A Simple, Straightforward Guide to Time Travel

(Practical tips. No fancy mumbo jumbo.)

Everyone can travel in time. You can go to the future as long as you don’t die. This is the default mode of time travel. At 60 seconds per minute (of inter-subjective time). [Subjective times may vary.]

You may also be able to travel to the past. Contrary to popular belief, time travel to the past is not banned. The only restriction is that it is illegal to have memories of the future. So, most of the time, when you travel to the past, you don’t remember doing so from the future, you thought you are still traveling in the default mode of time travel (i.e. 1 second per second inter-subjective time), so you don’t notice you jumped.

Note that the laws regarding time are not issued by the department of physics but rather jointly by the department of biology and humanities. Biology gives our brains the memory function, otherwise we experience time very differently (eg. we don’t have memory of the past, and we might not even notice the 1sec/sec default mode of time travel).

More importantly, the humanities department encodes our cultural preferences of both certainty (of the past) and freedom (of the future). Free will implies the future will be a bit hard to predict, and our society’s reverence of experience and knowledge means we obsessively preserve aspects of the past into the present in forms of memories, oral traditions, stone engravings, books, hard drives, etc.

And thus we have a law against remembering the future (i.e. remembering coming from the future), because it flows from the principle of free will. They are our laws, manifested from the structure and values of our society (see above). It is not necessarily God’s law (though God does give free will).

Of course, laws can be broken. Laws are always broken.

Occasionally people smuggle memories of the future into the present. We call them premonitions. We can punish the smugglers by discrediting them – we can always make the future different from the smuggled memories by doing the opposite of what was foretold and making it not happen. The principle of free will is stronger than rules written on a cosmic edict.

Of course, smuggled memories can still come true. The trick to breaking laws is to not get caught. If you smuggle memories and don’t tell anyone, they can’t choose a different path because you haven’t told them what it was supposed to be. [People would be surprised how many “laws of nature” one can break as long as you don’t get caught.]

But how do you smuggle memories? Well, you can’t use the default timeline, because using the default timeline you can never reach the past from the future. So the obvious solution is to do a meta jump – basically treat the world as a simulation, invent a new timeline (outside of the simulation), and then with the alternate timeline you can do the jump.

Easy. Straightforward. Very logical.

The only issue is that most of us are not very used to breaking so-called “natural” laws. That might require a bit of practice. But that’s all there is to it folks. If you don’t want to practice, it may also be possible to skip it by fast-forwarding to a timeline where you already had ample practice.

Good luck and safe travels!