Dear Editor,

I am aware of very intensive efforts in some of the advanced countries in which several organisations, including military ones, are trying to accomplish the feat of time travel. What many may consider science fiction is not seen as such by the organisations that are trying to accomplish this.

However, while I am convinced that time travel is possible, there are some things that some of these organisations are trying to do that I am not too sure about.

There are several things that these would-be time travellers of our time must understand. Perhaps the most obvious is that the very fact that these organisations are even attempting this feat — which I am sure will be achieved (in relation to our time) — is an admission that the present, in relation to any time, must be eternal. How else would anyone attempt to go back to the past or to the future if it is not already there? Another fact is that all events in time – past, present and future — are fixed.

There is another interesting aspect about our reality. These organisations that are trying (and they eventually will, if they haven’t already) to achieve time travel will understand that the concept of parallel realities may not be so fictional after all. Why?

Let’s say that a time traveller would want to prevent Adolf Hitler from ever being born. That time traveller would immediately be confronted with some hard truths. First, seeing that Hitler was already born, he cannot be unborn — at least in this reality. However, while the time traveller cannot stop Hitler’s birth in this reality, he can at least observe it.

However, that time traveller may in fact be able to stop Hitler’s birth in another reality. Indeed, that may very well have already happened. In that reality, there probably was never a second world war as we know it to have been in this one.

The point that I am making here is that both realities and the actions that caused them are fixed. There is nothing that anyone can do to change them. The time traveller will (or already has) have to discover that no matter how insignificant the actions of all of us may be, new realities — fixed realities — are “created”, so to speak.

In this reality, and at this point in time, breaking the barrier that separates us from the past, the future and the other parallel realities has not been achieved (at least in any significant way). However, make no mistake, this can and will be done (and indeed may have already been done).

Michael A Dingwall

michael_a_dingwall@hotmail.com