Time travel has been a staple of science fiction since its inception.  As early as 1895 HG Wells, arguably the father of modern SciFi, wrote about time travel and its implications in “The Time Machine” .   Now a days we get at least one time travel movie every year, mostly centered around paradoxes.  Paradox is the term physicists use for the illogical effects of a careless time travelers. The most famous is one in which a time traveler kills his ancestor in the past. If this happens there is no logical way for the time traveler to be alive to kill the ancestor.  This is called the Grandfather Paradox.

In modern times, experimenters have observed time reversal in  particles and theorized how to use moving wormholes to build time loops.  Physicists have recently even shown how a time machine can be constructed.  Of course, if such a device is possible, even in the far future, care should be taken to prevent possible universe destroying paradoxes.  The following is a simple guide on how to keep yourself,  and the universe, safe, should you decide to take that vacation to the Precambrian Era.

First of all, the basics.  We don’t really know what kind of time traveling the universe allows.  There has been many scientific papers on the mechanics of possible universes.   Both Science and Fiction have narrowed down the possibilities for us:

Type I: The Back to The Future Universe, in which there is a single timeline that can be altered and produces paradox opportunities galore.

Type II: The Time Cop universe, in which every trip produces a myriad of splinter universes with different colored Statues of Liberty, etc.  JanClaude Van Damme lives in all of them.

Type III: The Doctor Who Universe in which time travel is possible but the universe itself prevents and corrects inconsistencies.  This is the currently  accepted scientific standard but things change often in this field .

Regardless of which universe we inhabit we have a few simple rules that will keep you from fading away and keep  the time space continuum running like a Canton Hegemony built  chronometer:

Get your tips AFTER THE JUMP…

1) Lock your Time Machine up.   We can’t stress this enough.  Regardless of what kind of conveyance you use to mess with the basic fabric of reality,  do not allow others access to it,  be it Morlock  or Eloi.  Keeping track of your own comings and goings  is hard enough without allowing  locals to mess with the timeline as well.  Again and again your device will be stolen, misplaced  and used to go back and give your enemies advantages.  So lock up,  password protect, or at least take the front wheel off your temporal traversing device when you are not using it.  Never leave your time traveling car parked with the keys on the ignition. It will lead to no good at all.

2) Keep a Diary.  Time traveling can be confusing.  If you inhabit Universes I and III you will need to keep track of your visits and the people you meet.  This will be helpful to prevent you from messing with your own nested timeline.  It is extremely bad manners  to not say hello to people you have not met yet. Keeping a good annotated diary, be it digital or analog, will insure you know when you are about to  destroy a whole civilization by taking the wrong train or selecting the wrong floor on an elevator. Besides, you might want to know if  Jim the Fish has happened yet.

3)  The Past is Done!  Do not change the past.  Let me say that again:  Do NOT change the past.  No matter what universe we live in, it is a bad idea to change anything on purpose.  Every small change can have huge  and unexpected repercussions.  Specially , do not kill Hitler,  it obviously won’t work and you will look like a fool trying.  To be safe,  stay within all of the misreported and undocumented portions of  history.  This will insure  that the future you go back to will always be agreeable.   It is no fun to go back home only to find your planet populated with damn dirty apes.

4) Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute!  The easiest way of creating time Paradoxes is to leave your futuristic junk  laying around and having some local yokel pick it up.  He will inevitably conquer the planet with your nuclear powered toe clippers or sonic nose hair trimmers.  Tiny inconsequential objects have a way of becoming artifacts of power and destruction.  It does not take a T2000 to figure that if you leave a few future microchips in the past you will, invariably, end up with Skynet. The farther back you go the worse the effects.  So if you want to go home and be invited over to dinner at the Morloks’, by all means. leave your future crap laying around in the past.

5) Do NOT Seek Or Condone Romantic Relations With Vaguely Familiar, Alluring Members Of The Opposite Sex. Perhaps the most important rule of all is so obvious that it is often overlooked with continuum devastating results. They invariably turn out to be your ancestor. No matter how hot grandma was  back in the thirties,  or  how dashing you look in your period clothes, keep it strictly platonic!  Otherwise, this practice is ikky and in terrible bad taste and in universes type I and II could lead to the destruction of the timeline. However, in case you are in Universe Type III , or what I like to call the “everything  goes” universe:  Go wild ! For all you know, you are indeed your own grandpa.

In many ways, Time Travel is like a greek tragedy:  no matter how hard you try to avoid it you are bound to end up like Eadipus. Some will say that the only safe time travel is to observe without interacting and will spout terms like “Temporal Time Directive” and such.  I think they just like to watch.  So, should you  refrain from this particular abuse against nature? I say it’s all about having fun and using protection.  If you follow our simple rules, you can enjoy yourself and keep the universe safe at the same time. Be a nice tourist and learn some of the local language and  dress period.  For the adventurous, time travel can be fulfilling, romantic, and profitable.  And remember, don’t stare directly into the time vortex, you might go blind.

A five-part series that tries to explain how to make the science of Star Trek real…

Probably the most fascinating idea that Star Trek popularized was the idea of a warp drive. This was a concept from golden age sci-fi that went mainstream via Trek as space-age audiences became sophisticated enough to realize that NASA’s fastest rockets wouldn’t take you very far in a human lifetime. Even going the speed of light wouldn’t work for a show that tried to visit more than one star system in it’s 3 season run (due to time dilation your characters could visit those places, but their friends back on earth would be long dead). What was needed was a (plot) device that allowed you to visit distant planets in the time it takes to drive to the next state.

Since Star Trek, warp drive has become a part of public consciousness. It’s a theoretical form of technology that some feel is as inevitable as AI and teleportation.

There’s one big catch; while AI (or something that acts like it) seems to be a problem solved at some point on a graph projecting the development of intelligent systems and teleportation seems to be more of an energy problem, there’s not a viable theory for how a warp drive could work (exotic matter, worm holes, Alcubierre drives etc.) that doesn’t violate the laws of physics (as we know them) or result in some equation balancing phenomenon like a “quantum scream” (an obscure term used in an equally obscure paper on the subject).

But despair not. There could be a much simpler solution to getting to faraway planets quickly in a short amount of time. It might have to do with the fact that when we look at distant galaxies or study the acceleration of space probes beyond our solar system we see some strange stuff that falls outside our theoretical framework. Galaxies are moving faster than they should. Our space probes seem to be accelerating faster than they should (although this one might be just a measuring problem). There’s a variety of theories to explain this. None of them dominate.

If space itself is dimpled like a golf ball, traveling in a straight line is usually not the best option to get from one point to another. The fastest path is the one that avoids going into the valleys created by the dimples – but not too far out of the way.

Every particle in the universe makes a dimple in space. This dimple effects matter and light. Light from our second closest star is slowed down ever so slightly by the dimples caused by the various particles between it and us. Even a total vacuum suffers quantum fluctuations that cause these dimples.

Depending upon how significant the effect this dimpling has and how much it occurs on a galactic scale, we might have to rethink how we measure distance between stars. A star five light years away might be reachable in less time going less than the speed of light if there was a way to take a route that avoided most of the dimpling. This might be a route only a subatomic particle could take and it might only shave .0000000000000001 milliseconds off the total trip time, but it’s a start. And if it turns out that those dimples have dimples, then there might be an even bigger time savings.

While that’s not a whole lot to hope for right now and nowhere near as sexy to think about as a magical warp engine, it’s a helpful frame of reference for understanding how faster than light travel may not mean going faster than the speed of light.

Finding a way to get to distant star systems might not come from waiting for our existing theories to be overturned to satisfy our wishes. It might just come from studying the phenomenon at hand and better understanding how it all works together.

Check out the rest of the series on making the science of Star Trek possible

A five-part series that tries to explain how to make the science of Star Trek real…

In an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation called the “The Chase” a long running problem in Star Trek was finally solved – Why do all the aliens in Star Trek look humanoid. The answer was not “budget”. It was that a race that lived 4.5 billion years ago seeded the galaxy with its DNA. Humans, Vulcans, klingons etc., all got their imprint from them. We kind of look like each other because we all look like some alien race from 4.5 billion years ago. Problem solved. But is Intelligent Design really a satisfying answer?

If we find aliens that look like us, what other explanations could account for them?

Kidnapping
Having to deal with a slightly more sophisticated audience that grew up watching Star Trek, the producers of Stargate and the producers of the television series had to come up with a simple explanation for there being humans all over the galaxy in present day time. Their solution was a popular one in sci-fi literature: We were kidnapped. Over the last 100,000 years humans have been relocated to the distant corners of our universe. Once there, they go about their business. Building monuments to their gods (Star Trek and Stargate) or becoming thriving interstellar civilizations more advanced than us on earth (Iain Banks’s The Culture).

Plastic surgery
Let’s face it, we’re one sexy species. Of course we’re biologically programmed to think this, otherwise evolution would come to a stand still if we spent all our time trying to reproduce with some other species just as sexy in its own way (like sexy, sexy moss). But lets assume that we’re universally considered sexy. Then it makes sense that sophisticated civilizations would want to look like us – or at least some of them would. History is replete with examples of one culture adopting the style of another (sometimes less sophisticated one); Romans copying Egyptian fashion. Revolutionary France emulating the American Frontiersmen and Native Americans. British punks emulating Caribbean culture and Native American, etc.

Shape-shifting
Any civilization that can travel interstellar distances should also possess the ability to shift shape. We can do this in some small form through surgery and prosthetics. Eventually, nanotechnology should give us the ability to radically change our shapes, colors and features. It’s not impossible to think that if we ever meet some other species we might adopt their shape to fit in just like we do the wardrobe of other countries. Because nothing screams tourist on Epsilon XII like only one pair of arms and concealed genitals.

Coincidence
This is a hard one to accept initially. Our planet is filled with billions of different life forms. The only ones that ever came close to looking like us are distant relatives. But given a universe filled with over 70 sextillion stars (that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars), if intelligent life happens a lot and knowing that nature favors certain solutions (eyes, wings, flippers, feet) it’s not too hard to accept that somewhere out there are a lot of roughly humanoid looking species. But for every one of those would be a billion squidlings that think we’re very unsexy.

Synchronicity
This is a concept used in sci-fi to explain why patterns often repeat themselves. It’s not a matter of coincidence, it’s that there’s some property of the universe that makes systems move to the same metronome. A kind of galactic zeitgeist. In pop culture there have been a number of crank theories like Morphic-Resonance and The Hundredth Monkey that try to prove this. They fail because their own examples are easily debunked. They try to explain phenomena that don’t require a sophisticated explanation and supply a mechanism without really saying what it is.

Ignoring the crackpot examples, there are other examples of synchronicity fully understood and some that aren’t. Quantum entanglement is one form of it. It’s spooky action at a distance shows how previously connected particles are still mysteriously connected. Since the universe started out as a tiny point, we’re all connected in some way. In more mundane physics you can do fun experiments with tuning forks and other objects and observe how similar shapes can make each other resonate at a distance.

If at some level matter can influence other matter at a far off distance like two tuning forks, then maybe that influence can scale up to systems and cause co-evolution over similar paths. This could result in humanoids in the most far off places. For a great exploration of this idea, check out Anathem by Neil Stephenson.

Check out the rest of the series on making the science of Star Trek possible

A five-part series that tries to explain how to make the science of Star Trek real…

Time Travel stories generally suck. There are some noteworthy exceptions – specifically stories that deal with the problems of time travel and not just time travel as a plot device (Primer, Back to the Future, to name a few).

Star Trek has done some great and some very bad time travel stories. Story merits aside, there’s one big problem with most time travel stories; Transmitting people back in time (information) has no theoretical basis: It’s impossible. For every worm hole propped open with exotic matter or giant Tippler tube, someone always finds an equation to show how the universe corrects itself with quantum screams, bubbles or other annoyances that get in the way of us correcting that horrible thing that happened in 6th grade or saving the whales.

Assuming for a moment that the killjoys at MIT and Princeton who relish in pointing out that time travel as we understand it is impossible, then what? How can we tell scientifically literate time travel stories?

Fake universe
If the universe is really just a computer program and we’re just AI running around in as described in countless sci-fi stories, the Matrix and a few Star Trek episodes; then anything is possible. Traveling back in time is like finding a cheat code on a video game that lets you hop around levels in a game. Real time travel is still impossible but time travel for people in the simulation is totally possible. What are the odds that we’re in a quantum computer simulation? Frightenly good according to the Harter equation (see footnote).

Sideways time travel
If we’re not all in a computer simulation, then maybe the way to go back in time is to go sideways into a parallel universe that’s a mirror of our own but just a few milliseconds behind us and keep going universe to universe until you get to the time you want. Assuming that the multi-worlds theory of Quantum Mechanics is correct and that our universe branches off every time there’s a quantum event, then there could be an infinite number of universes like our own progressing back to the big bang because some of them got a little later start then us. Of course this isn’t time travel into our own timeline. But it’s traveling into a past similar to our own. You can kill all you distant relatives without repercussions (besides trifling moral ones).

Change the present to the past
The beautiful premise in Alex Proyas’s film Dark City was that the clock could be rolled back and timelines altered by simply putting people to sleep and then moving things where you wanted and implanting memories. No time machine required. Just rewrite the calendar and get everyone to subscribe to a collective delusion and create physical evidence.

Sound crazy? Our whole calendar is based upon a bunch of guys in funny robes changing our timeline to agree to a religious point of view. We’re a couple weeks out of sync with natural history because of this! Totalitarian regimes in Soviet Russia, China and North Korea constantly changed their timelines to whatever was politically convenient.

Take this a step further and imagine some kind of technology that doesn’t so much allow you to travel back in time, as much as roll-back the odometer on everything else around you. This would require knowing where things go and repositioning atoms into a prior arrangement to precisely fit the period you wanted to go. It’d be a tremendous undertaking, but it’s an engineering problem and not one of fundamental physics. This may or may not have been the device that saved the day in Galaxy Quest.

Going even further out on the fringe, if every particle has a memory, maybe there’s a way to knock everything into a past state. This might be something that can just be done locally or on a planetary scale. Figuring out how to account for all the particles that fell out of the region could be complicated. Your atoms were doing other things before they became you…

Simulate just the parts you want
We already do this to an extent. Video games, movies and Renaissance fairs are all attempts to recreate a part of the past. They’re all getting more and more sophisticated. At some point you’ll be able to walk the streets of ancient Rome in some way or another and it will be just as real to your senses as having been there. While this won’t let you wreak havoc on the present, it can allow you to fulfill your suppressed power fantasies by allowing you to use your 21st century knowledge to try to take over the ancient world, acquire a harem and build monuments in your own honor. And isn’t that what this is all really about?

Check out the rest of the series on making the science of Star Trek possible

Footnote:
The Harter Equation: *If* it’s possible to make a quantum computer that can describe a reality equal to or greater than our own universe in detail, and *if* it’s possible to create an infinite number of simulated universes with this level of detail, the chance that our universe is actually a quantum simulation would be nearly infinite*. There would be infinitely more artificial universes (that think they’re real) than real ones. Now if an artificial universes (like our own?) can create other artificial universes, the chances that we’re an original universe becomes even more implausible.

A five-part series that tries to explain how to make the science of Star Trek real…

An important part of the Star Trek mythos is the idea of mind-to-mind contact. Spock uses this to probe other people’s minds and even transplant his entire consciousness. Counselor Troi used it to read the feelings of other species. It’s a wonderful concept that has fascinated people since at least the 1800’s. Unfortunately, we’re no closer to it being real now then we were back then.

We can imagine all sorts of technology assisted ways to make this real, but there’s nothing sexy about your Vulcan girlfriend asking you to step into an fMRI so she can read your voxels (okay, maybe a little sexy). What we need are some organic solutions or explanations for brain to brain transmission that make the concept a little more plausible.

Pheromones
Pheromones are chemical signals that animals use to influence one another and convey certain kinds of information like mating availability and even directions. The amount that humans are controlled by them is up for debate. Yet, we know they’re there and we know they have some effect – especially when it comes to reproduction.

At its simplest, a pheromone is a chemical emitted by one animal that tells another animal’s brain (usually via the nose) some piece of information. While individual pheromone’s may not say a whole lot, they may be more complex than Chinese pictographs and capable of communicating more information than our spoken communication.

If an organism could control what pheromones it gave off (like we do sound in speech) and another organism could discern the details (like we do with hearing), a whole new level of non-verbal communication is made possible. This is even more practical than mind viruses (see below) and something you can readily experiment with. We’d love to hear from someone who has built a Wi-Fi system based on scent.

Mind viruses
Information is transmitted from mind to mind all the time without overt forms of communication. Animals that inherit their instincts get their instructions from coding in their DNA. Viruses can jump bits of DNA from one organism to another. Our own DNA is filled with examples of this. Some speculate that up to 50% of the DNA in us was left there by viruses.

If we can all agree that animals (including us) can inherit information (patterns in the brain) that predispose us a certain way and we can agree that viruses can alter our DNA, it’s at least possible for an organism to use DNA as a way to shuttle information back and forth between different brains. So when Spock puts his hands on your face in that Vulcan mind meld of his, he’s really just passing on some mind infection to you.

Who knows how effective of a mode of transmitting information this would be. It might be worse than a fax machine from 1960. Or how well it would work between two different people, let alone two different species from different planets. At least it’s a mechanism that may already be in place to some degree.

Magnetoception
When most skeptics approach the idea of telepathy, stock answer number one is how complex the brain is how all our brains are laid out differently. Forgetting for the moment that recent research has shown that we can pinpoint thoughts and decisions much more precisely than we thought; it doesn’t matter how different our brains are. We have parts of our brain dedicated to sorting that out and communicating with the rest of the world. All you need to do is send a request for information to that spot to get your response. Think of a spy on sodium thiopental. This truth serum works (kinda, sort of) because it affects a part of the brain that’s semi-conscious and not self censoring.

Now all we need is a nonverbal, non-chemical way tap into that part of the brain. Maybe it’s already there. Bee’s, sharks, birds and now apparently cows can all sense magnetic fields due to the presence of a magnetic organic compound called magnetite (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7213948). In the laboratory we can send signals to the parts of their brains that control their magnetoception and screw up their sense of direction. Studies in humans have been inconclusive yet we apparently have deposits of magnetite in our noses. At some point on our evolutionary path we likely had magnetoception to some degree.

A biologist wanting to give us the ability to read minds needs to first increase our ability to sense magnetic fields (tweaking a gene sequence or two) and then give us a controlled way to transmit. It could be a matter of giving a part of our brain that involves speech control over a muscle or organ (other than our tongue) that can generate really strong EMF waves (stronger than the ones our body already produces). Maybe some eel genes could help. Maybe there’s already coding for that.

The end product is a human that can naturally transmit and receive thoughts through electromagnetic radiation just like a cell phone or a radio – without the need for either.

Check out the rest of the series on making the science of Star Trek possible

A five-part series that tries to explain how to make the science of Star Trek real…

The transporters in Star Trek are an exciting concept. Recent developments in quantum physics have made the possibility of teleporting matter a theoretical possibility while warp drive still remains a fantasy concept. However, the amount of energy required to move a person and all the other problems that go with it (engineering and ethical) leave quantum teleportation a bit to be desired for practical use. Crazy things can happen, but in the event that quantum teleportation doesn’t scale up or people are upset by the idea of their atoms being destroyed so copies can take their place, here are some slightly (we think) more practical solutions for teleportation that use way less energy and preserve your atoms:

#1 The Human Javelin
If your goal is to get down to a planet as quickly as possible in an intact condition and you don’t mind what happens to your body in the interim, it might be possible using nanotechnology to squish you into a very small and narrow package. Basically your whole body would be dissected and shoved into a tube with a very narrow diameter (centimeters) and shot at the planet. Once the torpedo arrives, the nanobots that make up the packing material would go to work reassembling you from your squished up parts.

As unpleasant as this sounds, it’s really not that different from flying coach on most domestic airlines.

Technology required: An understanding of how to use nanotechnology to disassemble living systems and then put them back together in living condition.

Probability of being capable of this in the next 100 years: HIGH

#2 The Swarm
Slightly more elegant than the human torpedo but no less damaging to the short-term integrity of your molecules, is the idea of the Human Swarm. Imagine several million nano-mosquitoes each taking a tiny bite out of you – but remembering where it all went. They would then be shot out of your ship at a planet where they would drift down to the surface as a swarm. Once there, they’d begin to reassemble you back into your original form following an instruction set they made when they took you apart.

The elegant part about this solution is that it would look like some form of matter transporter technology or the smoke monster from Lost…

Technology required: The whole putting living things back together nano thing and intelligent flying nanobots.

Probability of being capable of this in the next 100 years: HIGH

#3 The Human Fax
If having your molecules diced up and transported elsewhere doesn’t appeal to you, an alternative is stepping into a machine that makes a copy of you somewhere else. This copy goes about its business (trade shows, Comic-Con, Lunar Vegas, etc) then steps back into the machine at the other end, downloads its experiences back to you and is disassembled. You then come out of your origin booth with the experience of having traveled somewhere at the speed of light and then back.

Forms of this idea have appeared in various sci-fi novels (Asimov’s Norby series and Wil McCarthy’s The Collapsium for example). It’s a very practical solution and may not require technology quite as advanced as the others suggested here. In fact, the faxed version of you doesn’t even have to be a precise copy. It just has to be capable of acting like you and recording what you do. The next step is getting those experiences back into your head. If you’re comfortable with only a downstream link back into your head, the experiences could be sent back in real time. Time delay wouldn’t be a problem because you’re only observing what your avatar does.

Technology required: The ability to electronically transmit experiences into a brain (actually closer than we thought just a few years ago). For long distances: AI driven avatars that can act like us – or digitally produced clones. For short distances: lifelike robot versions of ourselves to transmit experiences back to us.

Probability of being capable of this in the next 100 years: HIGH

#4 Particle Beam Teleportation
If all you want is to get your atoms from one place to another as quickly as possible, a particle beam can do the trick right now. Atom by atom you can flick your bits against a far wall using very high voltages and some electromagnets. The hard part is putting it all together again.

In a secret laboratory right now there might be some project sitting on a lab table that is trying to do this at least in part. The answer might be using two particle beams that intersect at a point and can move objects like forceps. These beams would sweep over you and shoot your particles somewhere in a matter stream where they would be stitched back together.

Technology required: Matter beams that can disassemble you atom by atom. A way to use particle beams or lasers to align and reassemble particles.

Probability of being capable of this in the next 100 years: MEDIUM

#5 Some exotic idea
World-changing ideas are often in obscurity before they change everything. Incandescent lights, silicon semi-conductors and even the Internet were academic concepts before they found their earth-shattering applications. There might be some theory or phenomenon sitting in a journal right now that some kid is going to base her graduate thesis on and create a great cover story for Discover magazine which might then lead to some radical new approach. Bose-Einstein Condensate fields?

Maybe we can move matter like light. Maybe you can make a matter hologram that allows you to reduce it to two dimensions and project it elsewhere. Maybe you can project all of the physical aspects of matter while keeping the atoms somewhere else. The point is, there are a lot of possibilities if you start thinking about the solution outside of just worm holes and a quantum teleportation.