Can Time Travelers Go Back To Fix This Mess?

By James Donahue

One reason the Matrix film series was so popular is because it suggests that we live in a make-believe world where events can be altered by master game players at the push of a button.

As humanity rushes headlong into the threat of extinction because of over-population, reckless environmental and economic policies and consequently a polluted, dying and over-heating planet, we seem incapable of fixing our desperate condition.

Not only can we not fix it, we seem incapable of agreeing how to go about it, or that some problems even exists.

As an old science fiction buff, I have been unable to avoid the thought that perhaps time travel is possible, and that somehow, at the last moment, we might discover a way to send someone back into the past who can do something to alter current events and save the day.

But if it were possible, just where would we send this time traveler, and just what mission could he or she have that would make such an impact on today’s hopeless world? Might Henry Ford be encouraged to develop cars operating on alternative forms of energy?  Might Thomas Edison be persuaded to listen to the voice of the late Nikola Tesla and choose a cleaner way of generating power for mankind? Perhaps we could have persuaded Saul of Tarsus not to launch the religious movement that became Christianity.

Now a report by physicists Daniel Greenberger of the City University of New York, and Karl Syozil of the Vienna University of Technology in Austria, suggests that the laws of quantum physics seem to permit time travel, but prohibit the paradoxical problem of altering the present because of the things we might do in the past.

The theory they present is complex, but it suggests that quantum objects split their existence into multiple component waves, each following a distinct path through space-time. They believe that even if a person were to travel back to the past, they would unlikely be in places where they might interfere destructively with an event and change the present.

While it may be good news among sci-fi buffs who worry about the paradox of going back in time and destroying themselves by accidentally killing their grandfathers, it also suggests that nothing we do can alter the course we have chosen for mankind in general, even if we succeed in going backward in time.

Putting it in more simplistic terms, the physicists are saying that every time we make a choice we create a new universe so that the results of our actions take different paths at what we might think of as a fork in the road.

If, for example, a time traveler succeeded in finding Hitler as a young boy in Austria, and encouraged his interest in art rather than a career in politics, it would do nothing to change the history of this world in this universe. It would make dynamic differences in the events that go on in the world created at that particular fork in time, however.

Indeed, from personal experiences with unexpected time shifts and contacts with entities in parallel universes, it has become apparent that time may only be an illusion and it may not exist.

That we appear to be living in some kind of timed experience in which we are born, grow older and eventually die, and we record the history of those who went before us, suggests that, at least for humans locked in a dark three-dimensional existence, time may be something we invented to help us make sense of what we are experiencing. 

We say this because the entities we communicate with appear to be existing in the past, present and future at the same time. While they can often give us an accurate prediction of some future event, they appear to have no ability to tell us just when this event will occur.

During the winter of 1995-96, while my wife and I were homeless and staying in a run-down old motel room in the wilds of Arizona, we lacked access to television or radio communications. Thus we turned to my wife's ability to communicate with entities in the spirit world to find out what was going on. We were shocked when we were told one day that President Bill Clinton was being impeached.

When we got back into civilization again, we were relieved to find out that our president was not being impeached. We decided the entity was playing with our minds and giving us bad information. But within two years, the Monica Lewinski scandel broke and impeachment proceedings were held for Mr. Clinton.

Time then is relevant to humans on Earth, but apparently to only us. Thus time travel may, indeed, be possible. And if the quantum thinkers are right, it won't fix the mess we have created for ourselves. It appears we are going to have to figure that out ourselves, or die trying.