I’ve said it before and I’ll say one more time right up in here right here right now: travelling through time is god damn freaking hard. And when those pesky physicists finally figure out how to do it, you can bet your sweet bippy it’s going to cost more than a train trip to your auntie Beatrice’s house out in the suburbs.
But there are some ways you can still do it, all for the neat-o, super groovy cost of no dollars and no cents.
Time-travel the tightass way
- Watch as it do it right here for you. Ready? Ok… blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
There. You just travelled about 6 seconds into the future without any thing being added to your life or learning anything. You’re welcome.
2. This is how The Onion says you can do it in this encyclopaedia:
Youtube, forward-only time-travel device invented in 2005. Users log onto YouTube and are instantly transported two to five hours into the future without consciously experiencing or being aware of the intervening period. Following the time-travel experience, youTube users describe a sense of disorientation and panic upon discovering that life has continued without them during their temporal shift, and that any work or other tasks they left in the past remain uncompleted.¹
or this is what I recommend…
3. Go outside at night and just look up.
Alpha Centauri is the closest star to us (apart from our sun). Have a look outside… You see that one dim, red one and those two brights next to it over there? No, not over there. Over there. No…you’re not looking where I’m pointing. Over there. No, No, look. Here. See? God damn it. Here. See where my finger is? Ah fuck it, forget it. Yeah yeah whatever. Yeah that one there.
Well that one there, Alpha Centauri is actually a triple star system (consisting of Alpha Centauri A and B and dim, red dwarf star, Proxima Centauri)² bound together by gravity and it’s still an average of 4.5 light years away. So what you’re looking at (yep, that’s the one alright. Keep looking at it. You got it.) is actually the star back in 2013. And that means that if something happened to it, say in theory it happened to burn out right now, we wouldn’t be able to see it happen until 2021.
So what you’re looking at is the past.
And that’s the closest one. The furthest star is Deneb and that’s somewhere between 1,400 and 3,000 light years away. So whatever you see now is actually the state of star around the same time Socrates and Confucius and Seneca and Aristotle and Jesus and all those kind of crazy cats were bangin.
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¹ Taken from The Onion Book of Known Knowledge.
² Which, by the way, they found an Earth-like planet close to! It’s fucking far though, so the problem’s getting there. This is an artist’s impression of the view from it:
