Wednesday 24 January 2007

Time Travel - Thoughts

Is it going to happen? Not "is it possible" because apparently that's been answered and yep if you had more energy than there is in the entire Universe, then you could move to any point in time you cared to - a moot point because with that much energy being used, time in the Universe would effectively stop. Heck, the Universe would effectively stop being. But it could be done. Once.

But I subscribe to another theory. Let me lay it out for you.

I was arguing with a late good friend of mine years ago, about whether or not God could have created a Universe that by definition had to include Himself. He told me I had better start praying and being Very Good.

The argument goes that we agree that the Universe is big. Infinite in fact. With infinite things going on all the time.

And we've all heard that old saw that if a million mokeys were to bash away at a million typewriters for millions of years, then one day, by pure chance, one of the monkeys would come up with a random string of letters and spaces which looked exactly like this post. (And that is a sobering thought right there, I'd better stop before I get depressed...)

So, this leads to an interesting corollary: Because the Universe is infinite, everything that is possible must be happening in the Universe, somewhere, right now. Including a monkey pulling a sheet of paper from a typewriter and thinking to itself "TEdALOG? WTF?" Hardly bears thinking about, does it? Replaced by a million monkeys with a million old Atwater-Kents.

But this corollary also means, quite definitely, that somewhere in the Universe, right now, God has created the Universe and is the Lord of All. And this only has to be true once, anywhere, to apply to the whole Universe...

So it's equally certain that somewhere, right now, someone has just found the Secret Loophole that allows anyone with a million monkeys typing all the Infinite Names Of God to travel backwards or forwards in time just by hitting the carriage return lever. And that means that our past would not be fixed, our future would be uncertain, and the present would be on pretty shaky ground. Which is exactly where we are, so you know that right now has already happened...

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