Copyright � 2026 by Shane
Tourtellotte
The far past is a minefield strewn with paradox triggers you may not see until it’s too late. The future is a blind flight into a trap surveyed by a million electronic eyes. If this is how you feel, you’re probably tempted to stay close to home, to visit only the recent past in your time machine.
This is an unwise idea. In trying to avoid the pitfalls of future and distant past, you could find there is, not a gap between them, but an overlap. You could suffer the worst of both worlds.
Future recording media may well be ubiquitous, but it’s not as if they are scarce today, or were scarce ten or twenty years ago. The problem goes back all the way to the latter 19th century, though with a different dimension and volume to the threat. In the future and recent past, you risk authorities judging you a danger in real time, and pursuing you as such. In the general past, the risk is appearing in photos, films, or tapes where once you hadn’t, thus changing the historical record and getting those tedious paradoxes rolling.
That risk is obviously greatest in the most recent past. Any historic event in the 21st century, and the late part of the 20th, is liable to receive saturation coverage by visual media, at least once the event gets underway. The 9/11 terrorist attacks are an excellent example -- but also an illustration of the limits of that ubiquity that you can exploit.
The first attack of the day, into the North Tower, was recorded purely by accident by a documentary team. No other visual record of the strike is known to exist. The crash into the Pentagon, a significant time later, is captured only in a security video that shows nothing clearly, a boon to myriad conspiracy theorists.
There is a useful lesson here for those disregarding my advice. If you do visit a historical event in the age of visual media, make it something where the event happens suddenly and is over suddenly. You can be a witness to history, and vacate the scene before history becomes a witness to your presence.
There are natural limits to this loophole. The thing you’re watching must not be important enough in its regular state to draw media attention. The press’s morbid “body watch” on any President of the United States explains why cameras were there in March 1981 filming Ronald Reagan departing a hotel -- and being shot. The assassination of John Kennedy eighteen years earlier helped institute said “body watch,” but the principle of a President being important just by being there already existed. It motivated Abraham Zapruder to film Kennedy’s drive through Dallas -- and capture a stunning, if not quite complete, record of his murder1.
The problem of media omnipresence thins the further you go back, but stays operative longer for big public events, such as important speeches and athletic contests. Those you may want to avoid, or to attend only on the fringes. The imperfections of recording devices, greater the earlier they are, may render you nothing but an indistinct blur on celluloid, a change in the record that ends up making no real difference. Whether being so distant from the event leaves it not worth the trouble is something you will have to decide, possibly only in retrospect after a disappointing experience.
Bad as I’ve made it seem, you can avoid visual media showing your passage. You cannot avoid leaving a trace, in the ways I’ve discussed before. The people you meet, the ground you tread, the air you breathe: all will be changed, subtly or perhaps blatantly.
Given the attractive properties of the original timeline, this will tend to shake out in the ways I’ve covered before. When the time given for it to shake out is measured, not in centuries or millennia, but in decades or mere years, though, that isn’t very long to get everything to line back up. The process needs to hurry up, but as far as we know, the process isn’t speeded along by such urgency.
It may be that things that cannot be fully rectified will be shunted out of observation by sense, into the shadows or un-walked hinterlands, as a work-around. If you can’t see or measure that something has changed, arguably it hasn’t changed. How would you know it wasn’t that way originally? Uncertainty can again be your friend.
But that is expecting a personal favor from impersonal forces of physics. More likely, you will trigger a reset cycle as with any bigger paradox you cause in a more distant past. The chances of paradox may be greater the shorter your trip into the past, unless you are very careful about what you disturb. Take shallow breaths, and don’t buy too much of the local food2.
Random objects may mark your passage, but they don’t technically remember you. People can. They may see you while you’re visiting the recent past, then later happen upon your pre-trip self and wonder why you look so much younger, or at least so close to the same age after so long.
The greatest peril isn’t that you will be recognized after your return to the present. It is that you will be recognized before then, in the intervening years before you make the trip backward. That can get you exposed to suspicion of being a time-traveler before you even know you’re going to be one, and can guard against the suspicion. That is how the timeline can be thrown off course, with the attendant risks of reset cycles.
The obvious precaution to take is to visit a place in the near past that’s far away from where you are now, or have been in recent times. Since these will be new experiences to you, out of your familiar ruts, they should certainly be attractive to someone as adventurous as you3.
Of course, strolling down Memory Lane has its appeals, so this advice isn’t cost-free. If you grew up several decades ago and half a continent away, the risk in a nostalgia tour is manageable. The closer you are on both axes, the chancier it gets. Don’t be tempted to cut it very fine -- especially if you risk bumping into your younger self, and having that youngster recognize you. The paradox risks are obvious.
… unless you recall such an actual incident from your childhood. In that case, making the trip may serve to avoid a version of the Bilking Paradox. You wouldn’t want to deprive your younger, carefree self of that creepy and disturbing experience, would you?
Footnotes:
Incomplete evidence is a magnetic draw for purveyors of unusual alternative theories. Most evidence is incomplete.
Even if that food was destined to be thrown away as excess by day’s end, the rats are going to be short a meal from their favorite garbage can, and that could set its own line of dominoes falling.
That’s deduction, not flattery. I take it for granted that someone traveling through time is highly adventurous.
Back to Top
Back to "Future, Imperfect"
Back to Home Page
|