Time travelers in fiction come in all forms, from Dr. Who to the novice Hiro in NBC's Heroes, whose antics provided the comic foil to the darker themes presented by the serial. Wells' The Time Machine depicts the time traveler travelling all the way to a distant end-of-the-world vista, and the film adaptations have the traveler narrowly escaping an apocalyptic event (nuclear holocaust, or the destruction of the moon) via time travel. Alas, we earthlings of 2012 do not appear to have this means of escaping EOTW.
So, the question of the day is: Is time travel really possible? Einstein's Relativity gives us a blueprint for how we might experience forward time travel using gravitational time dilation. Cryogenics / suspended animation might also be considered a form of forward time travel, and this is used as a plot device in films such as Demolition Man and Idiocracy.
Traveling back in time appears to be a different story. I have personally settled on the notion that we would have enough anecdotal evidence in our lives by now to support that travelers visited us from the future, and since we do not have that evidence, the prospect of traveling back in time is very doubtful. Stephen Hawking speaks of this absence of time tourists in the same manner, although to be comprehensive he gives us some possible reasons why we may not have encountered time tourists yet. I personally think the reason is chillingly simple: time travel is not invented before EOTW.
At least fiction continues to provide us with the rich imagination of what might transpire if we time travel to the past. We might alter the future through a small unintended change in the past (e.g. Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder); or we may send agents back in time to intentionally alter a dire future state (e.g. Terminator).
Or, we may unintentionally travel through time and find ourselves trapped in the past. Such is the case of my second classic Star Trek episode, "Tomorrow is Yesterday," in which the Enterprise and its intrepid crew is time warped back to 1960s Earth. Kirk, Spock and the gang must give consideration to how to leave the inhabitants of that period in an unaltered state, so as not to jeopardize their own history. Also revealed is the "slingshot around the sun" technique (gravitational time dilation?) to return them to the point in time they left. Star Trek IV fans should recognize this device.
Time travel storylines have appeared in a lot of Star Trek episodes throughout the entire opus. This was the first episode devoted to that concept, and it was right up my alley. There's a lot of buzz around the upcoming first season episode "City on the Edge of Forever," another time travel story...
And on another note, my new Sony noise-canceling headphones are pretty good so far. I'm test-driving them on Best of Bowie. My only complaint so far is that the time dilation feature doesn't seem to work ;-)
Drops from My 2012 Bucket: Jan. 16, 340 days remaining
Tomorrow is Yesterday (Welcome to the 1960s)
Video Mission Update: 20 / 728 hours = 2.7%
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