“Time is what you read off a clock.”
-Albert Einstein
The thing most people don’t understand about Time Travel is that you’re also travelling through space. They picture you jumping—let’s say 20 years into The Future—and somehow just appearing in the same spot where you were originally standing.
Except it’s not the same spot. Because what most people are not realizing is that everything in our universe is constantly moving around, every thing relative to every other thing, and that in the span of what we call 20 years that “spot” where you were standing is nowhere even near the same place where it was before.
Now of course if you’ve never left earth it still seems like it is, because everything on the surface of the earth tends to basically stay in the same place relative to every other place. But if you were standing on another planet, or even on the moon, that “spot” on earth where somebody is standing just keeps whizzing and spinning all over the place relative to the “spot” where you are standing. Now throw in star systems and galaxies and galaxy clusters and multiple universes and maybe you can start to get the idea of what I am talking about.
So everything is relative.
But relative to what?
Because we spend all our time on the surface of a single planet we tend to think that everything can be measured in relation to some fixed point in space. That’s how our maps work. But if you think about it even the ground upon which we stand is constantly shifting. Landscapes change, rivers carve new paths, mountains rise, landmasses sink into the ocean, continents drift, etc., etc., etc. It just all tends to happen so slowly that usually we’re not even aware of it. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t still happening.
So basically I guess what I’m getting at is that all that stability that you thought existed, everything which you’ve based your so-called life upon and around, is basically just an illusion—albeit a relatively persistent one. It’s just persistent enough to fool most of us into thinking we that have some sort of handle on the world, when in reality no such handle exists.
So what does all this have to do with Time Travel you may be asking yourself?
My best advise for most of you is Don’t worry about it.
Just don’t go thinking you know everything there is to know either.
Because in reality, relatively speaking, none of us knows anything.
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