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CN Studeent jackieTime Travel, Is It Worth It?
Jacqueline Maestas

Our entire lives are made up of plots and subplots that have determined what kind of people we are or will become.  There are many characters, anti-heroes, mentors, and villains, with each person seeing themselves as the hero in their own eyes.
But what would happen if we were able to go back in time before our stories began? Or if we look ahead and find out the ending?
Time travel would allow us to do just that, but what might the ramifications be if such a thing could be created? Should we pursue this illusive technology?
First, we do know that time travel to the future is possible. “The hands of a clock in a speeding train move more slowly than those of a stationary clock. A human passenger wouldn’t feel the difference, but at the end of the trip the speeding clock would be slowed by billionths of a second,” explained Kevin Bosor and Robert Lamb, the scientists behind the website “How Stuff Works.”
While a person is on the train, they are actually a few billionths of a second in the future. This may not seem significant on the surface, but the proof of concept is actually very important.
However, time travel to the past has not been definitively proven: “The very premise of… going back to yesterday violates the law of causality, or cause and effect,” said Bosor and Lamb.
Some scientists think that there is one theoretical way that people might be able to time travel to the past. That would be through the existence of Kerr black holes. Put simply, they could bend space in such a way that creates a short cut through space and possibly time.
“If they do exist [Kerr black holes] offer the adventurous time traveler a one-way trip into the past or future,” asserted Bosor and Lamb.  Notice that you would not be able to go back to the present even if Kerr black holes did exist. “And, as with any time machine, you couldn’t go back farther than the point at which the time machine was created,” said Bosor and Lamb.  These facts eliminate a few of the benefits of time travel.
Since the very nature of time travel is mostly theoretical, it is only fitting that one considers the theoretical benefits and risks of time travel.
If we could go into the future, one benefit would be the “avoidance of future disasters and suffering,” said Dr. David Lewis Anderson, author of “The Secret Truth about Time Travel.”
This benefit appears to have the least amount of risk, but there is still a chance that it could change the future considerably. Our lives are defined by our struggles and our victories, if either of them are changed, so then could we.
Because of this simple theory, it is safe to assume that no matter how much we might try to predict how something might change history or the future, we will never know for sure what the consequences would be and if it would be worth it. There is also the possible risk of a time war.  If time is connected by time travel, it is possible for there to be conflict between each of these time periods. (Or, if there are different dimensions altogether for each time period, as some scientists believe, there would be wars between each dimension.) Overall, the risks of time travel far outweigh any benefit.
We won’t know for certain if time travel is possible until we actually invent a time machine. Until then, no one will understand the weight of the risks that they have taken for themselves and humankind by exploring this technology.
It is important for scientists to not only ask, “can we?” but also, “should we?”
If not, we could end up sacrificing much more just to satisfy our curiosity.

Jacqueline is a senior in Nipomo High School who finds great value in the written word, particularly storytelling. She loves to read in her spare time, and plans on pursuing a career in film after high school. She looks forward to not only inventing new stories to tell, but also creating adventures of her own by traveling the world.

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