... you could travel in time?

Did you ever wonder how your reality would look like if you did something different in the past? Or did you wonder what you would be doing in ten years? There are many movies and series, like Men in Black or Doctor Who, which are based on this fascinating topic. But what if we could really travel in time?

Thinking about it, many questions arise. For example who would control time travelling? Could you take things with you? And how often and for how long can you go? But the most interesting one is probably, assuming you could only time travel once in your life, if you would go to the future or to the past.

I think it would be really hard to choose where to go. Not only the choice between past and future, but simply the decision for an exact year. There are so many interesting things that already happened and will happen! Travelling to the past, you could see dinosaurs in real life. You could talk with Jesus or other important personalities like Martin Luther-King or Gandhi or you could be a spectator when once-in-a-lifetime things happen, like Caesar getting stabbed or the fall of the Berlin Wall. It would also be just interesting to see life in a different decade, for example during the Middle Ages or the ancient times in Greece.

If you would travel to the future you could see, depending on how far away you travel, how life is developing. How is mankind dealing with the progress in technology? Will artificial intelligence take over and how would we live together? Did humanity find a solution for climate change or are we by then living on other planets?

Another possibility is also to go to a certain point in your own life and maybe change something, in the future or in the past. But then there is the big question: how would your changes affect your future, or your past? The concept of the butterfly effect says that only a small cause can have large effects with time. So you would need to be incredibly careful and thoughtful by doing so. There are also many paradoxes scientists discussing regarding this concept. One of the most well-known paradoxes is called ‘the Grandfather-paradox’. It raises the following question: If you go back in time and kill your own Grandfather, then you would never be born. But then, who would kill your Grandfather? Also if you go to your own future to change something, it would simultaneously change your past. But then, you would have maybe never travelled to the future, would you? This shows that time travelling would most likely cause a lot of problems, especially if everyone could travel in time. Just imagine all the chaos this would create!

This leads me to another question. Lets say you travel to your own past – would you be yourself at that point of your life but just with all the knowledge you already have from the future or would you be additionally in that past as the person you are today? But then there would be twice the same person, although from different times, which makes everything even more complicated.

There are so many more things you need to consider when talking about this topic and I can’t even come close to speak about all of them within this article. But there is one more question I definitely want to consider: is time travel even possible or is it simply fantasy?

According to scientists, there are probably three ways to realize time travelling as we imagine it. Either one can use wormholes, black holes or to move close to the speed of light. Unfortunately, none of those options are possible yet.

I think we all agree that time travelling would be an amazing possibility and we could also learn a lot through experiencing certain things in ‘real life’. But there are also a thousand difficulties and problems time travelling would implicate. That’s maybe why it’s best that we experience it for now only through movies and novels, but not in reality.