What If We Could Start and Stop Time? | Unveiled

What If We Could Distort Time?

It’s one of the most popular science fiction themes out there because of the sheer number of possibilities it opens up. The fact that time seems to flow in just one direction has both frustrated and intrigued human beings for centuries… but, today, we can at least imagine what it would be like to be able to control it.

This is Unveiled and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; What if we could distort time?

While most of us understand the basic concept, there’s no universally-agreed-upon, complete definition of “what time is”. But, most simply, we usually view it as the passing of events from the past or present into the future. Efforts to measure time have been around for thousands of years - since as far back as the ancient Sumerians - while modern timekeeping is mostly based on the transition frequency of caesium-133 atoms, with atomic clocks believed to retain their accuracy for millions of years. And yet, how we measure time is really arbitrary… Our seconds, minutes, and hours would most likely be meaningless were another intelligent species to try and decipher them.

One especially large leap in our understanding of time came with Einstein and his theory of special relativity. Building upon his work, scientists came to understand that space and time are one and the same and aren’t separate entities. Instead, they exist together in a fabric conveniently named “spacetime”, which can also be thought of as the fourth dimension. Einstein’s equations also helped us to see how time is relative to the observer. For people on Earth, it appears to move at a constant rate, but if you were in space and travelling much faster, then it would seem to pass more slowly. So in a sense, we already know of one way to distort time - we simply have to travel fast enough to warp our own understanding of it. Other ways of distorting time are less clear to us, but there are plenty of people looking into it… the thinking being that if every other dimension can be navigated in a variety of ways, why should time be any different?

If we were fully able to distort time, we could shape it however we please, and in any direction - we could stretch or compress it, forwards or backwards. And having this ability would completely change how we lived. Untapped time travel would essentially grant us unlimited redos in life - or, at least, unlimited “try agains”. Any mistake you’d ever made could be changed or avoided if necessary. The taking of physical risks would be far less scary a prospect, because if ever they resulted in injury or pain you could simply reset life as though you were restarting a tricky level on a game. If your temporal distortion abilities were employed as simply as through a flick of a switch or a press of a button, and your reactions were good, then you could even jump out of a situation before it took a turn for the worse... and then, enjoying the benefit of hindsight back before the event went wrong, decide not to attempt that particular activity again. It’d be “nothing ventured, nothing gained” but also “nothing lost”. A win-win situation.

More impressively, if everyone shared the same abilities (say time distortion is just something human beings are born with) then our life expectancies would shoot up to dwarf what we currently have. More than a million people die every year through road traffic accidents, for example, but, in this hypothetical, we’d all be equipped to avoid them - by slowing down time or stopping it entirely. Similar techniques would be a benefit for other high-pressure situations, too… surgeons would have ample time to work in; stock market traders could manage the chaos; anyone working to a deadline would have time to collect their thoughts. For all the benefits of stretching time to slow it down, speeding it up could have plenty of plus-points, too. By compressing time, we could make hours zip by in moments. Long-haul flights would be accomplished with ease if you began compressing time right when you took your seat onboard the plane... meanwhile any stints of boredom you encounter in your life could effectively be skipped.

Clearly, though, a time distortion world wouldn’t be without some very major issues! First off, what happens to our memories? If we fast-forward through a flight, would we still remember everything that had happened? Would we still even function in the same way during that flight as we would have done at true speed? If we were to still go about our lives in the same way only quicker, then perhaps we’d actually be more susceptible to injury during those compressed time periods.

And what about everyone else? In a reality where all human beings have the power to shift time, then all of those shifting timelines could affect one another… and anyone not distorting time at the particular moment would be well aware of everyone else who was, passing people either moving slowly or at speed or who have frozen themselves or disappeared completely. It’d make maintaining any kind of friendships or relationships exceptionally hard to do, unless you and your friend precisely mimicked the time distortion habits of one another.

With everyone living at their own pace, though, life would suddenly appear very disjointed. And yet, it could go on forever, because with time distortion even our own mortality could be avoidable. By forever returning to whenever our bodies were healthiest, we could live life after life to infinity. But even if jumping back in time wasn’t doable, if we could apply the same slowing techniques to how our cells age, for example, then we’d stay fitter for longer. By using time to preserve our bodies we’d never have to worry about getting ill, or about an existing illness getting worse. And that’s all before the prospect of adding future time travel into our time distortion repertoire. With medicine, as with any other type of science and technology, if even one person could glimpse the future for even a few minutes, it could quickly accelerate the progress being made at any earlier time.

Still, despite the opportunities it presents, it’s hard to imagine that such an alternate reality would go completely unregulated… and time distortion could well come to be frowned upon by the authorities left wondering how to police it. It could also lead to adverse health effects and would almost certainly impact mental health - with people becoming addicted to tweaking their own timelines in a bid to achieve some kind of perfection. Ultimately, the world could lose its perspective on time completely, with distorters no longer able to appreciate - or even identify ­- when their lives were unfolding in a natural and unmodified way.

Perhaps it would be in sport where both sides of the story would be most obvious. Take a tennis player; on the one hand they’d have potentially unlimited time to deliver the perfect forehand; on the other, they’d have unlimited time to strike the perfect return. So, the game would now be redundant, and even if time distortion was disallowed in the rules, the potential for a player to cheat the system would always be there. The chance of failure will’ve disappeared, but the chance of success will’ve gone with it.

For life in general, it’d be much the same. We’d have endless opportunities to do basically anything we wanted… but with those “endless opportunities”, is it possible that our appreciation and enthusiasm for life could actually begin to falter? And that’s what would happen if we could distort time.