Throughout history, we've stumbled upon some of the greatest discoveries by accident. Indeed, we've discovered stuff for the heck of it, hacking together solutions to hard problems just because it made us feel more alive.
So maybe weβll stumble upon a way to exploit the lightspeed limit of the space-time continuum?
Okay, let's see a show of hands. How many of you wonderful psychos would volunteer for an exciting opportunity to accidentally discover time travel? Imagine youβre at some distant point downstream. Youβre test-flying your own personal Lockheed Martin Temporal Invader, built and funded by survival of the fittest, big dreams and even bigger business. Youβre zooming along testing the light-barrier, all hopped up on vaporcred and government funded research grants, in a world where wide area networking and credit micromanagement has put you in the know. Together theyβve scored you knowledge on how to exploit a relatively special spacetime lag with a maneuver -- one you could theoretically pull off at lightspeed in a nth of a second -- if you timed it right.
So, determined by a statistically finite series of events that cascade upstream (wayback to the birth of the universe) you break the cosmic speed limit. Yet time -- like a good little stubbornly persistent illusion -- nopes so hard it yanks you back and just like that youβre sucked into a quantum ripcurrent, then dumped in some random cosmic time and written off by suits: omnipresent, hidden-in-plain-sighterβs whoβll feed heavily doctored segments of your story to the Feds, whoβll distribute it to data-harvesting gatekeepers of infotainment, whoβll feed it to the public as another βActually Mad Scientist Actually Consumed By Actually Mad Experimentβ newsbit.
Nope. You wouldnβt want be the first one to chance upon time travel, especially if it plays out anything like the example up there.
No, itβs better to go in *second*. Because data gathered from the first batch of state-funded experiments on time manipulation ought to give us enough info to prototype and test (under controlled conditions, of course) a more efficient way to manuever through time. Solutions thatβll make it possible to tunnel safely through the cosmic superstring network; the entangled mess of base code; the maze labyrinth in deep reality, so-called for its flexible and bendy super-smart fabric.
Maybe then you could take on a full-time time-jumping gig. Become a timezone-tripper; a black hole pillager. A time-sliding junkie travelling from point of no return to point of no return until the inevitable collapse of the universe.
