speed of light may have been faster during the first moments of the early universe, is collected under the Star Trekking of Science title Faster Than the Speed of Light, and sent on a whirlwind nationwide publicity tour.
Time travel stories pervade the later Star Trek television series and movies. Time rifts brought about by Deep Space phenomena such as quantum singularities or disruptions in the spacetime continuum; temporal manipulations willed by super-beings like Q, played by John De Lancie; and temporal narcoses resulting from accidental warp core breaches or transporter malfunctions are common. In the Voyager episode Eye of the Needle, time travel is said to be possible by beaming through a wormhole, thus combining two technologies of disappearance.
The obsession with time travel – along with related time-loop and temporal turbulence phenomena such as retroactivity, retroversion, recurrence, and reversibility – is rampant in contemporary science fictional media culture. We are in the outer limits of the disruption of chronological time’s normal processes. It is the twilight zone of tremulous, shimmering passageways and secret formula speedships; of sudden arrivals in another year, century, or parallel dimension. There have been television series like Dr. Who (1963-89), The TimeTunnel (1966-7), Quantum Leap (1989-93), and Sliders (1995-2000); films like LaJetée (1964), Sleeper (1973), Somewhere in Time (1980), Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989), Groundhog Day (1993), Twelve Monkeys (1995), Retroactive (1997), and Frequency (2000); and film series like Terminator(1984, 1991) and Back to the Future (1985, 1989, 1990), to name only a few. The clandestine social psychological goal of virtual time travel is to exterminate the radical otherness of history and other cultures, to short-circuit the difficult course of mourning, to meet up with none other than myself.
In The Character of Physical Law (1965), Nobel-prize winning physicist Richard Feynman prophesied that a “degeneration of ideas” would take place in the hard sciences after the completion of the era in which the fundamental laws of nature had been duly discovered and catalogued. Philosophers posing as trained physicists, Feynman believed, would appear on the scene to produce endlessly varied rhetorical flourishes passed off as rigorous science. “Exotic theories” about the workability of time travel are currently furiously debated in serious theoretical physics research journals. About fifteen new scholarly papers a year are published on the subject. It is an illustration of the ongoing fast-paced mutations of the laws of physics. These transformations are dictated by the science fictional culture that is leading physicists around by the nose.
The sundry frontier possibilities that the laws of physics would open up for time travel were first glimpsed in Albert Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, originally formulated in 1905 and 1915, respectively. Special relativity accommodated “time travel to the future.” It was discovered that a passenger inside a spaceship traveling at a subluminal velocity close to the limit-speed of light speed would exist in the private reality of a rate of time passage slower than that lived by her cohorts and progeny left behind on Earth. This was a revision of the classic Newtonian view that clocks proceed at the same pace everywhere in the universe. According to the twentieth century Swiss-German-American theoretical physicist, clocks aboard the starship traveling at close to light speed would appear to run more slowly than those on the home planet, from the relativistic point of view of a Terran observer’s motion and proper time. This time dilation effect, predicted by Einstein’s special relativity equations, has been verified by experiments conducted in upper atmosphere test pilot speed-flights, and by studies of the lifespans of subatomic muon particles in cyclotron-like accelerators. If carefully regulated by speed and navigational technologies, an astute practical application of special relativity could enable future astro-tempero-nauts to return home to a desired future date while having aged much less than they would have had they remained on Earth during that span. If the really-existing Virgin Galactic Airways of Richard Branson can get its subspace vessels running at close to light speed, then upscale customers might be able to journey hundreds of years into the future (but still on a one-way special relativity ticket). Contrary to the claims of some physicists, this “time travel to the future” is not really time travel. It is not a “jump” in time. It is more like suspended animation or “waiting for the future.” Enclosed in his “special relativity bubble,” the passenger would see time in the “outside universe” moving at a faster rate.
It was the great mathematical logician Kurt Gödel who, in 1949, offered a solution to Einstein’s general relativity, or geometric gravitational tensor field equations, that inaugurated the trend of general relativity “viewpoints” encouraging confidence in the practicability of time travel to the past. Gödel put forth a new ideational model of the universe as a non-expanding, rotating fluid or river-like cosmos of spacetime, overflowing at its banks with whirlpools and countercurrent eddies. Within such anomalies, also known as closed timelike curves or temporal causality loops (in the terminology of Star Trek), time locally backtracks on itself. Time could even macrocosmically reverse its course if one traced a path along the “world-line” direction of rotation “in a sufficiently wide curve.” In his memoirs, Einstein commented disparagingly on Gödel’s temporal turbulence explication of general relativity. He reemphasized his position that the universe everywhere expands (as in the Big Bang theory) rather than rotates.
In 1963, a New Zealander higher mathematician named Roy Kerr revisited the knotty problem of time travel to the past, parrying back at Einstein with a new hypothesis focusing on a specialized rotational version of self-collapsing black hole (no)-space-(no)-time regions in outer space. Kerr postulated that a spacelike black hole singularity in Deep Space does not have to implode to a point with extremely strong gravity, infinite matter density, infinitely curved space, and the “end of time,” as had previously been believed. If its origin were a spinning star, it might rather break down into a circulating ring of neutrons covering an extended area. Since the neutron ring would be turning around so quickly, and at a constant rate, its centrifugal force would keep it permanently just on the edge of caving in. The timelike ring singularity’s perimeter is nearly infinitely dense and its center is empty space. No final crush provoked by infinite curvature would ever be consummated. This state of revolving suspension and protrusion outwards near the post-star’s equator would permit a space traveler to enter the ring along its axis of rotation in a technology-assisted manner, and break on through to the other side. The traveler could exit in a faraway location in space, a different millennium in time, or an alternate universe of his or her choosing.
After astronomers were reputed to have observed real black holes in the Milky Way and other galaxies in the 1970s, interest both in the standard non-rota- ting type of “Schwarzschild” black hole (named after German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild) and in the Kerr variant skyrocketed. Speculation about time travel and secret doorways to instant arrival in another part of the galaxy or universe became widespread, much to the initial annoyance of most serious theoretical physicists. Kip Thorne, professor of physics at Cal Tech, and a leading expert on the general theory of relativity, began his black hole research in the 1980s (in collaboration with several colleagues) with the goal of definitively disproving all the “nonsensical” suppositions about time travel. Professor Thorne, however, eventually transformed himself into one of the leading proponents of time travel pataphysics.
A significant catalyst in Thorne’s transfiguration was the spark of an event in the history of science fiction literature and film. In the summer of 1985, Cornell University astronomer and popular science writer Carl Sagan was at work on a science fiction novel called Contact,later to be made into a blockbuster Hollywood movie (directed by and starring Jodie Foster) about the epic quest for First Contact with the extraterrestrial Other. Sagan needed some kind of plausible-sounding “scientific propositions” to persuasively undergird his literary-technological device offering instantaneous galactic travel through a technically-managed black hole core from a departure point in our solar system to an arrival point near the star Vega in the Lyra constellation, 26 light-years from Earth. To achieve maximum “scientific accuracy and comprehensibility,” Sagan hired Kip Thorne as his amazing phenomena authentication adviser. This science fiction media consulting gig was the opening for Thorne to scrupulously reexamine the Einsteinian general relativity equations with an eye towards establishing the feasibility of the crossing of spacetime by the agency of a stabilized black hole.
According to inter-dimensional and time travel trexpert Michio Kaku (professor of physics at the City University of New York), Carl Sagan’s famous wormhole technology solicitation from Kip Thorne was not a chapter in the history of science fiction. It was an “honest, scientifically relevant request made by one scientist to another.” But Thorne and his colleagues published the following comment in a renowned 1988 contribution to a distinguished theoretical physics journal, much more in the contemporary spirit of the times (Zeitgeist) of mutating the laws of physics in the service of a “futuristic civilization” with limitless resources:
Normally, theoretical physicists ask, ‘What are the laws of physics?’ and / or ‘What do these laws predict about the Universe?’… we ask instead, ‘What constraints do the laws of physics place on the activities of an arbitrarily advanced civilization?’ This will lead to some intriguing queries about the laws themselves. (Morris, Michael S., Thorne, Kip S., and Yurtsever, Ulvi, 1988, “Wormholes, Time Machines, and the Weak Energy Condition”, in Physical Review Letters, 61)
Thorne’s first duty was to fulfill Contact’s requirement for a controlled shortcut corridor between two seemingly distant yet in fact conjoined places in the galaxy. His attention soon turned, however, to exotic connections between different times, taking advantage of an important feature of Einstein’s general relativity equations. Responding to mathematical physicist Hermann Minkowski’s 1908 (geometric spacetime or block universe model) breakthrough disclosing time in special relativity to be the fourth dimension of a flat, “absolutely objective reality,” general relativity added a twist to the treatment of time as essentially unified with the three other known physical dimensions. Due to the influence of gravity or strong enough concentration of mass-energy, time “exceeds” the other dimensions in a disposition towards curving.
In his 1994 best-selling book Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s OutrageousLegacy (with a foreword by Stephen Hawking), the author of previous books with titles like Gravitation and Quantum Measurement (Kip Thorne) recounts the story of attending a professional conference in Chicago in December 1986. One of the gathering’s attendees (Tom Roman) casually pointed out to Thorne’s graduate student Mike Morris (“in the corridors between lectures”) that black hole hubs of the wormhole variety could be engineered into machines for time travel to the past. In addition to Kerr-type black holes, various kinds of traversable wormholes are possible. Two different times associated with the same (or more than one) location could become connected by means of an outward-flaring “neck” or “throat.” Thorne, Morris, and Ulvi Yurtsever of the University of Michigan first publicized elements of the wormhole time travel theory to “the scientific community” in their article in the prestigious Physical Review Letters in June 1988. The theory was, in one sense, a further detailing of the “Einstein-Rosen bridge” to a “mathematically required” parallel universe which had, since Schwarzschild’s work of 1916, always been considered to be essential to solutions to the general relativity equations with respect to “black stars” or black holes. It is the general relativistic property of spacetime curvature, providing the basis for a radical opposition between the wormhole’s two “mouths” (contiguous in space yet deferred in time), that can be harnessed into building a time machine to the past. Any telescopically detected Richard Dean Anderson Stargate through space could also become a tunnel through time. It might be necessary to attach one end of the traversable wormhole to a sub-warp rocket and accelerate to near-light speed in order to get its time travel features to kick in.
In the wake of Professor Kip Thorne’s conceptual advances, one of the few remaining obstacles to the scientific acceptance by consensus of the legitimacy of wormhole time travel to the past was the old-time physicists’ logical paradox bugaboo about grand-matricide. “If I were to travel back in time and slip arsenic into my grandmother’s tea, then this action would prevent me from ever having been born. So how could I have ever gone back in time ‘in the first place’ to commit the crime if I did not exist?” How will Michael J. Fox in Back to theFuture be born(e) if his mother falls in love with him rather than with his father? Physicist Michio Kaku, among many others, took care of the final giant leap in the real science time travel certification clearance process. Influenced by the many-worlds rendition of quantum theory, and within the framework of a superstring theory (or unified field theory of “quantum gravity” that incorporates relativity and quantum mechanics) of the ten-dimensional origins of the universe, Kaku concludes (in his 1994 best-selling book Hyperspace: A Scientific OdysseyThrough Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension) that what appears in ordinary experience to be a single “reality” or timeline is, in fact, a multiverse of latent or parallel happenstances. The six extra dimensions are by now curled up into a tiny hyper-dimensional loop of vibrating strings, of zero width or 10-33 centimeters wide (for more recent “M-theory,” there are eleven dimensions, seven of which are “curled up”).
Just as a quantum “object” like an electron follows many different simultaneous paths in separate universes, so a “quantum time traveler” to the past might blaze the way in the course of his adventures for the constitution of new parallel universes. He could create a “unique” doubled cosmos where his grandmother is dead and her descendants are never born. Yet the quantum time traveler’s “original” universe is never affected. This multiple time tracks arrangement will be a boon to the virtual reality tourist industry. The electron’s kaleidoscopic spin in many concurrent nucleic orbits is pragmatically inhibited to just one lane by the act of the scientist’s microscopic observation of that given quantum of negative electrical charge. In a similar way, the many alternative family histories which are my personal potential instances, or “world-lines,” of the universe are sensibly limited to one fork in the river of time by the specific episode or rerun of hyperspace multi-dimensionality that I am actually living. To further elucidate this splitting universes principle, Michio Kaku draws a family tree showing the logically consistent genealogy of a very busy individual time traveler (from the 1959 Robert Heinlein science fiction short story “All You Zombies–“). This inter-dimensional tourist, after a series of round-trip excursions to her past and future, ends up being her own father and her own mother (as well as various siblings, children, and thrice-removed cousins). “She is an entirely family tree unto herself.” Couched in the language of mathematical brain twisters and logical paradoxes, Professor Kaku’s excursus inadvertently stumbles upon the essential symbolic purpose of the time travel technologies so intensely craved by our turn-of-millennium culture: time travel to meet myself.
Any practical wormhole time machine will require spectacular quantities of energy to reach even this minimal goal. As Lawrence M. Krauss points out, the needed trans-temporal fuel will have to come from either managed deviation of the entire radiational power of a first magnitude star, a newly-discovered negative energy / negative mass source, or antigravity. This last species of exotic matter or Flubber® would violate the physical law of the weak / strong energy condition and ascend from the void towards the periphery. “One of the basic tenets of elementary physics is that all objects have positive energy,” explains Michio Kaku. “However, if we can produce objects with ‘negative energies,’ then we might be able to generate exotic configurations of space and time in which time is bent into a circle. Energy must become temporarily negative for time travel to be successful.” “Perhaps our prejudice against the existence of exotic material is wrong,” writes Kip Thorne. “Perhaps exotic material can exist. This was the only way I could see to help Carl [Sagan complete his science fiction novel].” An effective procedure for generating enough useful “negative average energy density” material to get the timeship rolling would entail bringing the quantum theory Casimir effect (named after Dutch physicist Henrik B.G. Casimir) to bear on the stabilized traversable wormhole. Engineers would set up two large conductive parallel metal plates, divided by an intermediary vacuum, in separate chambers at each mouth of the wormhole. Thanks to the controlled reduction of quantum mechanical effects, the sets of twin plates would serve as a technology for the perpetual-motion machine recycling of “virtual” subatomic particles popping in and out of existence less randomly in the energy-fluctuating quantum vacuum. The hyper-concentrated electrical field would create a permanently recurring series of matter-antimatter-spacetime rupture or appearance-disappearance-reappearance.
In Kip Thorne’s time machine, one of the electrically charged, negative energy chambers is taken out for a late afternoon spin past Pluto at just under the speed of light, then brought back safely to the wormhole garage. Clocks in the two mutually attracting negative energy density chambers, obeying Einstein’s special relativity, have advanced at different rates. An alternate technique for putting the special relativistic finishing touches on the general relativistic time traveling wormhole is to fly-drive the portable chamber through the gravitational field of a neutron star, causing an “inter-mass force of attraction” time dilation. The wormhole throat’s “exotic matter” continues to exert a repelling anti-gravitational “push” on the rest of the wormhole and its immense gravitational forces, keeping the cartilaginous jaws of its mouth spread sufficiently wide apart. A functional time shift is duly accomplished, and a spaceship passing through the technologized wormhole can travel to the past or the future. As they say, “this is not ruled out by the laws of physics.”
Princeton University astrophysicist J. Richard Gott suggests an alternative source for the exotic material required to keep a wormhole’s throat open, which he calls one-dimensional moving cosmic strings. These are “thin strands of high-density material left over from the early universe which are predicted in about half the proposed theories.” (J. Richard Gott, Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe) As two parallel cosmic strings advance in opposite directions past each other at near light speed, a closed timelike curve forms around the pair. Part of the string’s total mass must be “imaginary,” or the square root of a negative number. A cosmic string has zero or subatomic width, a length that is infinite or extends for millions of light-years, a mass more than half that of the galaxy, and a mass-per-unit-length of ten million billion tons per centimeter. It has a spacetime geometry that looks like a pizza with a slice missing, and it can loop like a “Franco-American Spaghetti-o.” A spaceship traveling around the cosmic string duo can go back in time, but not to before the time machine was built.
Cosmic strings could also be used to sustain the rotating cylinder time machine proposed by physicist Frank Tipler in 1974. Tipler’s temporal device is a massive, infinitely tall cylinder that warps the spacetime around it. Rotating at half the speed of light, the cylinder must be extravagantly dense to withstand powerful centrifugal forces. J. Richard Gott boasts that Diane Duane’s The Wounded Sky, a Star Trek spinoff novel about faster-than-warp-speed speed, contains references to theoretical physics papers by Science Officer Spock and himself. Putting on his hat of “serious scientist,” Gott acknowledges that the workability of time travel to the past does not belong to our “reality.” Only a “supercivilization” that has made interstellar space travel routine and colonized at least a billion class-M planets, “commanding the energy resources of an entire galaxy,” could develop this technology. It is extremely unlikely that Earth civilization will ever become such a supercivilization. “Supercivilizations must be a billion times rarer than civilizations confined to their home planet.”
In The Physics of Star Trek, Lawrence M. Krauss remains skeptical about the practicability of the wormhole time machine (after having just spent many pages elaborating one). Following the early Hawking, Krauss believes that the quantum field fluctuations of gravity inside the wormhole (known as radiational “back reactions”) would be so great as to fatally undermine its stability or destroy the starship troopers navigating their way into one of the wormhole mouths. Resolving these collapsing difficulties will require a theory of quantized gravity (see Alan Sokal’s important paper, probably one of the great breakthroughs of the late twentieth century) or superstring theory of everything (but really of everything, not just “physics”), reconciling the apparently incompatible theories of relativistic geometric gravity and quantum mechanical forces.
We are faced with a Möbius strip (continuous surface without inside or outside) of the unified higher physics and lower science fiction commentary on time travel. As science fiction theorist Paul J. Nahin explains, “since 1988 [the year of the landmark publication of traversable wormhole articles by Cal Tech’s Thorne et al.] much of the real science of time travel has been discovered by physicists,” providing a solid conceptual and rhetorical foundation to “guide prospective science fiction writers.” In addition to supplying the lexical and terminological finery of authentic-sounding scientific knowledge, the new physics of time travel teaches teaches the lesson that “if your story does depend on changing the past, you must also introduce multiple time tracks, as with splitting universes.” Michio Kaku and Oxford University’s David Deutsch believe that the solution to time travel paradoxes is to “protect” the timeline chronology through multiple or parallel realities. Others, such as J. Richard Gott, advocate a principle of self-consistency insisting that events in the past can be visited but not changed, even though they may be visited by time-traveling tourists (as in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure) who “always were” a part of them. Kip Thorne’s own view combines “many-worlds” and self-consistency. But all the prevailing theories only demonstrate that time travel cannot be precluded by the laws of physics. Far from adding new knowledge, they skillfully skirt the constraints of previous knowledge. Shrinking the kids to microbe-size (honey) or winning thousands of times in a row at roulette also cannot be excluded by the laws of physics. Since few scientists or sci-fi fans attend to the meticulous technical realization of those phenomena, it follows logically that the truly vital inquiry regarding time travel is the cultural question of why we are in pursuit of this technology rather than another one. The same question can be asked for the other Star Trek technologies of disappearance, such as virtual reality, the transporter, faster-than-light speed, or artificial language.
Our cultural wish to hyper-really achieve these science fictional technologies is so strong, in fact, that we are perfectly willing to alter our definition of what we are seeking to achieve, during the process of achieving it, and in order to achieve it. Yet we remain convinced in the end that we have achieved the originally defined goals. I live in a universe and history of “cause and effect” and normal chronological processes. But, dammit, I wanted to make some changes to that good old chronology. I wanted time travel: the real thing®. I wanted to go back and kiss that girl in high school whom I failed to kiss in the chronology-as-already-taken-place. I wanted to go back to Ford’s Theater in 1865 and prevent President Lincoln’s assassination. I wanted to go to Las Vegas in 1969 to bet on the Miracle Mets to win the World Series at 100-1 odds. I won’t be placated by virtual time travel, by just seeing what Mesopotamia looked like, or getting a photo op with the dinosaurs. I can already get that kind of stuff on TV, or at the VR video arcade.
Science fictional techno-culture promised me genuine time travel. But what I get instead from the scientists is a change in the rules, a serious slippage or mission creep, a fundamental modification in the mode of temporality, a revised model of chronology as splintered media tracks or multiplicity of parallel timestreams. Instead of transporter beaming of my molecules and my real physical body, what I get instead from the scientists is a manufactured digital-genetic-quantum clone of “myself” at the arrival station who replaces the expired, discarded “me.” Instead of racing my starship four light-years in space to Alpha Centauri A at supraluminal warp speed, what I get from the scientists is a cosmos-bending technology of contracting massive regions of spacetime in front of the ship and re-expanding them behind it, requiring fuel that costs me a mega-zillion latinum credits per gallon, and has untold ecology-devastating consequences to boot.
An epistemological reversal takes place, retrogressing from the modernist ideal of cumulative progress in history or scientific knowledge – “what are the laws of physics?” – to the inverted, reverse-engineered, reasoning-backwards-from-the-goal shedding of knowledge -“what constraints do the laws of physics place on a Star Trek civilization?”.
Amassed knowledge (of the laws of physics) retains a certain significance, but only as an inconvenience that gets in our way. What counts is to deconstruct knowledge and shove it aside. The casting off of modern society’s acquired wisdom is the secret purpose of information systems, which destroy knowledge through its superabundance and relieve the exhausted human brain of the burden of erudition. “No one can say that time travel or faster-than-light speed is impossible,” to paraphrase the endless drone heard on-line in Star Trek forums. “No one can put limits on what is possible. No one can rule out what will be discovered by daring original scientific geniuses in the future.” “The First Law of Star Trek Physics,” as physics trexpert Lawrence M. Krauss explains, is to always come up with some wild, imaginative contrivance that “circumvents every bit of physical knowledge” that we possess. Do we hear in such a statement the respect for learning and education or, rather, the start of a fast descent into convoluted ignorance? Is this the rule of law or the wayward self-cancellation of reason? Is not wormhole physics, as the study of what is not impossible, nihilism in its purest form? Many things are not impossible. Choosing one of them as a field of study can only be based on criteria that are not scientific but arbitrary. Just work on what science fiction techno-culture makes us feel like working on. Are we not already living the dis-accumulation phase of the historical arch of capital and Enlightenment — the recline of the West, as Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein call it?
The problem is not the answers given, but the question posed. The most significant thing about time travel is the cultural fact that we are dreaming of it today. The idea of time travel or the question “is time travel possible?” makes a certain assumption in order for the question to be framed at all. This assumption is paradoxically both a radical simplification of human experience and an anthropomorphic imposing of aspects of “time” which are human creations onto the nonhuman “physical world.” It is a bringing together of reality and the televisual mindset, the self-fulfilling prophecy that life is a film that one can rewind or fast forward. An important property of time is that some of its properties are human inventions. One example of this is the idea implicit in the “block universe model” of spacetime that the future is already “out there” or already exists. This is the future-orientation of time in the statistical worldview, or the future’s simulation. It is opposed to the existential view that the future is yet to be decided. The wish for time travel to the past is another, complementary component of the human and hyper-real notion of time. At its root is the desire to undo something painful that has happened. But “things go wrong” is as much a part of nature and reality as the mathematical equations and contortions of logic that “allow for” time travel. In a culture more accepting of “things go wrong” and failure as normal parts of life, there would be less desire to deliver warnings to my younger self.