Time is
perceived to be a dimension of our existence, like height, width, and depth. It
seems likely to me that we would eventually learn how to move through time in
either direction. This implies that we should have visitors from the future……unless
those enlightened folks see nothing interesting about road rage and reality TV. Perhaps there is reason to avoid us? Maybe we contaminate attitudes? Yet, I think
natural human curiosity would impel them to visit us.
So, where
are they? I don’t buy the notion that
they’d all be hidden. People are screw-ups. Even though they would have
protocols to safeguard contaminating our time with knowledge of them, someone
would slip up. That’s just human. But
they haven’t, so they aren’t here.
How can
that be? The most likely answer seems to me to be that the world will end
before mankind advances enough to travel through time. The lack of time travelers
here implies the end of the world.
I think drawing the end of existence from the fact that no time travelers are here is a little far fetched. We may well unlock the power of time-travel, but so far, physics has taught us that we can only slow down time, not reverse it. For an an object, say, a person on a spacecraft that flies at 10% the speed of light, time will move slower (relative to objects that are travelling at much slower speeds, such as a person back on earth). This means that when the person touches back down to earth, they will be younger than people they were previously the same age as, (but still older than they were when they left). We can't reverse time, just slow it down. So, we will only begin meeting time-travelers AFTER we discover a means of time travel.
ReplyDeleteAll this said, It's impossible to know what we will discover, and your post really made me think!