What If Time Travel Already Exists? | Unveiled XL Documentary

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What If Time Travel Already Exists?</h4>

If you were a time traveler, where would you go first of all? Forwards or backwards? To somewhere from within your own lifetime, or to somewhere from within someone else’s? The possibilities are seemingly endless… but at the heart of it all there’s a problem; because, if time travel is to ever exist, then surely it already does?

Back in 2009, Stephen Hawking threw a party for time travelers, complete with a buffet, balloons, and chilled champagne. He waited for his guests to arrive, but ultimately no one came… After all, he’d sent out the invitations only after he had thrown the party. Hawking saw this as proof that time travel didn’t exist, but couldn’t deny throughout his career that it may be possible. 

Time travel is one of the most popular modern sci-fi tropes around, present in series ranging from “Harry Potter” to “Doctor Who”, “Star Trek” and more. However, the concept of traveling in time via mechanical means was first popularized more than a century ago in 1895 by HG Wells’ novel “The Time Machine”. Though it may seem like it belongs only in fiction, however, time travel is scientifically plausible, and in fact, technically does already exist. That’s because Einstein's theory of Special Relativity explains that time is subjective and can speed up or slow down depending on how fast you’re going. So, if you travel near the speed of light for five years in your time, decades could have passed back on Earth. Everyone you knew before your trip will have grown old, even though from your perspective only a few years will’ve passed. 

So, today’s question, on the face of it, is very plausible... Time travel (to the future, at least) is an idea with sound science to back it up. In fact, some astronauts have already time traveled into the future, but only by the smallest of margins. Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka can reasonably claim to be the world’s most prolific time traveler, as he has spent more time in orbit around the Earth than anyone else. Because of time dilation, he’s time traveled around 0.02 seconds into the future during his missions, meaning he’s aged 0.02 seconds less than everyone else alive. 

But that’s only time traveling forwards. What about traveling backwards in time? It’s a notoriously tricky concept, and there are certain paradoxes that come into play… including Bootstrap Theory, which says that bringing an object back in time means that that object existed before it was created, and so has no determinable origin; a clear problem. Then there’s the Grandfather Paradox which posits that if someone were to go back and kill their grandfather, they would prevent themselves from ever being born, and so would never have been able to go back in time in the first place; another sizeable issue! However, both of these can be solved if we assume infinite timelines and universes - allowing for all of the possibilities to unfold. 

So, if time travel exists, it’s almost certain that there are also countless timelines to cater for it, with “new realities” forming every few seconds. In which case, would we ever know that time travel exists, even if it already does? There’s a chance we might not. If technology is developed that allows us to travel around the speed of light, to push us into the future, it would have zero effect on us in the here and now. So, as we live our everyday lives driving to work, eating lunch, and watching TV, there’s a seemingly distant (though still very real) possibility that someone else is jetting off in front of you, aging far less rapidly than you are. That person could theoretically travel to the year 2100 having only aged a year or two…. But we’d never know about them because we’d likely never meet them. And if we did meet them, we’d perhaps be skeptical of their story. 

But still, via those potentially infinite universes and timelines, we could all be experiencing the effects of time travelers messing up our own timelines every day. Say someone traveled back in time to prevent you getting in a car accident; they’d then split your life into two; one where you crash in a fatal accident, and another where you don’t. Every time someone spliced your original timeline, they’d birth new ones right alongside it - and the multiverse becomes an ever-thickening web of everything that ever was, is or could be. But you, as in the “original you” living in your “original timeline”, would be completely oblivious and would never know that time travel existed or that it had shaped your life to this point. On the other hand, if you were living across one of the other timelines, you might come face-to-face with solid proof of time travel. So, somewhere out there, a different you could even be time traveling right now - completely aware that you exist even if you’re unaware that they do. 

If technology for traveling to the past has already been invented (after all, if it’s to ever exist, then why not right now?) it’s likely that world governments would keep it under strict lock and key… as that sort of tech could cause huge problems. Unless time travel was rigorously regulated, anyone and everyone could show up in all sorts of time periods, leaving artifacts from the future, blowing their own cover, and altering human history. Changing even the smallest thing could send ripples through time all the way up to the moment you yourself first time traveled - which could be disastrous for the world around you. So, if time travel already exists, then there’s surely a “time police”, too. It’d be their job to stop others from creating chaos - like a time travel version of the Men in Black, maybe even erasing your memory if you’d ever seen anything you weren’t supposed to. 

More specifically, if time travel really was real, it could provide answers to some unexplained phenomena in our standard, non-time-travel lives. It could be that Déjà vu is simply the experience of having our own timeline split by an unknown time traveler’s actions, leaving us to feel as though we’ve experienced the same thing twice. The Mandela Effect, causing shared but incorrect memories, might be another sign. Common examples range from believing that Curious George has a tail (he doesn’t), to recalling that Nelson Mandela passed away in prison (he didn’t). If time travel already exists, these false memories could be down to some kind of glitch caused by an errant traveler’s antics. 

There’s no doubt, though, that if time travel does exist, those who know about it and can use it have unrivaled power. They’d have prior access to news stories, exam questions and lottery numbers (unless the “time police” outlawed it) and, for as long as they could even glimpse the future, they’d know which companies were best to invest in. More than money, though, they’d have the ability to peek through anybody’s life story at any time… and potentially the power to reshape, redirect, prolong or cut short any life they felt like. Without even knowing it, those not privy to time travel would be completely under the time travelers’ control. And the scary part? If you accept that time travel’s even theoretically possible, then all of that should inevitably be happening right now. Because, if time travel is to ever exist, then surely it already does? Someone, somewhere, at some time should’ve already mastered it. 

Do you believe that time travel is possible? It’s one of the most hotly debated concepts in all of science, as well as one of the most wished-for hypothetical technologies on the planet. Given the chance, would you go forward or back in time? It’s another deep-rooted question that has us all deeply divided. So, whenever there’s even a sniff of a real-life time travel story, it usually attracts a lot of attention. And, in this video, we’re going to look at four of the most compelling temporal tales, from four different corners of the world map. 

First, and arguably the most famous time travel story of modern times… John Titor. An alleged American soldier sent back from the year 2036, he posted on a spate of internet forums in the early 2000s - originally under the name of TimeTravel_0. At the time, Titor’s messages caused a stir because they appeared to place him across three separate generations. According to him, he was first sent back to the year 1975… to regain an early IBM 5100 computer. The retro machine was apparently needed to prevent computing problems in the future, a reference that some of Titor’s audience took as relating to the Year 2038 Problem - a predicted Y2K-style computer glitch, scheduled to happen two years after Titor’s original time. 

The seeming time traveler explained his appearance at the turn of the century, though, as him simply stopping off on his way home. In his posts, Titor made various references to an imminent civil war in America (between the years 2004 and 2015) and even to the outbreak of World War Three shortly afterwards. Today, we know that that didn’t happen… but believers claim there’s a readymade explanation at hand. Crucially, Titor also advocated the Many Worlds Theory of Reality as being the correct one. It was something which he suggested was common knowledge by 2036. And it’s an important part to the story because it effectively means that any predictions Titor made that didn’t come true could be explained away by it. So the theory goes, his reappearance in 2000 could have caused a split in the timeline and, fortunately for us, that split meant that war in this world was avoided. So, what do you think? Did John Titor save the world, or was it all just an elaborate hoax?

For our second and perhaps even stranger time travel claim, we’re heading across the Atlantic to Europe, and France. What’s come to be known as the Moberly-Jourdain Incident also took place almost exactly 100 years before John Titor took to his keyboard… and it does what all good time travel stories should do, by adding ghosts into the fray as well! 

In 1901, Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain were two academics visiting Paris, shortly before they began working together at Oxford University. As part of their trip, they took in the Palace of Versailles where, while exploring the gardens, they took a wrong turn and became lost. And right about now was when it got… weird. Both remembered walking along the outskirts of a wood, when they alleged that the world around them subtly changed. The trees reportedly took on an unreal quality, and they came across a variety of unusual characters dressed in old fashioned clothing. One in particular caught the attention of Moberly; a woman in traditional dress, stood on an open lawn apparently sketching the landscape.

Eventually, Moberly and Jourdain found their way back to the Palace and, a week later, traded notes on what they both suspected had been a paranormal experience. The main idea was that wherever they had stumbled upon had been haunted… but, also, that in being there they had traveled back in time. They would spend the next ten years gathering more research before publishing (under pseudonyms) an account of their experience in the 1911 book, “An Adventure”. Among the most noteworthy claims they made in it were that they believed that they had traveled back to the late 1700s… and also that the sketching woman had been Marie Antoinette!

In the time since, the Moberly-Jourdain Incident has been explained away by others as a number of things - including a shared delusion, and an unknowing encounter with a period costume party. But, what’s your verdict? Could there really be some kind of portal in the Palace of Versailles grounds, or were these Oxford academics simply mistaken?

From Paris to Rome, and more specifically the Vatican City… where there are some serious claims that the Church has a secret (and ongoing) history of dabbling with time travel, too. The Chronovisor is probably one of the craziest machines ever said to have existed anywhere, anytime! According to those who claim it to be real, it’s a bizarre, cabinet-like contraption packed with buttons, gadgets and gizmos - all designed to totally reconstruct our experience of time. A Chronovisor user is said to be able to view any past event through the machine, thanks to some spectacular technology that can somehow convert electromagnetic radiation into effective backwards time travel. Or, at least, convert it into a window through which you can revisit actual history.

Records mostly come from one Father François Brune, a Catholic priest who wrote about the Chronovisor in his 2002 book, “The New Mystery of the Vatican”. Broadly speaking, Brune claims that the device was built by another priest named Pellegrino Ernetti, and allegedly with the help of many of the world’s leading scientists in the twentieth century - including Enrico Fermi, today famed for the Fermi Paradox. Father Ernetti is then said to have used the Chronovisor to go back in time to observe the actual crucifixion of Jesus Christ. And while Ernetti’s claims have been continually challenged, and even he himself reportedly admitted making them up, proponents to the Chronovisor’s existence insist that it’s real. And that, now, after Ernetti was allegedly forced into casting doubt over it, the machine is today used in secret by a global elite to control world governments.

Of course, if it does exist, then it’s something unlike anything else ever built on Earth. Would it surprise you if there were a machine like this, used by a select few to pull the strings of society? Our last time travel story is perhaps a little more grounded, but strange all the same. And, this time, we’re heading for the UK!

The city of Liverpool is famous for many things. The Cavern Club, the Beatles, Anfield… but did you know there’s also a real life time warp there? Allegedly. Most of the reported stories centre around Bold Street - an area full of shops and shoppers. And while most of the time you can stroll around this part of town and stay firmly in the here and now, there have been some occasions when people have reported suddenly being transported back to a bygone era.

The most famous case involves a former policeman, who was out shopping in the year 1996. His wife went to a nearby bookstore while he went to pass time elsewhere. But then, when he went back to meet up with his wife again, he was confused to find that the bookstore wasn’t there. In its place was a clothes shop, and it didn’t turn back into a bookstore until he stepped through the door. Thankfully, husband and wife were swiftly reunited, and nobody was lost in time forever… but when the former policeman came to realise that the same building had been a clothes shop decades beforehand, in the 1960s, that’s when this particular tale took on a whole new meaning. It was as though he had been briefly transported back in time and given a glimpse of history, in a similar way to how Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain had felt after their experience in Paris.

Both Liverpool and Paris are fine European cities, granted. But could they also have something truly incredible in common with one another? If these stories are to be believed, then they both offer the unsuspecting visitor the possibility that they might suddenly be plunged back into the past. Failing that, you could always visit the Vatican to try to unearth the Chronovisor and at least be given the opportunity to observe times gone by. Or else you can keep regular tabs on the internet’s time travel forums, in the hope that one John Titor might make another appearance soon! 

For generations, we’ve pondered what it would be like to meet aliens. What would happen if an extraterrestrial visitor arrived on Earth tomorrow? Would we greet it, fight it, or run away in terror from it? Well, according to some theories, there might not actually be that many differences between us and them.

One of the biggest questions that believers in UFOs and extraterrestrial visitations have to answer is “why?”… Why would aliens go to so much trouble to travel so far across the universe to come and abduct just a handful of random Earthlings? Is Earth special to them? Have we been targeted? Or is every alleged alien encounter in history simply the result of random chance? These problems, though, are eliminated if we consider for a second that flying saucers aren’t far-off spacecraft; but that they’re time machines, instead… filled not with otherworldly creatures, but with humans from the future who we might reasonably assume would know that the Earth is here.

This isn’t yet a widely accepted theory… and there are many other, far more mainstream predictions on what alien life will or could look like. But there are growing numbers of scientists and professors lending their thoughts to it, too - most notably one Michael Masters, a professor who published a book in 2020 on what he calls a multidisciplinary scientific approach to UFOs. In it, he discusses the possibility of future humans returning to the here and now, and being mistaken for aliens. And, regardless of where you stand, it does make for an interesting thought experiment. Because, if you were given a working time machine, wouldn’t you want to go, yes, to the future to see what becomes of humanity… but also to the ancient past to see some of your favourite historical periods up close? And, when you arrived in the ancient past, wouldn’t you imagine that you might be greeted with wonder, suspicion or fear? All of the same emotions you might expect to exhibit upon meeting an alien.

If we in the present, then, would love a time machine to visit the past, the same would probably be true of humans in the future. Only, for them, our present is their past. Time travel is arguably the most talked about sci-fi concept of all, with all manner of high-profile figures making predictions about whether it will or will never exist. But, if backwards time travel (specifically) is to exist at any time in the future, then we’re just as likely to encounter it now as at any other time in history. All it would take would be a future time traveler keying in today’s specific date, and there you go. If they were spotted, some would call “UFO!”. And if they were spoken to, some would call “alien!”.

From the time traveler’s point of view, going to the ancient world would in some ways be just as foreign or alien as going to a different planet. They’d be faced with a completely different society and way of life. Long forgotten customs, languages, foods and technologies. But the basics, the building blocks of life and survival, would be pretty much the same. If you were travelling backwards from the present day, for example, you wouldn’t need to undertake rigorous studies just to test whether the air in Ancient Egypt is safe to breathe; you’d just need to remember to pack enough water and maybe some sun cream. In this way, in the hypothetical future when both exist, time travel technology could actually be the safer option compared to interstellar space travel.

But, why would these travelers want to visit the twenty-first century, specifically? In recent years we have seen a general increase in the number of UFO sightings reported… and there are a number of explanations for this, but in the context of today’s question, would there be anything in particular pulling time travelers to this precise time period? Considering that future humans (from a time where backwards time travel exists) will also most likely have moved away from Earth, across the solar system and perhaps further… it could still be as simple as them just wanting to know where they came from. This interstellar immigration could be a search for cosmological roots that leads them all the way back to present day Earth. These humans could have been raised on a newly terraformed Mars, or in the clouds of Venus, above the oceans of Europa and Titan, or on centuries old generation ships just drifting through the void… if you were them, wouldn’t you want to see the planet where humans originally lived?

This effectively means that all those UFO sightings we so often hear about on the news or on the internet would actually, now, be tourists - time tourists. It’s still not likely we’d take them at their word, though. Until we actually develop time travel technology for ourselves, if that’s even possible, then the majority of people would be at least hesitant to believe anyone claiming to have genuinely come from the future. But, it’s also true that often the aliens that people allege they have seen aren’t actually that alien in description. The stereotypical extraterrestrial in sci-fi and most abduction claims is really quite humanoid… they may have grey or green skin, they might be a little shorter, and they often have larger heads and eyes, but they’re still fairly close to us with four limbs and recognizable features. 

And this human-like appearance ties into today’s question… with the suggestion being that if these strange creatures are actually just highly evolved humans from the future, that’s why they look a bit like us. If we assume that future humans will have gone to live on different planets, they could also have begun to evolve at unprecedented speeds and in unprecedented ways, simply to adapt to and survive wherever their new home was… meaning larger eyes, bigger heads and longer fingers, for any number of reasons. Of course, what’s more generally accepted as the likeliest explanation is that alien abduction claims feature these physical tropes because science fiction has steadily perpetuated this particular aesthetic.

Still, for as long as we don’t have any concrete proof that life exists on other planets, which we still don’t… and for as long as we know that humans on Earth are interested in developing working time travel, which we still are… the idea that the two could marry up can’t quite be totally dismissed. So, let’s imagine for a moment that we live in a future time when this farfetched theory is a real word reality, and it’s been uncovered that UFOs really are time machines… should we be worried? 

Well, countless studies and thought experiments have shown that traveling back in time could have terrible consequences. Anyone doing it could breach a variety of paradoxes, and prevent important events from happening, accidentally cause horrible things to happen, or even stop themselves from being born. But, perhaps, herein lies another reason to believe that UFOs are time travelers? If the dicey history of UFO reports proves one thing, it’s that these vehicles rarely hang around for long enough to be proved or disproved themselves. But, in a world where they’re actually piloted by time travelers, maybe this is just an exercise in damage limitation?

The high risk involved with time travel could mean that, if we ever did invent it, it would probably be strictly regulated. Anyone traveling back in time would be under strict command not to alter anything about the past, and not to be seen. For the most part, then, it works fine… but every so often a present-day human encounters flashing lights, or stumbles across a levitating disc, and the cover is blown. That is, unless the travelers can disappear quickly enough, or make their appearance incredible enough so that it’ll never be believed. It offers one explanation as to why so many alien abduction claims include instances of missing time or memory problems… that part is a traveler’s last-ditch attempt to fix their mistake.

If you accept a deterministic model of the universe - one in which everything will always inevitably happen however it’s supposed to - then, really, none of this should be of any concern to you. If UFOs are piloted by extra-terrestrials or time travelers, or if they’re a total myth, it makes no difference. And, as for all of the dangers that time traveling UFO pilots could bring with them, well, they’re not dangerous at all… because whatever changes they do (or don’t) make, always were (or weren’t) meant to be made.

However, if you’re more inclined to free will, you don’t not believe in UFOs, and you have even a sneaking suspicion that, one day, time travel might be possible… then today’s question is one meeting place for all of those things. We repeat; it’s not yet a widely accepted theory, but it is an eye-catching thought experiment. 

Everything has to end eventually. Our days, when the Earth completes one rotation; our years, as it makes its way through all of the seasons; and the decades pass one after another after another. Humans, just like all living creatures, have a limited lifespan. One day, they’ll die and so will everything else out there; the Earth, the sun, the whole galaxy… but what about reality itself? 

Practically every belief system has its own depiction of an “end time”, a prophesied apocalyptic scenario that it’s believed will one day happen. It may involve the second coming of a figure like Jesus Christ, a battle with the forces of evil, or just a general spate of large-scale, across the board ruin and destruction known as Judgement Day. Even with the likes of Buddhism, where rebirth cycles are incredibly important, there are writings about “end times”, where the Buddha is forgotten and society collapses. 

There have also been plenty of secular theories about something destroying the world. The Millennium Bug, for example, triggered frantic concerns over computers struggling to cope with the year change from 1999 to 2000 - with some fearing a massive, world-wrecking glitch causing a fairly literal “end of time”. Elsewhere, we’ve seen various other prophecies come and go… including the 2012 apocalypse theories based on the Mayan calendar which billed December 21st of that year as the doomsday moment. It again received plenty of attention, but again didn’t translate into actual annihilation. But regardless of the apocalypses that so far haven’t happened, for many it’s inevitable that time will one day end - and since time and space are inextricably linked, this future point of incredible destruction can also be generally understood as the end of the universe. 

There are other ways to interpret the question… Like the death of time equating to the death of the sun, if you take “time” to mean humanity’s method of measuring it… Or perhaps the “end of time” actually passes when Earth itself expires, or when there are no humans left to perceive time in the way that we do. And, as with most conundrums surrounding time, there’s also the question of black holes and the massive, maybe infinite distortions you yourself would experience were you to somehow fall into one. But in terms of a total black-out; the final destination for anything and everything; the end of the universe is the only scenario where it might also be said that time truly stops moving. 

So, to see the end of time you’d have to also be present at the end of space – a practical impossibility but a theoretical prospect. We know that time travel into the future is theoretically much simpler than time travel into the past. And there are also various far-future theories on how we might one day achieve immortality, which offer another route to front row seats at the end of all things. With the time travel option, the theoretical problems with traveling back into the past would unfortunately mean you’d never be able to tell anybody that wasn’t already there that you’d seen the end of time… And with the immortality approach you’d have essentially discovered that even everlasting life has its limits… but you’d at least be present to see the ultimate endgame. In either case, knowing precisely when the end of time will happen is key. Estimates vary wildly, with some theories suggesting that the universe only has a few billion years left to run… while others say that if reality does ever end, it won’t happen for hundreds of billions, perhaps even trillions of years. The window we’ve got to work in, then, is exceptionally wide! But exactly what you’d see when you eventually got to the correct time and place depends on which of the various “end of the universe” theories proves to be the right one. 

Over the years a lot of predictions have been offered up! “Heat death”, or the Big Freeze, is a reasonably well-supported idea… where the universe reaches thermodynamic equilibrium and can no longer increase entropy. In other words, it gets too cold to function when, in the far, far future all of the black holes in existence close up, no longer able to even sustain themselves. But there’s also the Big Crunch theory; a now less-popular idea in modern science, but one where it turns out the expansion of the universe we’re currently in the middle of isn’t endless, and that it will one day revert inwards and back towards an eventual collapse. If neither of those come to pass, there’s also the Big Rip theory, which some predict could happen after an increase in the amount of dark energy present in the universe. Right now, we think the universe is about 68% dark energy… but say it climbed closer to 100%, it could ultimately tear itself apart - condemning everything inside the universe to another inescapable doom. Finally, the Big Bounce is a best-of-all-worlds scenario and arguably the least destructive option, where the universe endlessly expands and contracts forever, as though it’s breathing. In some ways, there actually wouldn’t be an “end of time” in this case, but there would be various stages in a now eternal cycle where next to nothing exists! 

However it plays out, if you somehow traveled to the end of time and survived to witness it, you’d be left with… darkness. Blank, literal, total nothingness everywhere. A bottomless void in the truest sense, where even your own existence would actually be impossible. With time and space no more, you yourself couldn’t age, grow or even function. As will have happened with everything else - from planets, to stars to even supermassive black holes - the matter that makes up your body would now be impossible, too. Even in some kind of indescribably futuristic, seemingly indestructible spaceship, you’d be a goner as soon as you arrived at your “end of all things” destination. If time really does end and you really could jump forward to see it, then you’d simply be fast-tracking your own demise. But perhaps there’s a silver lining to arriving at your own inevitable departure? Seeing as energy can’t be created or destroyed, the residue of the universe - the remnant of space-time - has to go somewhere… particularly if you subscribe to the Big Crunch or Bounce theories! And you would’ve been there at the very close… so perhaps no sooner would you be gone before you’d reappear, at the birthing of a new universe or the beginning of a “new time”. 

Regardless of whether you lived, died, were ruthlessly annihilated in the blink of an eye or wondrously reborn into a brand-new reality, however… you’d have played your part in the absolute rarest event in cosmology; a moment to defy description, or even comprehension! 

What’s your verdict on time travel? Let us know in the comments, and tell us exactly where you’d travel to - if you had the chance! Perhaps there are already time machines out there; perhaps all those time travel stories really are true to life; maybe time travel has evolved so far that it’s become an alien superpower; and maybe, one day, it will take us to the end of time, too. Because that’s what would happen if time travel already exists!