Time Traveling: Hubble Style

I'm glad that you were paying attention to my last post about modern day time travel. I talked about how even though we don't have a DeLorean with 1.21 jigawatts, we still sort of time travel through the means of recordings and other things. I'm glad someone noted the idea of how looking through a powerful telescope, like the Hubble, is another version of Time Travel because it gives me an excuse to talk about an image known as the Ultra Deep Field.

Let me drop some physics on you.

Light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second. That means that if something is about three-hundred thousand kilometers away, it would take light one whole second to travel that distance. It takes light from our own sun about eight minutes to reach us. I'll let the math about concept about that roll around your head while you watch this video

This video illustrates that each time we just look into the stars, we are looking into the past. Some of those stars could have gone nova and winked out as we were looking at the night sky, but we wouldn't know about it for thousands, millions, or even billions of years.

Beat that Doc Brown.

Modern Day Time Travel

I like talking about Time Travel. If that is not evident already, then either I'm dumb or you're dumb. Either way, let's talk about Time Travel and how it affects you. "But, Traveler, I have neither the technology nor the mental capacity to harness the power of Time Travel! Whatever shall I do?"

Aha. Well, I'm so glad you asked because that is exactly what we're going to talk about in today's lesson!

Whenever I try to lower my social standing and make it known what a huge nerd I am in public by bringing up Time Travel in casual conversation, people immediately start thinking of these guys and a DeLorean. While that is a brilliant major motion picture release glorifying Time Travel as the most epic of epic adventures, we travel through time in a much less epic way every day of our lives.

Before I illustrate a couple of examples of such, I'd like you to pretend that you exist in the middle ages. Your day goes: wake up, farm, farm, eat, cough, farm, farm, cough, farm, commit genocide on an indigenous people, farm, farm, eat, sleep. You lead a very exciting life. Ok, so now that you're heavily into the part, let's begin.

Example 1: I have a device here that I call a camera. With it, I can save a 2-Dimensional moment in time indefinitely. This is a perfect representation of what was happening from that angle and this moment in time is captured forever. I can travel backwards through time and see how the world looked at whatever time the picture was taken.

Example 2: I have this other device here that is referred to where I come from as an alarm clock. The day is separated into increments called hours, minutes, and seconds. Basically all it does is give a time-based structure to the day. Now, this alarm clock's basic function is to let me know the current time, but it has a more advanced feature. I can give the clock a user defined time in the future and it will beep when that time arrives. The usefulness of that is that if I wanted to only sleep for 7 hours, because I have extra farming to do tomorrow, I could set the alarm clock to beep in 7 hours allowing me to, effectively hibernate for 7 hours and arguably travel into the future at my own pace.

Example 3: Time zones.

There are many things in our lives that we take for granted that are, essentially, minor forms of time travel. Any recording you've watched or listened to, alarm clock you've used, time zone you've crossed, or any of the countless times you've played Chrono Trigger for the SNES, consider yourself lucky for having the time traveling luxuries that many in the past did not.