It has been a dream of many scientists and science fiction
writers for generations, imagined in books and stories written and transformed
visually in a huge number of cinematic films and TV series; the possibility to
leave your present point of reality to go and visit some other point in the
future, or even better, to see some event in the past.
Don’t you want to see how the world is going to be in a 100
years from now, in a thousand years, or perhaps more than that? Don’t you want
to know which civilization will outlast which other culture? Surely, many of us
would be happy to see if we will conquer the moon (once again), if we will
build colonies on Mars or other planets? Who does not want to see the world cup
finals of the next 10 tournaments? But most of all, who does not want to know
if the human race will go on for another millennium or not? And if not, why?
On the other side, how amazing and adventurous, not to
mention informative, would it be; to have the ability to go back and re-witness
something from your past, maybe to correct some bad actions or decisions, to
save a person who was dear to you from an accident, or to take a different path
in any life changing choice? Wouldn’t it be great to check your old childhood
home, to see your mother and father again, and while they were still alive, talk
to them one more time? How would it feel to do things in the past using the
knowledge you gained through the years after that?
Maybe someone wants to go and undo some harm that he might
have inflicted on another person, or he wants to confess his feelings to a girl
he never loved anyone else after, or maybe he just wants to hug someone and
experience once again the warmth that he felt some years or decades ago.
While we, in our real lives, can move in any direction we
choose: right or left, forward or backward, up or down, with time it is quite
different. Time moves only in one direction: past – present – future, and we do
not know of any way to alter this fact.
According to modern physics and to what Albert Einstein’s
theory of Special Relativity tells us, time travel to the future is a valid possibility;
a traveler could, for example, move 10 thousand years into the future and age only one year
during that trip, even though such a voyage would require a huge amount of
energy. The problem remains in the aspect of traveling to the past; to do that
we need to move faster than the speed of light, which is by itself impossible
according to our knowledge and to that of Einstein himself.
But who talked about creating a machine to be able to travel
to the past? Human beings are constructed with a machine capable of going back
in time, built-in within them, from the beginning. We all have this machine,
and nearly no one ever thought of considering it as such. You can use this tool
and travel back to any point in your passed years, re-see it, re-witness it,
re-live it. This machine is called memory, a function of all our brains, that
saves in all the moments we live, some we forget for a while, but as soon as
there is some kind of stimulant, it pops up again. The stimulant can be a
smell, a sound, a photograph, a drawing, or anything else that digs out a certain
memory that up till that moment, we thought it was lost.
You can be again with a person that was taken from you, talk
to them, rewind that conversation you had with them before the end came; you
can close your eyes and let the whole recording run in your mind, with all its
images, sounds and voices, and all its events. You can feel that warm kiss and
nice words you heard from someone you cannot physically contact anymore, you
can cheat death and re-live those important moments that you mistakenly thought
were gone.
Our memory is the magical answer to all the questions of the
writers and the thinkers, it is the only way, we know of, that can allow us to
travel back in time, and witness again what we thought was lost forever.
