THE TROUBLE WITH TIME MACHINES

The Elegance of Infinity

There is an inherent problem with time machines. If you haven’t finished building yours yet, I need to warn you, but it’s not what you think. It’s not the breeder reactor you need to assemble, or the amounts of radioactive material needed to do so. Material salvaged from smoke detectors, medical waste, and glowing wristwatch dials, painstakingly collected for months on end to make your dream a reality.

Nor is it the sheer magnitude of the project. It will take a decade alone to decipher the plans you received in the mail, and the cost of the other materials will drive you into bankruptcy. Family and friends will abandon you and debt collectors will become incessant nuisances. Neighbors will peek through their curtains to monitor your comings and goings, police will be notified of mysterious noises resonating from your home, and you will always have your fingers crossed, hoping they won’t come knocking with a warrant in hand.

You will no longer question who sent you the blueprints or why. Seeking answers to those questions will become unnecessary distractions, insignificant details, as you forge ahead with your single minded obsession. You will be oblivious to the problem ahead. Deaf, dumb, and blind to anyone or anything that does not fuel your compulsion.

Only when you have installed the last circuit board and sit ready at the console, with electrodes on your temples, and with a sense of accomplishment that energizes every cell in your body, only then will the problem kick you in the teeth. And it’s not about choosing between the future or the past, or if you become stranded in either, or ending a war, or preventing a pandemic, or saving the life of a loved one, those are genuine concerns, but they are not the problem.

Before you flip the toggle switch to begin your travels, you will be consumed with a temptation, and this temptation is the problem. Why not see how all of this started? Perhaps an explosion caused by realities colliding, and what is reality? Or maybe it is all a merry-go-round we can’t jump from, and if it’s not, why not see how it all ends. Will it all retract in the blink of an eye, everything seen and unseen, will it all collapse upon itself and contract into nothingness, and what is nothingness? But you will not want to know the answers, for if you know the answers, there will be no reason to have been born at all. No reason.

So I urge you to stop at once, disassemble your machine, or better yet, never attempt to build it in the first place. Burn the plans, tell not a soul how close you came to knowing it all, to answering the questions that have plagued the human mind for centuries. Escape from the quandary you’ve created, into the present, into the now, and I will give you the antidote for the poison coursing through your brain.

Stare into the faces of your fellow travelers as we journey around the sun, and know you are not alone, because what poisoned you all along was loneliness, the dark despair of solitude, that is where fear dwells, in the wasteland of our uncertainties, in the conundrums created by time machines, for these machines serve only to amplify the anguish of hopelessness and regret, because the answers they offer can only lead to more questions.