The worst thing about Time Travel isn't the possibility of interrupting your parent's courtship. It isn't the danger of creating a paradox that rushes backwards through time, eradicating the universe. It isn't losing the keys to your time machine in the Morlock tunnels
The worst part about traveling through time is tenses. Our fragile three dimensional minds can barely comprehend the four right-angled vertices that make up the next dimension. How can we possibly expect our language to be up to par?
Forget hypercubes and those topology classes you took as an undergrad. As a time traveler, you can handle a flat torus in the three sphere more easily than you'll be able to describe your trip.
You'll find yourself a slave to gnarled mutations of conditional future subjunctive.
- I am going to have already been engaged in plotting the 1975 disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa for 2 years next week when I start yesterday.
- Mary Magdalene wasn't really much of a party girl when I am going to met her three years ago. Surprisingly, Judas is going to was be more fun.
- I am going to have been knowing the answer to whether Harper Lee or Truman Capote wrote "To Kill A Mockingbird" five minutes ago. I already told you an hour from thence.
I propose we begin the preparations for the tumultuous task of defining new grammars to deal with the implications of time travel, as soon as possible. Don't think, "Oh, we can just wait until we invent time travel, go back in time and start planning then." That's the folly. If we wait that long, we'll find ourselves bogged down in the mire of communicating how we will have been already creating a language to stop us from having to have been already having had this conversation about avoiding just this type of grammar.
Don't get me started about the difficulties in trying to schedule a meeting between two time travelers. It will loosen your frail mind.
posted 2007-06-26