A medicated essay on time in Normal entries

As a kid, like ten, I started reading time travel stories, like HG Wells the Time Machine, Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court (that one fucked me up) and Bradbury’s short story the name of which I don’t remember. (Oh, why did Twains one fuck me up? Because that damned Yankee could do fucking anything, I thought how soft we’d become since Twains time, I had no idea how to forge a gun, for instance, let alone find the components for gun powder in the stone. I mean I knew I was a kid and not expected to know any of that shit, but none of the grownups I knew did either. We would have been fucked in a Dark ages kingdom. According to Twain.)
I’ve seen a lot of movies and TV shows and throughout my life gravitate towards time travel stories. Most TV and Movies are more like the Bradbury story, concerned with paradox and the ethics of the act. They spend a lot of plot energy on not fucking up the time line and draw you into the speculation as though it were empirical. It’s like Asimovs laws of robotics. Here in the future we know good and goddamned well technology and ethics are not particularly close friends, often they are strangers. I mean why isn’t there similar laws for, say, automobiles. I don’t remember the exact wording but Asimovs first law is something like “A robot cannot harm a human”. We do have a similar law for automobiles but it’s after the fact, a penalty for harming a human with your automobile and added penalties if you broke other laws to do it. Why isn’t there a failsafe in computer chips to keep them from going to every national security site in the country? Just saying.
But back to time travel, all the paradoxs and dangers inherent in the stories are predicated on the notion that time gives a fuck about humanity. Hmmm, I didn’t say that quite right but I came close. History is a contrivance we made up for our own benefit as is the way we view time and reality. Because our lives are linear and our make up so damned egocentric we have literally rationalized our current reality from counting seconds as they pass to insisting one grouping of molecules is a chair and another a desk knowing full well that there’s a whole lot of space in between each grouping of atoms. Sorry, another tangent.
The ethical dilemmas of fucking with the time line pale next to the fluidity of time and the idea that the timeline is always being fucked with while we plod along in our fantasy of linear cradle-to-the-grave thinking. I’m not saying that thinking is a flaw, I’m not, I think it’s a protective adaptation, I think it came as a biological failsafe with the ability to abstract. We are very invested in chaos and order so much so that we can become anxious over the perception that at some undisclosed time along an uncertain path all the order in our world can be wiped out and/or chaos depending on one’s predilection. It’s funny that the same person who doesn’t believe in God believes in his chair because he can “touch it” or events in History because he’s read about them. If you think about it God is the least troubling thing to consider the existence of, especially if you think you’re rational and have a head for the sciences. I’m not even thinking about how subjective written history is, though most of us believe that to be true, I’m thinking about how fluid time is, how it’s enveloping rather than racing from point A to point B.
Einstein’s theory of relativity is pretty cool, it’s untested because we can’t figure out how to travel at the speed of light. However, light can. Somewhere in your childhood someone told you one of the stars you were looking at died a long time ago but the light is still traveling. Ok, someone told me that as a kid. My first thought was that it must work the other way too. That was as articulate as that thought got. I was a kid, fuck you. A bit more articulate version would be; if light can travel fast enough to hit the curvature of the universe then, effectively, any light exists outside of time, in both present and past and probably the future. Still not very articulate but it’s the only time travel thing that actually has a smarty pants theory to go along with it. We do have planes that break the sound barrier; ever been near one? One way of stating the discrepancy between sound and vision (the boom happens after the plane passes) would be to say the sound is in the past. It sounds silly but we do that with light all the time, our history books are completely about our perception of light in the past.
Ok, maybe I need more or less medication, typing is not the worst thing I could be doing. But if you’ve followed this (I’m not sure I have) and agree, paradox and ethics of time travel seem academic, not because we can’t do it but because there is no such thing as a time line, it’s all a time circle and the events of humanity are … not insignificant, just not any more real than this keyboard, chair, desk, their reality solely dependent on perception of light and suspension of disbelief.