Time travel

Time travel tourism may not bring a bumper year

There is a theory that if indeed time travel had been discovered, we’d have felt its influence by now.

People would be going back and forth from the future to sculpt our way of life, prevent disasters and generally make everything OK.

Or, if they’re motivated by trouble-making, running riot.

And, of course, the conspiracy fans will probably say ‘well, how do you know they haven’t’. But it’s at that point, should you be engaged in such a conversation with someone who actually cares so passionately about it to be arguing the toss, it becomes almost entirely pointless and bailing out of that particular discussion is the only realistic way forward for the sanity of all involved.

What’s more, it is hard to imagine how the temptation to go back and do things differently wouldn’t motivate anyone and everyone many years hence, to a. create the required machinery in the first place and b. buy a trip back in time and find themselves in our towns and cities right here, right now, on a spot of time travel tourism.

You’d imagine it would be a big money earner.

Although, I suppose, if given the expanse of time in which to travel, is 2012 really one you’d pick?

True, a wonderful Olympic Games would be a huge temptation for the sports fan, but otherwise you’d be spending your precious days off visiting an era where no-one has much cash, everything’s priced high, and the weather is always miserable.

There are, I imagine, more headline grabbing times and places to visit. Ancient Egypt, perhaps; a stable in Bethlehem a little over 2,000 years ago, or watching from a grassy knoll as a certain President of the US drove past in downtown Dallas.

Or perhaps those from the year 3000 are actually heading back to 2020 so as to watch the opening of the Boris Island airport in the Thames Estuary. Who knows?

However, we’d all love the opportunity to go back in time and change things we’ve done, to do things better, to not make the mistakes which haunt us.

But let us, for the sake of the aforementioned sanity again, assume time travel has not been created by some wild, Back to the Future-esque crazy haired professor, and that we are forever stuck with world events and personal circumstances and nobody can ever change them.

And that is probably a good thing too.

There are many who subscribe to the ‘everything happens for a reason’ theory on life – and it is frequently hard to dispute that.

Great tragedies may have claimed dozens or even thousands of lives, but the fact they happened prompted massive changes in approach and made things safer for millions of others.

So let’s leave the debate to those with too much time on their hands and a love of internet forums.

Although, hang on, what if they are the ones stuck here having travelled from the future and are trying to tell us something….yikes!