Time Travel

Time travel is impossible.  Sorry.

     We love the concept of time travel and all the fun that it could provide us but really there is just no pulling it off.  What has happened has happened and what will happen cannot happen until we go through the motions of the present.  We can change how time affects us relative to other objects in space by speeding up and slowing down however, which is kind of like time travel in a way.

     Man has proven that when objects move faster, time 'slows' when compared to an object that is stationary or moving slower.  We've proved this by putting sensitive clocks on airplanes and then comparing them to identical clocks that stayed on the ground.  The clocks on the airplanes had less time elapse.  In essence, the airplane landed on the ground in the future.

     In science fiction this problem is often ignored when you have starships traveling at insane speeds all the time but there is no time issues.  In Star Trek, they travel at warp speed constantly but when they return home, they have experienced the same amount of time passage as the people that stayed behind.  What?  For the people on the starship, a week may have gone by but back on a planet months should have passed.  The original Enterprise was supposed to be on a five year mission.  Is that  five year mission to them or people still on Earth?  Either case is bad.  They would go out for five years and come back to find Earth progressed a thousand years and the machines have enslaved humanity.  In the other scenario, they'd get a few weeks to run around before having to return home to check in.  That would be a pointless mission.

     So obviously there has to be something going on to allow everyone to age the same despite all the time relativity problems.

Just a theory...

    To solve this we have to look at the favored way that starships in the Star Trek universe get around at faster than light speeds.  The warp drive.  Now, I rambled about warp drives a bit in a previous blog so I'll summarize briefly on how they work.

     Warp Drives work by putting the ship into a sub-space bubble that allows them to exist slightly out of the physical universe and escape the problem that traveling the speed of light causes infinite mass and probably death.  It's an easy way to make anything you want to happen the way you want it too.  It's magic for science fiction.

    In the real world that we actually live in however, we won't be getting into sub-space anytime soon.  However, there are ideas out there on how to travel at great speeds while avoiding some of the complications.  We can disrupt the fabric of the universe a little to create a gap that we can travel through to avoid dealing with all those traditional physics laws holding us back.  It's a cheat.  So what about time?

    Well, time and space are connected.  Time changes with us moving and expending energy.  So is time simply an illusion caused by matter and energy displacing each other?  If we expend little energy and don't move, time speeds up for us.  This is why the clock seems to crawl when we're stuck at a desk doing boring things.  We're looking out into a world with time actually going slower.  When we expend large amounts of energy and move around a lot, time slows down for us.  In this case, we exist in a world where time is going faster than us.  'Watch pot never boils' and 'Time flies when you're having fun' type of situations.

     So.  If time is connected to how our personal mass and energy interact with the mass and energy of the universe; then what happens when we separate ourselves from the universe?  In the case of a warp drive or 'rip apart the universe' drive, we are no longer interacting with real space on a normal level and no longer dealing with time normally.  In fact, since you're not interacting with energy or matter since it's being shunted aside by the 'warp' field, you would be treated as standing still when figuring the relativity of time.

     Looking at it this way, it is completely probable that you could take a spin around the galaxy in the USS Defiant with Commander Worf (Michael Dorn is awesome), and not come back to find Dax in a new host because Ezri died of old age.