Time Travel: Only good for one person at a time

The traveler boards or puts on or clips on her time machine. She sets it for some point in the future or past. Then she throws a switch, pushes a button, thinks something, says something. Lights come on and off. Everything stops. The traveler has reached her destination. The shakes, tastes, smells, blinks and noises differ from story to story but the outcome is more or less the same.

Traveling into the future for say five years means there is five years of history she has not been a part of. She left. She's out of place. She's not going to arrive with those memories intact. To the people who didn't skip ahead she disappeared for five years. People were born. People died. Administrations change hands. She might have jumped ahead to a destroyed world. Her nation might be occupied by a foreign power. The location she left might be a convenience store five years later and she could appear right between the robber and clerk. A bomb could go off where she's landing. The place could be burning down. If she's traveling from her apartment did she pay up the rent for five years? The manager could have evicted her, moved the stuff out and rented the place to someone new. She could land in someone else's bedroom right in the middle of the mattress. Best case she can hope that everything is roughly as she left it.

Now a day or two has passed and the traveler is ready to return. She sets her device to place her back where at the point she left. She arrives there with a rough understanding of the events of the next five years. There is one tiny little problem. The world five years hence was a changed world. The fact that she left it and hopped ahead changed it from simply moving forward. There were people's lives she was a part of and suddenly, without explanation, she's gone. Assuming she is not a prominent figure in either world, the "big stuff" won't be affected. World events, changes in the stock market, lottery numbers and all the other things connected with money that people say they'd use to their advantage if the had the opportunity to visit the future should be about the same. She can still score at the race track, call up her bookie, whatever.

That's just some of the stuff surrounding one person who travels into the future. You can flip the scene around and tell what might transpire with a time traveler in the past. Both assume quite a lot. The time traveler can do little more than surf the internet, read books and newspapers. If they do anymore than scan the place they'll end up causing additional problems with the timeline. Time or the time continuum is kind of like cheap stockings. If you do much more than look at them you'll end up causing a runner. And nobody likes that.

This was just the simplest of examples. Things get more complicated by adding space to the calculations. Then what about multiple time travelers? By multiple I mean people going on separate trips roughly at the same time. What if one keeps his continuum in tact while the other does something stupid? Most of our science fiction stories don't handle these issues well. They'll abuse one or more aspects to keep a story together then when anyone tries to analyze it they come to the conclusion that several characters should have died or never been born. Oh well. Movies are about selling tickets. Fiction writers have to concentrate on writing good fiction. Hopefully at some point the two will meet.

Learn more about this author, Raymond Gilford.
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