What If There Was a Time Machine on Earth? | Unveiled

What If There Was a Time Machine on Earth?

What would you do if you could travel in time? A time machine is arguably the most sought-after bit of kit in all of science fiction, allowing us to bend and shape the spacetime continuum to our will. So, what would happen if we had one on this planet?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; What if there was a time machine on Earth?

In books, films and TV series, time travel is usually presented in a variety of ways. Characters can travel back in time to relive history; forward in time to get a head start on the future; they might get caught in an infinite time loop tied together by their time travelling; or they could trigger alternate timelines that would never have existed were it not for their ability to time travel in the first place. For today’s question, everything is possible. We’re imagining a time machine on Earth capable of all those things and more, turning time into a malleable, plottable, controllable reality. The key is that there’s only one of them… with two main explanations as to how it got here. One; we built it… Two; it arrived via some other means.

In the first scenario, how would we decide where to build it? One argument is that, by the time of its construction, the development of genuine time travel will have likely been a massive and long-running effort made by all the world’s brightest scientists, physicists, engineers, philosophers, lawmakers, creatives and more. It will have been funded by countless investors and contributed to by various organisations. So, while sci-fi often paints a time machine as the work of just one, stereotypically “mad” scientist, in real-life, if we ever did (somehow) design and build one, it would almost certainly require a huge collective effort.

For this reason, society with a time machine would have had to have transformed into something totally different by default. There’d be no room for things like national interests or cultural divides, because the time machine will have rendered them all at best confusing, at worst completely obsolete. In this way, Earth-with-time-machine could truly be a planet without borders… but it could be even more than that. If we understand time travel as the absolute pinnacle of technological achievement - because, by its nature, it would grant us access to every single bit of information there ever was or will be - then perhaps it can only happen when society is naturally advanced enough already. By the time we develop time travel, then, we’ll have presumably climbed things like the Kardashev Scale to the top; we’d be a universe-wide, space-faring, super-capable force; and we’d have no interest in going back in time to blow the surprise for anything before us, because we’d understand that to do so would mean ruin. As for whether “we” would still constitute humans at this hypothetical point in the probably seriously far future, who knows, but it’s difficult to imagine that that version of ourselves would be all that recognisable to us now in the relatively primitive twenty-first century…

Of course, there remains the other possibility that a time machine wouldn’t be this border-breaking bringer of futuristic peace and unity; that it wouldn’t be the result of worldwide, collective effort and ingenuity… but would instead be the ultimate prize in an arms race-style competition between nations, blocs or companies. In this case, having a time machine on Earth becomes a much less rosy and more problematic prospect. Yes, there’d be all of the same advantages when it comes to accessing information and inheriting infinite knowledge, but now only some groups or individuals would be privy to it. And so, society would be more divided than ever before.

Those with control of the time machine would have ultimate power. They could choose who used it, when they used it, and for what means. They could decide where in time any user could go. Potentially, it would give any particular nation the chance to rewrite history for the betterment of themselves… or any particular company the failsafe opportunity to horde the secrets of the future and ensure that they’re always ahead of the curve. The people who had seen the future or revisited the past would now be a select few, chosen by an even smaller number of time machine invigilators - be that a certain government, a military leadership group or a board of directors. Those invigilators might well be subject to regulations or the target of protests; they could well field time travel requests, or grant free access to the machine… but for as long as they - and only they - called the shots, then they’d arguably be the most influential figures in Earth’s history. And the time machine would stand akin to the greatest weapon, or at least the greatest means of control, ever devised.

The final scenario is that the time machine wasn’t built by humans at all, though. It wasn’t a collective endeavour across all of human history marking the pinnacle of technological advancement, nor was it a divisive arms race resulting in a massive divide between those who can and can’t time travel. Instead, the time machine just arrives here, maybe brought here by an advanced alien civilization as per various sci-fi stories, including “Doctor Who”. Imagine, for a second, what would happen if humans had the TARDIS. In all likelihood, and as the ever-popular BBC series often implies, we’d have little-to-no idea what to do with it, how to work it, how to even get inside it… in fact, we probably wouldn’t even know it was a time machine at all. But, say we did at least work that last bit out, where would or could we go from there?

For many, the quest to understand the time machine would become an all-consuming obsession. Here we’d have a device which confirms many of our greatest and most mind-bending theories about reality; we’d know that time wasn’t linear but that it was web-like, and that if we could only work out how to use it then we could answer essentially every single question that’s ever occurred to humanity. How did the universe form? What came before the big bang? Are black holes really so significant? And how will the universe end? The time machine would be seen, by some, as a gateway to ultimate truth, and its location could even become a place of pilgrimage. Humans around the world would be fascinated by what could be possible through it, and faith in science and technology could reach all new levels.

Should any human ever get it to work, though, they’d risk unravelling any number of paradoxes… not least that if they travelled back in time, they’d take back with them (to an earlier point in history) knowledge of working time travel. If the time machine wasn’t the product of an advanced human society - one advanced enough to know not to reveal it too early - then this could cause some major glitches in the timeline and reality of humankind. Equally, if an ultra-advanced time machine just arrived on Earth, and if only one person or a small number of people worked out how to use it, then they would instantly move apart from the rest of humanity, assuming a godlike omniscience over the past, present and future. And then we’d face the same problems and decisions as if humans had built the time machines themselves; what to do with all that power?

What would you do if there was a time machine in this world and you knew how to use it? Time travel brings with it countless choices between right and wrong, fair and unfair, fixed and flexible, or good and evil. In some variations of the story, a time machine can’t exist until we know how to use it effectively; in others, its invention is what shapes the whole of society from that point forwards (and therefore backwards); and in others, the time machine starts off as the ultimate mystery, until the human mind catches up with its awesome potential. According to some, they’re impossible… but, to the same degree, if they’re ever going to exist then, somewhere, they already do. And that’s what would happen if there was a time machine on Earth.