Time travel makes for great fiction, bad reality

One subject that has always fascinated me is time travel.
Although time travel is not possible yet, without it we wouldn’t have many great works of fiction, both in literature and in movies and television.
This includes Mark Twain’s under-appreciated “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”; “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” a most excellent comedy featuring a young Keanu Reeves; Audrey Niffenegger’s “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” one of the best books I read last year, and soon to be a movie; H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine,” which is considered the Godfather of all time travel fiction; and the three “Terminator” movies, as well as the new television show based on these movies.
Don’t forget about “Quantum Leap,” a television show from the late 1980s featuring a character that traveled through time correcting the mistakes of others as he was kept from returning to his own time.
Or the three “Back to the Future” movies. I could watch Michael J. Fox tear through Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” to a stunned audience years before the song was ever written a hundred times before getting bored of it.
Most recently, the television show “Journeyman” caught my attention. I loved it, as did many other people, but television executives once again decided high-quality programming isn’t something people want to watch, so they cancelled it. I wish I could cancel them.
The entire concept of time travel is mind boggling. I remember writing an essay about the possibility of it ever existing back in high school, which led me to research the topic. I learned that some scientists believe it is theoretically possible; however, it could never be accomplished physically, unless we discovered some sort of alien technology far superior to the technology currently available.
Time travel, if it were possible, poses many moral questions. Would it be acceptable to travel back in time and change something for the better? The answer seems simple, but what if changing even some minor detail changed the present completely.
For example, if I were to go back in time and convince my father to take better care of himself so he wouldn’t die at an early age, my life, as well as other’s around me, would be completely different today.
Why? Well, when my mother remarried, my uncle met his future wife at her wedding. They have since produced two lovely children, including my Godson. I met my wife at their wedding, and we have a wonderful son, a person I can’t fathom the notion of being without.
I loved my father, but would I change my current situation to bring him back? Never.
That’s what memories are for. Granted, as legendary punk rocker Johnny Thunders once sang, “you can’t put your arms around a memory,” but a memory can allow a person to travel through time – in his or her own mind.
The type of time travel I’d like to see would allow people to see the past and future as a ghost-like entity, but participating in past and future events would not be allowed. Maybe this time travel has already been invented in the future, which could explain ghosts.
I’d love unlocking some of history’s greatest mysteries through time travel. For once and for all, we could prove that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. We could learn how the pyramids were built. We could discover the identity of Jack the Ripper.
We could also prevent future mistakes. If we knew a nuclear apocalypse would wipe out mankind, then we could learn to be a peaceful world, instead of one that relies on war to solve problems.
But we should be doing that now. A time machine is not needed to show us mankind is destructive.
Knowing our future might not be a great thing, especially if it is grim. I think I’ll just continue to enjoy time travel through fiction and memories, and hope it never becomes a reality.