New Southern Dad: Thoughts on time travel and the present day

In the Mahabharata, King Raivata Kakudmi travels to a heavenly realm to meet Brahma. When he returns to Earth, he discovers that millions of years have passed and the world as he knew it did not exist anymore. The text, believed to be written around the year 400 B.C and considered sacred reading in Hinduism, is the first known time travel story. 

Other ancient texts and legends always have people moving forward through time. Another example is the Japanese folktale of Urashima Taro, in which a fisherman visits a wondrous underwater palace for a few days only to find that 300 years has passed when he returns home. 

The 1819 American story of Rip Van Winkle has the protagonist taking a 20-year nap in the Catskill Mountains. The Dutch colonist, prone to laziness and often scolded by his spouse, wakes up with a long gray beard and a dead dog. He laments his missed days but not his departed wife. He moves in with his adult daughter and resumes his old habits. 

I’m not sure what the moral of that story is supposed to be. 

Folks began traveling backwards in time, at least through literature, in the 1880s. H.G. Wells’ sci-fi genre-defining novel “The Time Machine” describes the first, well, time machine, a device exclusively designed to take its passengers to any point in the known universe’s timeline through a rift in the fourth dimension, a realm that exists hidden between the fabric of time and space. 

This book unleashed a seemingly never-ending flow of science fiction tales, and even scientific theory, that humans would one day be able to time travel. This travel would not only open up the possibility of visiting ancient or futuristic times, but would unveil the multiverse, that we all exist along several planes of reality simultaneously. 

That means that there could be another me out there while I sit here hunched over a keyboard squinting at a screen, living the life of luxury as a successful CEO, and another surviving off the land as a hermit in the woods. I wonder which one of us is the happiest? 

I’ve never bought into such theories. I’m quite satisfied occupying my little piece of time and space. Sure, this world and time isn’t perfect, but find me one that is. People long for the “good old days,” but this slice of human history with antibiotics and indoor plumbing has been pretty good to me. 

A new study rules out the possibility of many time travel and multiverse theories. I’m going to have to take research at face value, because it’s math. Something about lines and how light travels. I don’t know, this version of me doesn’t understand that kind of stuff.  

If people spent half as much time trying to make today a little better as they did trying to get somewhere else, the world might be a better place.  

The past isn’t what it’s cracked up to be and the future won’t be too much either if we don’t start focusing on the present.