I have been fascinated by the concept of time travel since I watched The Time Travellers from 1964. It was and still is a quite dreadful film about time travellers, however it has this ending which has pretty much stayed with me ever since. The travellers inadvertently create a time loop, so the ending doesn't/isn't. Since then the idea of paradoxes has stuck with me and is one of the reasons that I feel that even far off into the future time travel will still be impossible - apart from forwards in time. You can't go into the past because the past doesn't exist.
However, if someone in the future could go back in time or manipulate the past in some way, presumably as long as it doesn't defy the laws of physics then you could get away with it, surely? You can't kill someone in the past because the repercussions and variables are too long and complicated, but could you change the name of something? I always thought it would be funny if I could go back in time and change the word for trees to cunts and vice versa. That wouldn't cause a temporal vortex or a time paradox, at least not that I can see. The problem is only I'd find it hilarious because everyone else would know a forest is full of cunts and the worst insult you can give to a woman is calling her a tree.
You know when you've gone upstairs for something and when you get there you've forgotten why you've gone upstairs? That could be time travel; the thing you went to get might not exist any more. You know when you meet someone and you're convinced you've met before, but that would be almost impossible? Time travel. It's the residual 'memory' of another plane of existence resonating inside your brain. You knew this person in a different life.
That actually happened to me once. No shit, this is a true story. Back when I was 11 and just finishing middle school, I had a couple of mates who I used to hang around with occasionally. Terry, Steve and Denver and what I liked about Denver was not only did he have a weird but okay name, he was an eleven year old who had been writing a book for almost a year. The thing was, we were all going into the big school in September and while Terry and I went to one school, Steve and Denver went to Weston Favell, the local rival school. I probably saw both of them about four times over the next five years and not since we were teenagers.
Many years ago, I looked on Facebook for the three of them; became friends with one of them, Terry, for a few years - only via messaging as we never hooked up and we got talking about Denver with the weird names (his surname was even weirder). I went in search of him and given that this was when you could attach a message to a friend request it's probably closer to 15 years ago, I not only found him but I attached a message. His response was odd; he remembered Terry and Steve but had no idea who I was - which as anyone who knows me will tell you is weird anyhow. I mentioned the book he was writing, where we all used to hang out, what we were into and the fact that I was friends with Terry and he literally could not remember me at all, not even a vague recollection.
Several years ago, before I moved to Scotland I 'discovered' the term for albino beetroot was 'chobli' derived from an African word in origin, meaning white root. Even the wife recalls me talking about them - because they're fucking tasteless shite if you ever get one - and yet when I went to look it up there was no such word as chobli, nothing at all. It never existed, I made it up.
Unlike the months I've spent trying to convince people that Simon & Garfunkel were originally called Ollie Eggboo & Vorgaltron, I can actually remember these things and so can other people, albeit only verbally. Yet in a world of misinformation and bullshit, it would be impossible to remove all traces of certain things unless those certain things didn't happen. I might remember knowing Denver but that might be because of some tachyon fluke; Terry might have taken it for granted that I knew Denver but what if something happened in the past that meant I never met him at all, or we only ever were on sort of nodding terms at school? I only have the wife's memory about chobli, she remembers me telling her about it shortly after we discovered white beetroot is awful. I can't imagine I made it up; I never took drugs that buggered around with my imagination or memory, unless I made it up because I couldn't find anything interesting about them so wanted to sound knowledgeable? Except, the internet... the wife isn't stupid, etc etc etc.
Now, we're told that time alters memories we turn certain memories into little films in our head although I'm not sure we even process memories like that; I think unless we're looking for data or clues in our thoughts, then most of our memories are impressions and feelings rather than a cine camera dialogue. So if absolute specifics - and you don't get much more unique than chobli, a word that doesn't exist - are remembered, isn't it a little bit like me asking you if you remember the late Queen's husband, Prince Dave of Macedonia.
There are famous people who believe we're all in a massive time loop and that we've been doing this for thousands of years and we have no memory of it and it can never be stopped. Which begs the question if we have no memory of it and are not aware of it surely it's just a theory, much like God, to make us feel a bit better about having not achieved everything we might have wanted? If it was a time loop and everything is the same, then during the first ever loop - the prime loop, the loop de loop, so to speak, the actual time line, someone must have theorised that we might all be in a time loop, otherwise you can change the loop because the smallest things have the widest implications.
This is why I find time fascinating and how tiny, miniscule irrelevances can prove why it - time travel - can't happen, but if it could happen I can't understand why they want to take the word chobli out of existence. I can see that the moment Denver and I originally met was made not to happen, my residual memories are: weird name, Lennon glasses, writing a book at 11. I can't remember much else, I'm sure I asked him where he got such a fab name from and I'm sure he told me but... that might be my altered memory playing tricks on me. Maybe I didn't leave an impression on him or he had a stroke or did loads of drugs or is a recovering alcoholic driven to drink because he knew me. Maybe he's lying because he couldn't stand me as a kid and he expects adult me is going to be just as bad?
Or maybe it's a person from the future coming back in time and inadvertently giving someone a cold in 1973 which means they never meet the person they're going to have children with... But, you see that alone would cause too many ripples. It's like that Marvel film Avengers: Endgame where Steve Rogers decides to go back into the past and spend the rest of his life with the woman he loves in a time he doesn't belong in. That's a wonderful happy ending for him, but what about Peggy Carter's future husband or how that would affect the establishment of SHIELD or anything else she was involved with? Everything about that is wrong because as far as we know we're not a multiverse in real life, so people would cease to exist.
There is nothing you can do physically in the past that wouldn't have consequences; however that's not to say you couldn't transfer a consciousness. If you could do that then you perhaps overcome the paradoxes, but it's unlikely. Plus there's another important element, the idea that someone could be in the future coming back in time and changing things can't happen, because that would make now the past and as I stated earlier the past doesn't exist. Existence is a now thing. The future is a blank canvas; it's been sketched out but generally it's blank; plus can you imagine the number of variables at play and the admission that there is a fate or a destiny, which there isn't because life and existence is chaos, we just strive for some semblance of order.
So, while I love the idea of time travel - I've been working on a story for seven years now about a man who lives in Cambridge discovering a time machine and deciding he's going to travel back in time and prevent the madness and eventual death of Syd Barrett - I do regard myself as a bit of an expert, which, of course, is impossible because time travel is an impossibility, so I'm a bit knowledgeable about time travel in films, TV and literature than the eight month old baby of your cousin in Frinton, who might not exist now but probably will at some point in the future. Or not.
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