While this is not politics per se it does go into some basic common sense and you’ll see that the bulk of people that buy into and believe fanciful things like time travel are a little more liberal leaning than conservative. So liberals are more likely to buy into the idea of time travel, teleportation and the like as something that will be real as opposed to something that will never be, but that’s an observation for another day…

Just on the idea of time travel alone, a recent story put forth this observation…

Time Traveler’ May Just Be Hard of Hearing

Speculation about a supposed time traveller talking on her cell phone at a 1928 Hollywood film premiere has sped across the Internet faster than a DeLorean time machine. But a less mind-bending possibility is that she was just hard of hearing, experts say.

The story first surfaced in a YouTube video that includes film footage showing the 1928 premiere of the Charlie Chaplin film “The Circus” at Manns Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, Cali. Irish filmmaker George Clarke points out a woman in the old footage holding what he describes as a cell phone against her ear. The shape implies the woman is a time traveler using a modern mobile device rather than an ear trumpet, Clarke said.

Now while I of all people think time travel travel would be super cool and would give my left nut to be able to it there are a few minor problems with the theory and it is just that – a theory…

(duct tape your head warning)

If time travel was possible it would assume time is not linear but spherical or spiral in some way and bends back on or circles itself – therefore if time travel was indeed a reality and not a theory one would have to ask … where are the people from the future? As the future is the present somewhere in time so where are they? Where is it written from the past or the present about people from the future? Where is the proof? After all if one could travel through time then we would have already met people from the future and additionally those people in all likelihood would have at some point violated the fundamental laws of time travel that would be not to give people in the present information from the future as it could disrupt the time line in the past thus changing the future which could screw things up for them. Do you really believe that people would be so ethical in the future as to not come back in time and kill Hitler or Mao or warn us about Obama? Do you think that they would obey the prime directive to the letter as to not warn someone of impending doom like 9/11, the tsunami in Indonesia, how to cure the Black Plague or events of Pompey? Do you not think someone would have gone back in time to verify history thus changing history in the process? What would have happened to history if someone went back in time and gave Leonardo just a couple of hints on flight? Or maybe told the Babylonians you are on to something with that battery? What would the world be like today if someone dropped a modern world map in ancient Rome or Greece? Like I said someone would have violated the prime directive at some point. Hell, not even Star Trek could go a season with violating the prime directive in the name of the greater good.

Cell Phone or Hearing Horn - I'm going with Hearing Horn.

Now I’m not even going to waste any time on the cell phone in 1928 thing as it’s hard enough to get a signal nowadays better yet getting one across decades of time as I’m pretty damn sure there weren’t any cell towers in 1928 nor could a signal travel through time. (But AWG maybe in the future the technology will exist to do that?) I’ll cover that in a second, but to think a cell phone would actually work in 1928 is just ridiculous… just try living where I live and try to get one to work in 2010! Besides if someone could travel through time don’t you think that they would have come up with the technology for a better communication device than a damn cell phone? Just saying…

So anyway… let’s assume time is not linear and it’s spherical. You then get into the chicken and the egg of who or what was first – the time traveler or the ability to time travel? See think of time as a marathon – if a 50 mile marathon is ran from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’ you always know who is on the lead, but if that same marathon is ran on a 440 yard circular track like you find at any school then is doesn’t take long before those in the lead lap those in the rear and it’s difficult to know who is in really front – the positions in time become muddied. Thus giving rise to some spherical but parallel time line – that is assuming they don’t overlap onto themselves but look more like a spiral and you can move back and forth between them. Kind of like an vinyl record – every grove has different sounds but it’s the same record that you can skip laterally on.

However this has it’s problems too – if you could only move laterally between spherical but parallel time lines you could not go to a pinpoint place in time but only to a place in time next to you on the spiral in a lateral move… kind of like moving between a snaking line at a airport counter. You can jump the rope but only laterally – you can’t go from the back of the line to the front in one jump unless you are in the right place at the right time.

Get it?

So why I think time travel would be incredibly cool it’s just not possible because if it was we would have done it. Maybe not now but in the future which is already here in their time somewhere along the time line, but which part of the time line is in the front? Because based on the theory the future is the present and the past somewhere in time. So you have to ask is it somewhere in time the human race evolving or coming to an end every second of every day? And what would happen if you could go back in time and meet yourself? (Don’t tell me you wouldn’t want to go back in time and give yourself some well needed advice!) What if you told yourself – unknowingly – something that caused you to die between the present and future – would you still be able to come back in time and tell yourself if you said something that caused you to cease to exist or would you both just disappear? And how would that effect every single person you influenced in life positively or negatively? What would this do to the chain reaction of events? What if you traveled back and time and couldn’t get back and you reproduced – how would this effect the time line by creating offspring that wasn’t suppose to be there in that time?

Just some of the 1000′s of questions and problems… and I didn’t even get into Plate Flutter Model and E=MC2 and if you could travel at beyond the speed of light you could actually travel back in time provided that going from zero to 186,282 miles per second did rip you into a trillion bits of goo down to the atomic level because there is this nasty thing called the laws of physics that just a pretty big hill to clime and until someone finds a route over that hill all you have is theoretical physics and if time travel was possible someone would have found away in the future which is the present on another grove of the record which would mean theoretical physics wouldn’t be theoretical anymore now would it?

See the idea is this if you could keep eye contact with a clock and that clock was straight up noon and you could travel away from that clock at the speed of light the time would remain straight up noon because in reality you really don’t see anything you only see it’s reflection thus traveling at the speed of light would allow you to travel at the speed of the reflection and therefore the time never changes – understand? In THEORY if you could travel faster than the speed of light you could travel faster than the reflection and therefore travel back in time past 11:59, 11:58 and the greater the velocity the further and faster back in time you’d go and if you did this while off the planet you’d return to earth at a different time and we’d all be ruled by Apes (oh wait we are now) – So never mind.

But then there is greed – tell me that if you travel back in time you wouldn’t buy something or leave yourself a note for the future to invest in this or that that would change your life in your present? Think about what your life would be like if you could travel back in time right now to 1989 and you left yourself note and it said “Buy every tech stock you can in the early 1990′s and sell them all before 1999 and you will be rich beyond rich.” What if you went back and bought them and then went back and sold them a decade later – why you’d be the richest person in the world but then you have to ask that if you were the richest person in the world would you risk traveling back in time to give yourself the note or buy those stocks yourself in the first place and if you didn’t would you have gotten rich?

Remember in the new Star Trek … Spock gave the young Scotty his formula for teleportion during warp but how could Spock of known the formula to give to Scotty if Scotty in fact had not yet figured it out then there was really no way Spock could have known it – unless Spock was from a parallel universe and not the same one as Scotty. See you can not give somebody something they made if they have not yet made it as it does not yet exist.

Confused yet? Well there is no way I can cover every angle and argument for and against, safe to say there are a lot of problems with the time travel as a practical application as cool as it maybe it’s not really reality as there are some laws you just can’t break no matter how much you want to.