Episode 3: Time Immemorial

*chants*
WHAT DO WE WANT?
TIME TRAVEL!
WHEN DO WE WANT IT?
IRRELEVANT....

Yes time travel, parallel dimensions and infinite universes. For your third installment of The Comrade Contrary Files we have taken a turn for the nerd, I thought we would visit an idea that has racked mankind for what would seem like time immeemorial. According to Wikipedia; the greatest thing since Microwave Brownies, "time travel is the concept of moving between different points in time in a manner analogous to moving between different points in space. Time travel could hypothetically involve moving backward in time to a moment earlier than the starting point, or forward to the future of that point without the need for the traveler to experience the intervening period (at least not at the normal rate). Any technological device – whether fictional or hypothetical – that would be used to achieve time travel is commonly known as a time machine."

Eisenstein said for time travel to occur (please note that this is grossly oversimplified due to the fact I am no physicist and I cannot count past 22 because after that I run out of fingers and toes.) you need to break the light barrier.(travel at the speed of light) When an object travels at the speed of light and over the linear appearance of time is warped. (Though time appears linear in the 3rd dimension (our world) time is more of a 'wibbley wobbly timey wimey" mass) When this occurs the faster you travel the more time effectively folds back on itself to cause a time jump. With this in mind, theoretically anything can be a time machine if you are able to make it travel fast enough.

Now the concept of time travel appears in most Sci-fi shows at one point or another, or if you are Doctor Who, its the entire show. There are many ethical issues and other problems associated with traveling in time besides being able to travel at the speed of light. Backward time travel would have the potential to introduce paradoxes related to causality, and a variety of hypotheses have been proposed to resolve them, as discussed in the sections Paradoxes and Rules of time travel. And well there are many issues about knowing the future, many of them visited in the BBC Series Red Dwarf.