Time Travel for the Inexperienced..

Ladies and gentlemen, for as long as time has been comprehended, mankind has wanted to escape these bonds and enter into the unexplored zone of Time-Travel. As the title of this essay suggests, Time-Travel is not something that one should just jump into. It is a complicated process that should be very carefully thought through before any action is taken. My aim is not to explain the fundamentals of how to Time-Travel, as I am sure you are all aware of the simplicity of the process, once it had been explained in graphic detail by Meredith Green (1955-?-3771), but more to point out the dangers of ignorance when contemplating doing it yourself. Many a person has approached the subject of Time-Travel with a cavalier attitude, and many have not actually have been in the cavalry, so to speak.

Time-Travel should be approached carefully, just as one would treat a lion when trying to tweak a whisker for important research: very gingerly, and with a hasty escape plan. Time-Travel sounds like a simple enough concept. “It is just like normal travel, only instead of ending up somewhere else, you just end up somewhen else,” fools have been heard to say. And indeed if you are a person who may have believed such utter drivel, then I suggest you take careful note of the tips and pointers that I shall be issuing you.

Firstly, Time-Travel comes at a cost. A time cost. The intrepid Time-Traveler must be a person arrogant and selfish in personality. This is because the amount of time they gain in traveling back in time needs to be derived from somewhere else. Time, of course, doesn’t just grow on trees. For a universal balance to take place, if our Time-Traveling ‘hero’ goes back 60 years (effectively gaining those years in potential-time) someone else has to lose them. This has effects as severe as instantaneous death or a person almost forty years old. One minute your body has forty to fifty strong years ahead of it, and the next thing it thinks its hit the big century and is handing in its notice. Hardly fair on the families.

Now I know what you’re all thinking. You’re all thinking, “Oh but its fine if they go into the future, because then, for the balance to work, someone is going to get another 60 years life.” This is true, but who’s to say whether a man taking his last breaths on his deathbed, having spent the last twenty years battling an incurable disease wants to spend the next sixty doing the same. And anyway, when the Time-Traveler comes back in time to tell of his fantastical journeys, some other poor sod has his life cut short again. I reiterate: Time-Travel is not for the selfless.

Secondly, the moment someone is transferred back or forward in time, a vacuum is left in their place. And as nature, and the teenager chore-avoiding boy, abhors a vacuum it replaces the emptiness with something of sheer worthlessness, just to plug the gap. More often than not this is a pile of Boney M cds, but every once in a while you get an Elvis impersonator.

My point could not be more clear: When embarking on a journey involving Time-Travel one needs to realize that one is effectively affecting everyone in the world dramatically negatively. If not directly, as illustrated in my first point, then certainly indirectly (as predicted by my second point) via an incident that may occur at a terrible party. You’d have to be a real prick to want to Time-Travel. But that’s what they said about Magellan..

Toodle-pip,

andrewthekerr