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10 Key Destinations For The Historical Time Traveler

Two hundred years ago a traveler had to wait months to traverse oceans. We now have the means to wake up in New York and fall asleep in Sydney, all in the same day.

The trend: travel is becoming exponentially more accessible to the common man.

But the tradeoff is that culture and history are being lost. Remote islanders maintain their outdated tribal customs merely to get a buck from the nearest walking wallet with a camera. Cities that in ancient times were considered quaint and romantic have become nothing more than identical concrete jungles.

We’re losing the remnants of human history with each passing day – why not find a means to time travel for leisure? Where would you go if you had a weekend in any city in any century?

1. Rome, Height of the Empire

No one in living memory has ever really seen the Colosseum. Whatever your religious beliefs, there used to be gods in that city; watching over the empire from their marbled countenance, and ensuring trade on one of the first greatest centers of business in the western world: the Roman Forum.

Imagine being able to walk down the epitome of civilization; they didn’t call the period after Christianity spread and the empire fell The Dark Ages for no good reason. ..

2. Kyoto, 16th Century

In the 1500’s, Kyoto served as the national capital and home to the imperial family. Tokyo (then Edo) was little more than a fishing village at this time, not yet placed on the map by the empowering of the Tokugawa Shogunate.

In modern times, many travelers journey to Kyoto to discover only remnants of what was once one of the most beautiful and mystical places on the planet. Back in its heyday, this Japanese city would have been the richest and most populated next to Osaka.

The predecessors to geisha gently walking in their kimonos, made from imported Chinese silk; visions of the mountains to the north and east not yet lost in a sea of grey; everything under ten meters high.

The only downside? Not much fresh fish or sushi: transporting the latest catch from Osaka to Kyoto took a while to perfect, and sushi was still in its infancy.

3. United States, The Old West

Back to the Future had the right idea – many people at one point imagine themselves as a cowboy or cowgirl.

What would you give to be riding on horseback on a cool summer morning in the undeveloped expanse of the western territories? Nothing for hundreds of miles in any direction, except perhaps the whistle of a steam locomotive and wandering tribes of Native Americans.

Of course, if you go back far enough in history, any land can be considered unexplored or undiscovered, but there’s a certain romantic connotation that stirs up when thinking about the American movement to the west.

It’s the promise of the unknown – traveling towards the Pacific, having uprooted everything stable, everything civilized in the east, and seeing where the Oregon Trail took you.

4. Ancient Egypt, c. 2500 BC

Watch the building of the pyramids and learn more about archaeoastronomy – skylights in the pyramids were carved so that certain constellations could be viewed at a set time of year.

Even the great structures themselves were arranged on the sand corresponding to the placement of three stars overhead. Discover the meaning of the Great Sphinx – who knows why it was built? Maybe some pharaoh just had a mutant pet.

Cairo will surely be hot and dry during this period in history, so remember to pack light loose-fitting clothing and plenty of sunscreen. If you wait around for another five hundred years, you might catch the finishing touches on Deir el Bahri .

5. London, 14th Century

“…the truth was that the modern world was invented in the Middle Ages. Everything from the legal system, to nation-states, to reliance on technology, to the concept of romantic love had first been established in medieval times.” – Timeline, Michael Crichton

Everyone wants to be a knight in shining armor or a princess fair and true. Chivalry isn’t dead. In fact, if you choose to travel to London roughly seven hundred years ago, you’ll find it quite alive and well.

A walking tour of this city will let you face the first real London Bridge, providing the only access across the Thames. Canterbury Tales by Chaucer paints a rather vivid picture of this era. Many of the buildings in London we associate with medieval times were already in place: The Tower of London, Westminster Hall, Westminster Abbey.

Remember to apply insect repellant liberally, as the Black Death was known to pass through Britain and France in this century.

6. Chang’an, Han Dynasty

The origin of The Silk Road and a golden age in Chinese history, when Confucian principles laid down the foundation for society and Buddhism was just beginning to spread. Travel west along this trade route and in a matter of months, you’ll reach the Roman Empire.

7. Chichen Itza, 5th century

Although you may not be in a temple of doom, it’s wise to heed the words of Indiana Jones and “protect your heart!” As one of the largest Mayan cities on the Yucatan Peninsula, Chichen Itza was the site of human sacrifices.

It’s true that quite a few of the largest temples are very well preserved in modern Mexico, but I challenge you to find another time or place in which ancient games that could rival basketball were played. Best to arrive before the Toltec siege.

8. India, c. 600 BC

The Buddha had about forty-five good years of teaching from the time of his reaching enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree to his death. Don’t waste them. Meeting the Awakened One and learning the dhamma firsthand would be an experience for which almost anyone in Asia would trade his or her life. Try and eliminate the suffering in your heart before your departure…

9. New York City, Roaring 20’s

By the time the 1920’s dawned in New York City, the modern version of a cityscape was already formed: Macy’s department stores, the public library, Grand Central Terminal, and the then world’s tallest Woolworth Building.

Unfortunately construction on the Empire State Building won’t commence until after the crash of ’29, but take advantage of this period in history with your choice of taxicabs or horse drawn carriages. Watch Lindbergh start his journey across the Atlantic. Gaze at the audience of women in hoop skirts and men in all too stiff and uncomfortable suits.

10. Babylon, c. 600 BC

One of the seven wonders of the ancient world: the hanging gardens of Babylon. As one of the first empires in human history, Babylon was built in the shadow of ancient Sumeria near the Euphrates River, and may have even been the source of the legendary Tower of Babel with its own Temple of Marduk.

I’m sure there are many asking “Why not see some dinosaurs?” Think a little practically in this impractical form of travel and question if you’d prefer camping in the late Cretaceous (and being trampled to death), or blending with the masses and observing the election of a Roman consul firsthand.

Besides, if a Tyrannosaur doesn’t get you, the meteor will later on.

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You’ve been to the past, now meet travelers that we still remember tale. Read 10 Travelers and Why Their Tales Made History . Also, what other trends might we see in the future of travel? Check out 6 Predictions For the Future Of Travel .

Where and when would you go if you had a ticket guaranteeing a weekend of fun in any place at any time?

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Time travel: five ways that we could do it

Cathal O’Connell

Cathal O'Connell is a science writer based in Melbourne.

In 2009 the British physicist Stephen Hawking held a party for time travellers – the twist was he sent out the invites a year later (No guests showed up). Time travel is probably impossible. Even if it were possible, Hawking and others have argued that you could never travel back before the moment your time machine was built.

But travel to the future? That’s a different story.

Of course, we are all time travellers as we are swept along in the current of time, from past to future, at a rate of one hour per hour.

But, as with a river, the current flows at different speeds in different places. Science as we know it allows for several methods to take the fast-track into the future. Here’s a rundown.

1. Time travel via speed

This is the easiest and most practical way to time travel into the far future – go really fast.

According to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, when you travel at speeds approaching the speed of light, time slows down for you relative to the outside world.

This is not a just a conjecture or thought experiment – it’s been measured. Using twin atomic clocks (one flown in a jet aircraft, the other stationary on Earth) physicists have shown that a flying clock ticks slower, because of its speed.

In the case of the aircraft, the effect is minuscule. But If you were in a spaceship travelling at 90% of the speed of light, you’d experience time passing about 2.6 times slower than it was back on Earth.

And the closer you get to the speed of light, the more extreme the time-travel.

Computer solves a major time travel problem

The highest speeds achieved through any human technology are probably the protons whizzing around the Large Hadron Collider at 99.9999991% of the speed of light. Using special relativity we can calculate one second for the proton is equivalent to 27,777,778 seconds, or about 11 months , for us.

Amazingly, particle physicists have to take this time dilation into account when they are dealing with particles that decay. In the lab, muon particles typically decay in 2.2 microseconds. But fast moving muons, such as those created when cosmic rays strike the upper atmosphere, take 10 times longer to disintegrate.

2. Time travel via gravity

The next method of time travel is also inspired by Einstein. According to his theory of general relativity, the stronger the gravity you feel, the slower time moves.

As you get closer to the centre of the Earth, for example, the strength of gravity increases. Time runs slower for your feet than your head.

Again, this effect has been measured. In 2010, physicists at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) placed two atomic clocks on shelves, one 33 centimetres above the other, and measured the difference in their rate of ticking. The lower one ticked slower because it feels a slightly stronger gravity.

To travel to the far future, all we need is a region of extremely strong gravity, such as a black hole. The closer you get to the event horizon, the slower time moves – but it’s risky business, cross the boundary and you can never escape.

And anyway, the effect is not that strong so it’s probably not worth the trip.

Assuming you had the technology to travel the vast distances to reach a black hole (the nearest is about 3,000 light years away), the time dilation through travelling would be far greater than any time dilation through orbiting the black hole itself.

(The situation described in the movie Interstellar , where one hour on a planet near a black hole is the equivalent of seven years back on Earth, is so extreme as to be impossible in our Universe, according to Kip Thorne, the movie’s scientific advisor.)

The most mindblowing thing, perhaps, is that GPS systems have to account for time dilation effects (due to both the speed of the satellites and gravity they feel) in order to work. Without these corrections, your phones GPS capability wouldn’t be able to pinpoint your location on Earth to within even a few kilometres.

3. Time travel via suspended animation

Another way to time travel to the future may be to slow your perception of time by slowing down, or stopping, your bodily processes and then restarting them later.

Bacterial spores can live for millions of years in a state of suspended animation, until the right conditions of temperature, moisture, food kick start their metabolisms again. Some mammals, such as bears and squirrels, can slow down their metabolism during hibernation, dramatically reducing their cells’ requirement for food and oxygen.

Could humans ever do the same?

Though completely stopping your metabolism is probably far beyond our current technology, some scientists are working towards achieving inducing a short-term hibernation state lasting at least a few hours. This might be just enough time to get a person through a medical emergency, such as a cardiac arrest, before they can reach the hospital.

In 2005, American scientists demonstrated a way to slow the metabolism of mice (which do not hibernate) by exposing them to minute doses of hydrogen sulphide, which binds to the same cell receptors as oxygen. The core body temperature of the mice dropped to 13 °C and metabolism decreased 10-fold. After six hours the mice could be reanimated without ill effects.

Unfortunately, similar experiments on sheep and pigs were not successful, suggesting the method might not work for larger animals.

Another method, which induces a hypothermic hibernation by replacing the blood with a cold saline solution, has worked on pigs and is currently undergoing human clinical trials in Pittsburgh.

4. Time travel via wormholes

General relativity also allows for the possibility for shortcuts through spacetime, known as wormholes, which might be able to bridge distances of a billion light years or more, or different points in time.

Many physicists, including Stephen Hawking, believe wormholes are constantly popping in and out of existence at the quantum scale, far smaller than atoms. The trick would be to capture one, and inflate it to human scales – a feat that would require a huge amount of energy, but which might just be possible, in theory.

Attempts to prove this either way have failed, ultimately because of the incompatibility between general relativity and quantum mechanics.

5. Time travel using light

Another time travel idea, put forward by the American physicist Ron Mallet, is to use a rotating cylinder of light to twist spacetime. Anything dropped inside the swirling cylinder could theoretically be dragged around in space and in time, in a similar way to how a bubble runs around on top your coffee after you swirl it with a spoon.

According to Mallet, the right geometry could lead to time travel into either the past and the future.

Since publishing his theory in 2000, Mallet has been trying to raise the funds to pay for a proof of concept experiment, which involves dropping neutrons through a circular arrangement of spinning lasers.

His ideas have not grabbed the rest of the physics community however, with others arguing that one of the assumptions of his basic model is plagued by a singularity, which is physics-speak for “it’s impossible”.

The Royal Institution of Australia has an Education resource based on this article. You can access it here .

Related Reading: Computer solves a major time travel problem

Originally published by Cosmos as Time travel: five ways that we could do it

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Is Time Travel Possible?

We all travel in time! We travel one year in time between birthdays, for example. And we are all traveling in time at approximately the same speed: 1 second per second.

We typically experience time at one second per second. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA's space telescopes also give us a way to look back in time. Telescopes help us see stars and galaxies that are very far away . It takes a long time for the light from faraway galaxies to reach us. So, when we look into the sky with a telescope, we are seeing what those stars and galaxies looked like a very long time ago.

However, when we think of the phrase "time travel," we are usually thinking of traveling faster than 1 second per second. That kind of time travel sounds like something you'd only see in movies or science fiction books. Could it be real? Science says yes!

This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows galaxies that are very far away as they existed a very long time ago. Credit: NASA, ESA and R. Thompson (Univ. Arizona)

How do we know that time travel is possible?

More than 100 years ago, a famous scientist named Albert Einstein came up with an idea about how time works. He called it relativity. This theory says that time and space are linked together. Einstein also said our universe has a speed limit: nothing can travel faster than the speed of light (186,000 miles per second).

Einstein's theory of relativity says that space and time are linked together. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

What does this mean for time travel? Well, according to this theory, the faster you travel, the slower you experience time. Scientists have done some experiments to show that this is true.

For example, there was an experiment that used two clocks set to the exact same time. One clock stayed on Earth, while the other flew in an airplane (going in the same direction Earth rotates).

After the airplane flew around the world, scientists compared the two clocks. The clock on the fast-moving airplane was slightly behind the clock on the ground. So, the clock on the airplane was traveling slightly slower in time than 1 second per second.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Can we use time travel in everyday life?

We can't use a time machine to travel hundreds of years into the past or future. That kind of time travel only happens in books and movies. But the math of time travel does affect the things we use every day.

For example, we use GPS satellites to help us figure out how to get to new places. (Check out our video about how GPS satellites work .) NASA scientists also use a high-accuracy version of GPS to keep track of where satellites are in space. But did you know that GPS relies on time-travel calculations to help you get around town?

GPS satellites orbit around Earth very quickly at about 8,700 miles (14,000 kilometers) per hour. This slows down GPS satellite clocks by a small fraction of a second (similar to the airplane example above).

GPS satellites orbit around Earth at about 8,700 miles (14,000 kilometers) per hour. Credit: GPS.gov

However, the satellites are also orbiting Earth about 12,550 miles (20,200 km) above the surface. This actually speeds up GPS satellite clocks by a slighter larger fraction of a second.

Here's how: Einstein's theory also says that gravity curves space and time, causing the passage of time to slow down. High up where the satellites orbit, Earth's gravity is much weaker. This causes the clocks on GPS satellites to run faster than clocks on the ground.

The combined result is that the clocks on GPS satellites experience time at a rate slightly faster than 1 second per second. Luckily, scientists can use math to correct these differences in time.

If scientists didn't correct the GPS clocks, there would be big problems. GPS satellites wouldn't be able to correctly calculate their position or yours. The errors would add up to a few miles each day, which is a big deal. GPS maps might think your home is nowhere near where it actually is!

In Summary:

Yes, time travel is indeed a real thing. But it's not quite what you've probably seen in the movies. Under certain conditions, it is possible to experience time passing at a different rate than 1 second per second. And there are important reasons why we need to understand this real-world form of time travel.

If you liked this, you may like:

A beginner's guide to time travel

Learn exactly how Einstein's theory of relativity works, and discover how there's nothing in science that says time travel is impossible.

Everyone can travel in time . You do it whether you want to or not, at a steady rate of one second per second. You may think there's no similarity to traveling in one of the three spatial dimensions at, say, one foot per second. But according to Einstein 's theory of relativity , we live in a four-dimensional continuum — space-time — in which space and time are interchangeable.

Einstein found that the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time — you age more slowly, in other words. One of the key ideas in relativity is that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light — about 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second), or one light-year per year). But you can get very close to it. If a spaceship were to fly at 99% of the speed of light, you'd see it travel a light-year of distance in just over a year of time. 

That's obvious enough, but now comes the weird part. For astronauts onboard that spaceship, the journey would take a mere seven weeks. It's a consequence of relativity called time dilation , and in effect, it means the astronauts have jumped about 10 months into the future. 

Traveling at high speed isn't the only way to produce time dilation. Einstein showed that gravitational fields produce a similar effect — even the relatively weak field here on the surface of Earth . We don't notice it, because we spend all our lives here, but more than 12,400 miles (20,000 kilometers) higher up gravity is measurably weaker— and time passes more quickly, by about 45 microseconds per day. That's more significant than you might think, because it's the altitude at which GPS satellites orbit Earth, and their clocks need to be precisely synchronized with ground-based ones for the system to work properly. 

The satellites have to compensate for time dilation effects due both to their higher altitude and their faster speed. So whenever you use the GPS feature on your smartphone or your car's satnav, there's a tiny element of time travel involved. You and the satellites are traveling into the future at very slightly different rates.

But for more dramatic effects, we need to look at much stronger gravitational fields, such as those around black holes , which can distort space-time so much that it folds back on itself. The result is a so-called wormhole, a concept that's familiar from sci-fi movies, but actually originates in Einstein's theory of relativity. In effect, a wormhole is a shortcut from one point in space-time to another. You enter one black hole, and emerge from another one somewhere else. Unfortunately, it's not as practical a means of transport as Hollywood makes it look. That's because the black hole's gravity would tear you to pieces as you approached it, but it really is possible in theory. And because we're talking about space-time, not just space, the wormhole's exit could be at an earlier time than its entrance; that means you would end up in the past rather than the future.

Trajectories in space-time that loop back into the past are given the technical name "closed timelike curves." If you search through serious academic journals, you'll find plenty of references to them — far more than you'll find to "time travel." But in effect, that's exactly what closed timelike curves are all about — time travel

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There's another way to produce a closed timelike curve that doesn't involve anything quite so exotic as a black hole or wormhole: You just need a simple rotating cylinder made of super-dense material. This so-called Tipler cylinder is the closest that real-world physics can get to an actual, genuine time machine. But it will likely never be built in the real world, so like a wormhole, it's more of an academic curiosity than a viable engineering design.

Yet as far-fetched as these things are in practical terms, there's no fundamental scientific reason — that we currently know of — that says they are impossible. That's a thought-provoking situation, because as the physicist Michio Kaku is fond of saying, "Everything not forbidden is compulsory" (borrowed from T.H. White's novel, "The Once And Future King"). He doesn't mean time travel has to happen everywhere all the time, but Kaku is suggesting that the universe is so vast it ought to happen somewhere at least occasionally. Maybe some super-advanced civilization in another galaxy knows how to build a working time machine, or perhaps closed timelike curves can even occur naturally under certain rare conditions.

This raises problems of a different kind — not in science or engineering, but in basic logic. If time travel is allowed by the laws of physics, then it's possible to envision a whole range of paradoxical scenarios . Some of these appear so illogical that it's difficult to imagine that they could ever occur. But if they can't, what's stopping them? 

Thoughts like these prompted Stephen Hawking , who was always skeptical about the idea of time travel into the past, to come up with his "chronology protection conjecture" — the notion that some as-yet-unknown law of physics prevents closed timelike curves from happening. But that conjecture is only an educated guess, and until it is supported by hard evidence, we can come to only one conclusion: Time travel is possible.

A party for time travelers 

Hawking was skeptical about the feasibility of time travel into the past, not because he had disproved it, but because he was bothered by the logical paradoxes it created. In his chronology protection conjecture, he surmised that physicists would eventually discover a flaw in the theory of closed timelike curves that made them impossible. 

In 2009, he came up with an amusing way to test this conjecture. Hawking held a champagne party (shown in his Discovery Channel program), but he only advertised it after it had happened. His reasoning was that, if time machines eventually become practical, someone in the future might read about the party and travel back to attend it. But no one did — Hawking sat through the whole evening on his own. This doesn't prove time travel is impossible, but it does suggest that it never becomes a commonplace occurrence here on Earth.

The arrow of time 

One of the distinctive things about time is that it has a direction — from past to future. A cup of hot coffee left at room temperature always cools down; it never heats up. Your cellphone loses battery charge when you use it; it never gains charge. These are examples of entropy , essentially a measure of the amount of "useless" as opposed to "useful" energy. The entropy of a closed system always increases, and it's the key factor determining the arrow of time.

It turns out that entropy is the only thing that makes a distinction between past and future. In other branches of physics, like relativity or quantum theory, time doesn't have a preferred direction. No one knows where time's arrow comes from. It may be that it only applies to large, complex systems, in which case subatomic particles may not experience the arrow of time.

Time travel paradox 

If it's possible to travel back into the past — even theoretically — it raises a number of brain-twisting paradoxes — such as the grandfather paradox — that even scientists and philosophers find extremely perplexing.

Killing Hitler

A time traveler might decide to go back and kill him in his infancy. If they succeeded, future history books wouldn't even mention Hitler — so what motivation would the time traveler have for going back in time and killing him?

Killing your grandfather

Instead of killing a young Hitler, you might, by accident, kill one of your own ancestors when they were very young. But then you would never be born, so you couldn't travel back in time to kill them, so you would be born after all, and so on … 

A closed loop

Suppose the plans for a time machine suddenly appear from thin air on your desk. You spend a few days building it, then use it to send the plans back to your earlier self. But where did those plans originate? Nowhere — they are just looping round and round in time.

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Andrew May holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Manchester University, U.K. For 30 years, he worked in the academic, government and private sectors, before becoming a science writer where he has written for Fortean Times, How It Works, All About Space, BBC Science Focus, among others. He has also written a selection of books including Cosmic Impact and Astrobiology: The Search for Life Elsewhere in the Universe, published by Icon Books.

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Time travel could be possible, but only with parallel timelines

Assistant Professor, Physics, Brock University

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Barak Shoshany does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Brock University provides funding as a member of The Conversation CA-FR.

Brock University provides funding as a member of The Conversation CA.

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Have you ever made a mistake that you wish you could undo? Correcting past mistakes is one of the reasons we find the concept of time travel so fascinating. As often portrayed in science fiction, with a time machine, nothing is permanent anymore — you can always go back and change it. But is time travel really possible in our universe , or is it just science fiction?

Read more: Curious Kids: is time travel possible for humans?

Our modern understanding of time and causality comes from general relativity . Theoretical physicist Albert Einstein’s theory combines space and time into a single entity — “spacetime” — and provides a remarkably intricate explanation of how they both work, at a level unmatched by any other established theory. This theory has existed for more than 100 years, and has been experimentally verified to extremely high precision, so physicists are fairly certain it provides an accurate description of the causal structure of our universe.

For decades, physicists have been trying to use general relativity to figure out if time travel is possible . It turns out that you can write down equations that describe time travel and are fully compatible and consistent with relativity. But physics is not mathematics, and equations are meaningless if they do not correspond to anything in reality.

Arguments against time travel

There are two main issues which make us think these equations may be unrealistic. The first issue is a practical one: building a time machine seems to require exotic matter , which is matter with negative energy. All the matter we see in our daily lives has positive energy — matter with negative energy is not something you can just find lying around. From quantum mechanics, we know that such matter can theoretically be created, but in too small quantities and for too short times .

However, there is no proof that it is impossible to create exotic matter in sufficient quantities. Furthermore, other equations may be discovered that allow time travel without requiring exotic matter. Therefore, this issue may just be a limitation of our current technology or understanding of quantum mechanics.

The other main issue is less practical, but more significant: it is the observation that time travel seems to contradict logic, in the form of time travel paradoxes . There are several types of such paradoxes, but the most problematic are consistency paradoxes .

A popular trope in science fiction, consistency paradoxes happen whenever there is a certain event that leads to changing the past, but the change itself prevents this event from happening in the first place.

For example, consider a scenario where I enter my time machine, use it to go back in time five minutes, and destroy the machine as soon as I get to the past. Now that I destroyed the time machine, it would be impossible for me to use it five minutes later.

But if I cannot use the time machine, then I cannot go back in time and destroy it. Therefore, it is not destroyed, so I can go back in time and destroy it. In other words, the time machine is destroyed if and only if it is not destroyed. Since it cannot be both destroyed and not destroyed simultaneously, this scenario is inconsistent and paradoxical.

Eliminating the paradoxes

There’s a common misconception in science fiction that paradoxes can be “created.” Time travellers are usually warned not to make significant changes to the past and to avoid meeting their past selves for this exact reason. Examples of this may be found in many time travel movies, such as the Back to the Future trilogy.

But in physics, a paradox is not an event that can actually happen — it is a purely theoretical concept that points towards an inconsistency in the theory itself. In other words, consistency paradoxes don’t merely imply time travel is a dangerous endeavour, they imply it simply cannot be possible.

This was one of the motivations for theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking to formulate his chronology protection conjecture , which states that time travel should be impossible. However, this conjecture so far remains unproven. Furthermore, the universe would be a much more interesting place if instead of eliminating time travel due to paradoxes, we could just eliminate the paradoxes themselves.

One attempt at resolving time travel paradoxes is theoretical physicist Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov’s self-consistency conjecture , which essentially states that you can travel to the past, but you cannot change it.

According to Novikov, if I tried to destroy my time machine five minutes in the past, I would find that it is impossible to do so. The laws of physics would somehow conspire to preserve consistency.

Introducing multiple histories

But what’s the point of going back in time if you cannot change the past? My recent work, together with my students Jacob Hauser and Jared Wogan, shows that there are time travel paradoxes that Novikov’s conjecture cannot resolve. This takes us back to square one, since if even just one paradox cannot be eliminated, time travel remains logically impossible.

So, is this the final nail in the coffin of time travel? Not quite. We showed that allowing for multiple histories (or in more familiar terms, parallel timelines) can resolve the paradoxes that Novikov’s conjecture cannot. In fact, it can resolve any paradox you throw at it.

The idea is very simple. When I exit the time machine, I exit into a different timeline. In that timeline, I can do whatever I want, including destroying the time machine, without changing anything in the original timeline I came from. Since I cannot destroy the time machine in the original timeline, which is the one I actually used to travel back in time, there is no paradox.

After working on time travel paradoxes for the last three years , I have become increasingly convinced that time travel could be possible, but only if our universe can allow multiple histories to coexist. So, can it?

Quantum mechanics certainly seems to imply so, at least if you subscribe to Everett’s “many-worlds” interpretation , where one history can “split” into multiple histories, one for each possible measurement outcome – for example, whether Schrödinger’s cat is alive or dead, or whether or not I arrived in the past.

But these are just speculations. My students and I are currently working on finding a concrete theory of time travel with multiple histories that is fully compatible with general relativity. Of course, even if we manage to find such a theory, this would not be sufficient to prove that time travel is possible, but it would at least mean that time travel is not ruled out by consistency paradoxes.

Time travel and parallel timelines almost always go hand-in-hand in science fiction, but now we have proof that they must go hand-in-hand in real science as well. General relativity and quantum mechanics tell us that time travel might be possible, but if it is, then multiple histories must also be possible.

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Time travel for travelers? It’s tricky.

Scientific theories suggest it’s possible to travel through time. But the reality isn’t so clear.

Time travel has fascinated scientists and writers for at least 125 years. The concept feels especially intriguing now, when physical travel is limited. Here, a photo illustration of Tokyo’s Robot Restaurant captures the idea of speeding through time.

I’m stuck at home, you’re stuck at home, we’re all stuck at home. Jetting off to some fun-filled destination like we used to might not be in the cards for a little while yet. But what about travelling through time? And not just the boring way, where we wait for the future to arrive one second at a time. What if you could zip through time at will, travelling forward to the future or backward to the past as easily as pushing buttons on the dashboard of a souped-up DeLorean, just like in the movie Back to the Future ?

Time travel has been a fantasy for at least 125 years. H.G. Wells penned his groundbreaking novel, The Time Machine , in 1895, and it’s something that physicists and philosophers have been writing serious papers about for almost a century.

What really kick-started scientific investigations into time travel was the notion, dating to the closing years of the 19th century, that time could be envisioned as a dimension, just like space. We can move easily enough through space, so why not time?

At the end of the 19th century, scientists thought of time as a dimension like space, where travelers can go anywhere they want. This photo illustration of Tokyu Plaza in Tokyo’s Omotesando Harajuku evokes the feeling of visiting endless destinations.

“In space, you can go wherever you want, so maybe in time you can similarly go anywhere you want,” says Nikk Effingham, a philosopher at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom . “From there, it’s a short step to time machines.”

( Why are people obsessed with time travel? Best-selling author James Gleick has some ideas .)

Dueling theories

Wells was a novelist, not a physicist, but physics would soon catch up. In 1905, Albert Einstein published the first part of his relativity theory, known as special relativity . In it, space and time are malleable; measurements of both space and time depend on the relative speed of the person doing the measuring.

A few years later, the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski showed that, in Einstein’s theory, space and time could be thought of as two aspects of a single four-dimensional entity known as space-time . Then, in 1915, Einstein came up with the second part of his theory, known as general relativity . General relativity renders gravity in a new light: Instead of thinking of it as a force, general relativity describes gravity as a bending or warping of space-time.

But special relativity is enough to get us started in terms of moving through time. The theory “establishes that time is much more similar to space than we had previously thought,” says Clifford Johnson, a physicist at the University of Southern California. “So maybe everything we can do with space, we can do with time.”

Well, almost everything. Special relativity doesn’t give us a way of going back in time, but it does give us a way of going forward— and at a rate that you can actually control. In fact, thanks to special relativity, you can end up with two twins having different ages, the famous “twin paradox.”

Suppose you head off to the Alpha Centauri star system in your spaceship at a really high speed (something close to the speed of light), while your twin remains on Earth. When you come back home, you’ll find you’re now much younger than your twin. It’s counterintuitive, to say the least, but the physics, after more than a century, is rock solid.

“It is absolutely provable in special relativity that the astronaut who makes the journey, if they travel at very nearly the speed of light, will be much younger than their twin when they come back,” says Janna Levin, a physicist at Barnard College in New York . Interestingly, time appears to pass just as it always does for both twins; it’s only when they’re reunited that the difference reveals itself.

Maybe you were both in your 20s when the voyage began. When you come back, you look just a few years older than when you left, while your twin is perhaps now a grandparent. “My experience of the passage of time is utterly normal for me. My clocks tick at the normal rate, I age normally, movies run at the right pace,” says Levin. “I’m no further into my future than normal. But I’ve travelled into my twin’s future.”

( To study aging, scientist are looking to outer space .)

With general relativity, things really start to get interesting. In this theory, a massive object warps or distorts space and time. Perhaps you’ve seen diagrams or videos comparing this to the way a ball distorts a rubber sheet . One result is that, just as travelling at a high speed affects the rate at which time passes, simply being near a really heavy object—like a black hole —will affect one’s experience of time. (This trick was central to the plot of the 2014 film, Interstellar , in which Matthew McConaughey’s character spends time in the vicinity of a massive black hole. When he returns home, he finds that his young daughter is now elderly.)

To get around the “grandfather paradox,” some scientists theorize there could be multiple timelines. In these images of Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo, Japan, time seems to pass at different rates.

But black holes are just the beginning. Physicists have also speculated about the implications of a much more exotic structure known as a wormhole . Wormholes, if they exist, could connect one location in space-time with another. An astronaut who enters a wormhole in the Andromeda Galaxy in the year 3000 might find herself emerging from the other end in our own galaxy, in the year 2000. But there’s a catch: While we have overwhelming evidence that black holes exist in nature—astronomers even photographed one last year—wormholes are far more speculative.

“You can imagine building a bridge from one region of space-time to another region of space-time,” explains Levin, “but it would require kinds of mass and energy that we don’t really know exist in reality, things like negative energy.” She says it’s “mathematically conceivable” that structures such as wormholes could exist, but they may not be part of physical reality.

There’s also the troubling question of what happens to our notions of cause and effect if backward time travel were possible. The most famous of these conundrums is the so-called “ grandfather paradox .” Suppose you travel back in time to when your grandfather was a young man. You kill him (perhaps by accident), which means your parent won’t be born, which means you won’t be born. Therefore, you won’t be able to travel through time and kill your grandfather.

Multiple timelines?

Over the years, physicists and philosophers have pondered various resolutions to the grandfather paradox. One possibility is that the paradox simply proves that no such journeys are possible; the laws of physics, somehow, must prevent backward time travel. This was the view of the late physicist Stephen Hawking , who called this rule the “ chronology protection conjecture .” (Mind you, he never specified the actual physics behind such a rule.)

But there are also other, more intriguing, solutions. Maybe backward time travel is possible, and yet time travelers can’t change the past, no matter how hard they try. Effingham, whose book Time Travel: Probability and Impossibility was published earlier this year, puts it this way: “You might shoot the wrong person, or you might change your mind. Or, you might shoot the person you think is your grandfather, but it turns out your grandmother had an affair with the milkman, and that’s who your grandfather was all along; you just didn’t know it.”

Which also means the much-discussed fantasy of killing Hitler before the outbreak of World War II is a non-starter. “It’s impossible because it didn’t happen,” says Fabio Costa, a theoretical physicist at the University of Queensland in Australia . “It’s not even a question. We know how history developed. There is no re-do.”

In fact, suggests Effingham, if you can’t change the past, then a time traveler probably can’t do anything . Your mere existence at a time in which you never existed would be a contradiction. “The universe doesn’t care whether the thing you’ve changed is that you’ve killed Hitler, or that you moved an atom from position A to position B,” Effingham says.

But all is not lost. The scenarios Effingham and Costa are imagining involve a single universe with a single “timeline.” But some physicists speculate that our universe is just one among many . If that’s the case, then perhaps time travelers who visit the past can do as they please, which would shed new light on the grandfather paradox.

( The Big Bang could have led to the creation of multiple universes, scientists say .)

“Maybe, for whatever reason, you decide to go back and commit this crime [of killing your grandfather], and so the world ‘branches off’ into two different realities,” says Levin. As a result, “even though you seem to be altering your past, you’re not really altering it; you’re creating a new history.” (This idea of multiple timelines lies at the heart of the Back to the Future movie trilogy. In contrast, in the movie 12 Monkeys , Bruce Willis’s character makes multiple journeys through time, but everything plays out along a single timeline.)

More work to be done

What everyone seems to agree on is that no one is building a time-travelling DeLorean or engineering a custom-built wormhole anytime soon. Instead, physicists are focusing on completing the work that Einstein began a century ago.

After more than 100 years, no one has figured out how to reconcile general relativity with the other great pillar of 20th century physics: quantum mechanics . Some physicists believe that a long-sought unified theory known as quantum gravity will yield new insight into the nature of time. At the very least, says Levin, it seems likely “that we need to go beyond just general relativity to understand time.”

Meanwhile, it’s no surprise that, like H.G. Wells, we continue to daydream about having the freedom to move through time just as we move through space. “Time is embedded in everything we do,” says Johnson. “It looms large in how we perceive the world. So being able to mess with time—I’m not surprised we’re obsessed with that, and fantasize about it.”

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April 26, 2023

Is Time Travel Possible?

The laws of physics allow time travel. So why haven’t people become chronological hoppers?

By Sarah Scoles

yuanyuan yan/Getty Images

In the movies, time travelers typically step inside a machine and—poof—disappear. They then reappear instantaneously among cowboys, knights or dinosaurs. What these films show is basically time teleportation .

Scientists don’t think this conception is likely in the real world, but they also don’t relegate time travel to the crackpot realm. In fact, the laws of physics might allow chronological hopping, but the devil is in the details.

Time traveling to the near future is easy: you’re doing it right now at a rate of one second per second, and physicists say that rate can change. According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, time’s flow depends on how fast you’re moving. The quicker you travel, the slower seconds pass. And according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity , gravity also affects clocks: the more forceful the gravity nearby, the slower time goes.

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“Near massive bodies—near the surface of neutron stars or even at the surface of the Earth, although it’s a tiny effect—time runs slower than it does far away,” says Dave Goldberg, a cosmologist at Drexel University.

If a person were to hang out near the edge of a black hole , where gravity is prodigious, Goldberg says, only a few hours might pass for them while 1,000 years went by for someone on Earth. If the person who was near the black hole returned to this planet, they would have effectively traveled to the future. “That is a real effect,” he says. “That is completely uncontroversial.”

Going backward in time gets thorny, though (thornier than getting ripped to shreds inside a black hole). Scientists have come up with a few ways it might be possible, and they have been aware of time travel paradoxes in general relativity for decades. Fabio Costa, a physicist at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, notes that an early solution with time travel began with a scenario written in the 1920s. That idea involved massive long cylinder that spun fast in the manner of straw rolled between your palms and that twisted spacetime along with it. The understanding that this object could act as a time machine allowing one to travel to the past only happened in the 1970s, a few decades after scientists had discovered a phenomenon called “closed timelike curves.”

“A closed timelike curve describes the trajectory of a hypothetical observer that, while always traveling forward in time from their own perspective, at some point finds themselves at the same place and time where they started, creating a loop,” Costa says. “This is possible in a region of spacetime that, warped by gravity, loops into itself.”

“Einstein read [about closed timelike curves] and was very disturbed by this idea,” he adds. The phenomenon nevertheless spurred later research.

Science began to take time travel seriously in the 1980s. In 1990, for instance, Russian physicist Igor Novikov and American physicist Kip Thorne collaborated on a research paper about closed time-like curves. “They started to study not only how one could try to build a time machine but also how it would work,” Costa says.

Just as importantly, though, they investigated the problems with time travel. What if, for instance, you tossed a billiard ball into a time machine, and it traveled to the past and then collided with its past self in a way that meant its present self could never enter the time machine? “That looks like a paradox,” Costa says.

Since the 1990s, he says, there’s been on-and-off interest in the topic yet no big breakthrough. The field isn’t very active today, in part because every proposed model of a time machine has problems. “It has some attractive features, possibly some potential, but then when one starts to sort of unravel the details, there ends up being some kind of a roadblock,” says Gaurav Khanna of the University of Rhode Island.

For instance, most time travel models require negative mass —and hence negative energy because, as Albert Einstein revealed when he discovered E = mc 2 , mass and energy are one and the same. In theory, at least, just as an electric charge can be positive or negative, so can mass—though no one’s ever found an example of negative mass. Why does time travel depend on such exotic matter? In many cases, it is needed to hold open a wormhole—a tunnel in spacetime predicted by general relativity that connects one point in the cosmos to another.

Without negative mass, gravity would cause this tunnel to collapse. “You can think of it as counteracting the positive mass or energy that wants to traverse the wormhole,” Goldberg says.

Khanna and Goldberg concur that it’s unlikely matter with negative mass even exists, although Khanna notes that some quantum phenomena show promise, for instance, for negative energy on very small scales. But that would be “nowhere close to the scale that would be needed” for a realistic time machine, he says.

These challenges explain why Khanna initially discouraged Caroline Mallary, then his graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, from doing a time travel project. Mallary and Khanna went forward anyway and came up with a theoretical time machine that didn’t require negative mass. In its simplistic form, Mallary’s idea involves two parallel cars, each made of regular matter. If you leave one parked and zoom the other with extreme acceleration, a closed timelike curve will form between them.

Easy, right? But while Mallary’s model gets rid of the need for negative matter, it adds another hurdle: it requires infinite density inside the cars for them to affect spacetime in a way that would be useful for time travel. Infinite density can be found inside a black hole, where gravity is so intense that it squishes matter into a mind-bogglingly small space called a singularity. In the model, each of the cars needs to contain such a singularity. “One of the reasons that there's not a lot of active research on this sort of thing is because of these constraints,” Mallary says.

Other researchers have created models of time travel that involve a wormhole, or a tunnel in spacetime from one point in the cosmos to another. “It's sort of a shortcut through the universe,” Goldberg says. Imagine accelerating one end of the wormhole to near the speed of light and then sending it back to where it came from. “Those two sides are no longer synced,” he says. “One is in the past; one is in the future.” Walk between them, and you’re time traveling.

You could accomplish something similar by moving one end of the wormhole near a big gravitational field—such as a black hole—while keeping the other end near a smaller gravitational force. In that way, time would slow down on the big gravity side, essentially allowing a particle or some other chunk of mass to reside in the past relative to the other side of the wormhole.

Making a wormhole requires pesky negative mass and energy, however. A wormhole created from normal mass would collapse because of gravity. “Most designs tend to have some similar sorts of issues,” Goldberg says. They’re theoretically possible, but there’s currently no feasible way to make them, kind of like a good-tasting pizza with no calories.

And maybe the problem is not just that we don’t know how to make time travel machines but also that it’s not possible to do so except on microscopic scales—a belief held by the late physicist Stephen Hawking. He proposed the chronology protection conjecture: The universe doesn’t allow time travel because it doesn’t allow alterations to the past. “It seems there is a chronology protection agency, which prevents the appearance of closed timelike curves and so makes the universe safe for historians,” Hawking wrote in a 1992 paper in Physical Review D .

Part of his reasoning involved the paradoxes time travel would create such as the aforementioned situation with a billiard ball and its more famous counterpart, the grandfather paradox : If you go back in time and kill your grandfather before he has children, you can’t be born, and therefore you can’t time travel, and therefore you couldn’t have killed your grandfather. And yet there you are.

Those complications are what interests Massachusetts Institute of Technology philosopher Agustin Rayo, however, because the paradoxes don’t just call causality and chronology into question. They also make free will seem suspect. If physics says you can go back in time, then why can’t you kill your grandfather? “What stops you?” he says. Are you not free?

Rayo suspects that time travel is consistent with free will, though. “What’s past is past,” he says. “So if, in fact, my grandfather survived long enough to have children, traveling back in time isn’t going to change that. Why will I fail if I try? I don’t know because I don’t have enough information about the past. What I do know is that I’ll fail somehow.”

If you went to kill your grandfather, in other words, you’d perhaps slip on a banana en route or miss the bus. “It's not like you would find some special force compelling you not to do it,” Costa says. “You would fail to do it for perfectly mundane reasons.”

In 2020 Costa worked with Germain Tobar, then his undergraduate student at the University of Queensland in Australia, on the math that would underlie a similar idea: that time travel is possible without paradoxes and with freedom of choice.

Goldberg agrees with them in a way. “I definitely fall into the category of [thinking that] if there is time travel, it will be constructed in such a way that it produces one self-consistent view of history,” he says. “Because that seems to be the way that all the rest of our physical laws are constructed.”

No one knows what the future of time travel to the past will hold. And so far, no time travelers have come to tell us about it.

Mental time travel is a great decision-making tool — this is how to use it

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When the future seems largely unpredictable, is there anything you can do to prepare for it?

“Yes!” says futurist and game designer Jane McGonigal . All you need to do is to tap into your imagination and envision all your potential futures — using what she calls “futures thinking.” 

“Futures thinking isn’t a superpower, and you don’t have to fix everything or save everyone,” McGonigal writes in her new book called Imaginable . “But futures thinking is an incredibly useful, practical tool to prepare your mind to adapt faster to new challenges, build hope and resilience, reduce anxiety and depression, and inspire you to take actions today that set yourself up for future happiness and success.”

Her book draws on the latest research in psychology and neuroscience to show you how to train your mind to think the unthinkable. In this excerpt, you’ll get a taste of how you can start thinking like a futurist — and create a better future for yourself. 

For the next 30 seconds, I want you to imagine yourself waking up tomorrow morning. Try to picture it in your mind or describe it to yourself as clearly as possible. 

These questions may help make your imagined scene clearer. What room or space are you in? What wakes you up — an alarm, the sunlight, someone nudging you or calling you? Is it light out or still dark? Is there anyone with you? What are you wearing? What kind of mood are you in? And what’s the very first thing you do now that you’re awake?

Keep imagining your tomorrow morning until you have a clear answer to all of these questions.

This quick mental time trip you just took is an example of a highly imaginable future — it was likely quite easy for you to envision, with plenty of vivid details.

Now let’s try something more challenging. For the next 30 seconds, I want you to imagine yourself waking up one year from today. 

Again, try to envision this as clearly as possible. Feel free to change as many or as few details as you want from the first scene you imagined. Are you somewhere different? Are you physically changed? What’s your mood? Do you have a different morning habit? What might that new habit be?

Keep imagining your morning one year from now until you have answers to all of these questions — even the harder ones. Notice how easily and automatically ideas came to you, or how hard you had to work to come up with details.

If you’re having difficulty imagining life 10 years from now, write down a description of what you imagine. It can be easier to think about the future with words rather than with mental images.

Now let’s try one more act of imagination. This time, I want you to imagine yourself waking up 10 years from today.

Take as long as you need to come up with a vivid and plausible image — of yourself, of the space that you’re in, and who might be with you. Where are you? What’s around you? What do you see, hear, smell, and feel? What’s the first thing on your mind when you wake up? What do you have planned for the day? How are you physically different?

Try not to make this future scene a total fantasy; stay grounded in what you feel is genuinely realistic and possible for you. If you’re having difficulty, write down a description of what you imagine. Sometimes, it’s easier to think about the future with words rather than with mental images.

You’ll probably find that 10 years is a trickier challenge compared with one year. Why? You’ve never been 10 years older than you are now, so your brain doesn’t know what to expect. Plus, there’s so much opportunity for things to change in a decade — your body, relationships, life circumstances, physical environment.

Your brain intuitively grasps this unknowability, so instead of confidently projecting one possibility, it opens up a blank space for you to consider multiple possibilities. You have to start making intentional choices about what you want to imagine in your future — you have to fill in the blanks.

“Episodic future thinking” or EFT is often described as “mental time travel” — your brain is working to help you see and feel the future as clearly and vividly as if you were already there.

Filling in the blanks takes considerable effort. But that’s precisely why this kind of imagination is so powerful. Instead of simply remembering what it knows, your brain has to invent a new possibility. It draws on past experiences, current hopes and fears, and your intuitions about what might possibly change in 10 years.

Then, after you’ve made this new memory, something amazing happens: What was previously unimaginable to your brain is now imaginable. You can revisit this new memory whenever you want and examine how it makes you feel. Does it spark positive or negative emotions? These pre-feelings can help you decide: Should you change what you’re doing today to make this future more or less likely? And because you invented this memory, you can change it whenever you want.

Scientists call this form of imagination “episodic future thinking,” or EFT. EFT is often described as a kind of “mental time travel” because your brain is working to help you see and feel the future as clearly and vividly as if you were already there.

EFT isn’t an escape from reality. It’s a way of playing with reality, to discover risks and opportunities you might not have considered. EFT is not a daydream in which you fantasize about waking up in a world where your problems are magically solved. It is a way of connecting who you are today with what you might really feel and do in the future.

An important element of imagination training is to fill your brain with what I call “clues to the future,” concrete examples of new ideas that might shape how your future turns out.

Because EFT allows us to pre-feel different possible futures, it’s a powerful decision-making, planning and motivational tool. It helps us decide: Is this a world I want to wake up in? What do I need to do to be ready for it? Should I change what I’m doing today to make this future more or less likely?

According to fMRI studies, EFT involves heightened activity and increased connectivity between 11 distinct brain regions. Compare this to remembering a past event, which activates 6 of the 11 regions of the brain.

There are three major kinds of sense making that happen when you engage in mental time travel to your future. First, your brain has to do what cognitive scientists call “scene construction” — mentally building the future world. Think of this as crafting the stage set, cast and props for a theatrical play.

During EFT, your brain goes on a hunt for realistic details and plausible ideas. To do this, it activates the hippocampus , the seat of memory and learning, and digs through your memories, plus any other facts and ideas you’ve stored away. Depending on what kind of future you’re imagining, the hippocampus identifies the most relevant stuff and retrieves and recombines it into a new scene.

Whatever you see in your future will always come from information your brain has already perceived and processed. Ideally, as you get better at imagining the unimaginable, you’ll incorporate not just obvious ideas and events but also surprising things that could be important in your future.

Another important part of imagination training is to try out new behaviors that could prove useful in the future. I call these micro-actions — taking no more than five minutes to do something today you’ve never done before.

That’s why an important element of imagination training is to fill your brain with what I call “clues to the future,” concrete examples of new ideas that might shape how your future turns out. When you have a hippocampus full of clues, your brain will have better data to draw on, and the scenes you construct will be way more interesting.

After scene construction, your brain starts to do what cognitive scientists call “opportunity detection.” Here, you look for ways to fulfill your needs and achieve your goals. For example: If you predict you will be hungry when you wake up in 10 years, what will future you eat? If you imagine yourself lonely when you wake up, who will future you try to connect with? Opportunity detection is like an actor showing up for rehearsal and asking, “What’s my motivation?” In other words: What do you want in this scene?

To figure this out, your brain fires up the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), a region that’s heavily used whenever you set goals and track your progress. Like the hippocampus, the vmPFC can suggest any goals you’ve had or previously considered. One of the most interesting things about EFT is that the motivations that pop into your mind first are likely to be closely linked to your deepest values and most essential needs, like always learning something new, helping others, pushing yourself to do brave things, taking care of your family, being creative, or  putting new ideas or art into the world.

But you still have to figure out the best way for future you to achieve these future goals. So then the putamen , also part of the motivation and reward system, kicks in. The putamen helps keep track of which specific actions and behaviors typically lead to positive results for you. It’s the part of your brain that knows things like “I feel better when I get some fresh air”; “I make my mom happy when I text her back right away”; “If I’m having a bad day, cooking helps”; or “If I don’t stand up for myself in the moment, I’ll beat myself up about it later.”

There are real benefits to intentionally and carefully imagining futures that frighten you. This can help you do the important work of getting ready for anything — even things you’d rather not experience.

The putamen is like a reality check on your future imagination. Since the putamen is trained on real experiences, the future actions it suggests will be heavily influenced by strategies that worked for you in the past. That’s why another important part of imagination training is to try out new behaviors that could prove useful in the future. I call these micro-actions — taking no more than five minutes to do something today you’ve never done before. When you experiment with micro-actions, you expand what your putamen considers realistic behavior.

Finally, as your brain works to transport you to the future, feelings will kick in. The insula and amygdala , emotion centers in the brain, fire up to give you a preview of how you might feel in the future — excited, disappointed, hopeful, afraid, proud, jealous, joyful, sad, curious, bored, embarrassed, relieved, loved, lonely, awed, confused, stressed out, free or more. These emotions give you important information and help you decide: Is this a future I want to wake up in? Should I take actions today to make this future more or less likely?

Crucially, these are real feelings. Studies show that the emotions you experience during EFT can be just as psychologically powerful as emotions experienced in the present. This is one reason why many of us prefer to imagine best-case-scenario futures and avoid imagining the futures that scare us.

But there are real benefits to intentionally and carefully imagining futures that frighten you. This can help you do the important work of getting ready for anything — even things you’d rather not think about, let alone actually experience, someday.

Excerpted from the new book Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal. Copyright © 2022 by Jane McGonigal. Used by permission of Spiegel & Grau LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Watch her TED Talk here:

About the author

Jane McGonigal is a future forecaster and world-renowned designer of alternate reality games designed to improve real lives and solve real problems. She is the Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future and currently teaches the course “How to Think Like a Futurist” at Stanford University, as well as serving as the lead instructor for the Institute for the Future’s series on the Coursera platform. She is The New York Times bestselling author of the books "Reality Is Broken" and "SuperBetter" and the new book "Unimaginable." Her innovative games and ideas have been recognized by the World Economic Forum, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, O Magazine and the New York Times, among others.

• book excerpt
• decision-making
• jane mcgonigal
• personal growth

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Not Your Usual Time Travel Story Ideas (2024)

Looking for unusual time travel story ideas and writing prompts? You’ve come to the right place!

Read on for ideas like a world where time flows differently in different regions, a person with an ability to travel in their dreams, and more!

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• S tory ideas

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The time travel trope.

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Related posts: Tragic Love Story Ideas (2023) The Most Enticing Forbidden Love Story Ideas (Updated in 2023) 40+ Sad Backstory Ideas for Your Character (2023) 17+ Enticing Soulmate Story Ideas (2023)

Time Travel Story Ideas & Writing Prompts

Time travel has long been a captivating concept in storytelling, transporting us to narratives of endless possibilities. Now, let’s explore some unique and unconventional story ideas!

Please note that the genders in these prompts and story ideas are just placeholders and do not mean to enforce any hurtful stereotypes nor offend anyone.

Story ideas

From unexpected time travelers to unconventional methods of traversing through time, embark on a thrilling, time-bending adventure with these exciting ideas.

• Lost Time A group of explorers stumbles upon an alien-made, time-traveling elevator that can transport them to different moments within their own lifetime, at the cost of reduced longevity.
• Reversed A scientist makes a mistake in their time travel machine, which sends them spiraling into an alternate reality where time operates in reverse.
• Past and Future Memories In a post apocalyptic world, a person finds that they can jump into the past as well as potential future memories of others. Then, they navigate through different people’s experiences in the hope of finding a way to undo the effect of the apocalypse.
• Time is Money In a world where time flows differently in different regions, a society formed where time travelers exist and time itself can be a commodity. (Originally appeared in my post The Most Mesmerizing Fantasy World Ideas (2023) )
• Chronicler of Lost History A person wakes up every day in a different time period, with no control over when or where they’ll end up next. As they try to find out why, they realize that their purpose is to witness and document crucial moments in history that have been erased from collective memory.
• Time-Traveling Detective In a time when time travel is possible, a time-traveling detective agency specializes in solving crimes and incidents that occur across different points in time.
• Network of Selves There’s a new invention that allows people to split their consciousness into multiple timelines, creating a network of parallel selves.
• Tour Across Time Time travel is a regulated industry, and a tour guide accidentally takes a group of tourists to a time period that never existed, causing a ripple effect that alters the course of history.
• Time-Traveling Companion There’s a peculiar type of animals that have the innate ability to traverse time. Once they form a unique bond with a human, the bond will allow that human to time travel along with said animal.

• The Time Capsule After unearthing a long-forgotten time capsule, a tight-knit group of friends is transported back to their younger selves. (A similar concept appeared in my post Beyond the Mundane: Captivating Slice of Life Story Ideas (2023) )
• The Time Thief A physicist accidentally creates a device that allows them to move between parallel universes. They exploit this power to commit crimes across dimensions, staying one step ahead of authorities.
• The Reversed Time Traveler A time traveler’s machine malfunctions, causing them to experience life in reverse. Frustrated by their reversed existence, they seek to disrupt the flow of time itself.
• Cheering Through Time An alien with the ability to explore different time periods gets stranded on earth and befriends a cheerleader. But as the two jump between time periods, they unwittingly start a chain of event that might spell catastrophe for both of their home planets.
• Happy Days Specific emotional triggers can create a quantum leap, launching individuals through time to a moment in the past or future when a similar emotional event occurred.

Here are some time travel picture prompts, because a picture speaks a thousand words! What kind of time travel prompt or story jumps out at you when looking at the picture prompts below?

The concept of time travel has fascinated storytellers for generations, offering endless possibilities and narrative intrigue, allowing writers to explore the complexities of cause and effect, challenge the boundaries of linear time, and delve into the profound impact of altering the past or glimpsing into the future.

In time travel stories, protagonists often find themselves in paradoxes and moral dilemmas as they attempt to correct past mistakes, change the course of history, or prevent catastrophic events where the smallest alteration can have far-reaching repercussions.

Time travel narratives also provide a fertile ground for exploring themes of identity, self-discovery, and the relentless march of time, prompting characters and readers alike to ponder the nature of free will and the fragility of existence.

If you need more story ideas and prompts, please browse our Story Ideas & Writing Prompts category!

Have any question or feedback? Feel free to contact me here . Until next time!

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Time travel: Is it possible?

Science says time travel is possible, but probably not in the way you're thinking.

Albert Einstein's theory

• General relativity and GPS
• Wormhole travel
• Alternate theories

Science fiction

Is time travel possible? Short answer: Yes, and you're doing it right now — hurtling into the future at the impressive rate of one second per second. 

You're pretty much always moving through time at the same speed, whether you're watching paint dry or wishing you had more hours to visit with a friend from out of town. 

But this isn't the kind of time travel that's captivated countless science fiction writers, or spurred a genre so extensive that Wikipedia lists over 400 titles in the category "Movies about Time Travel." In franchises like " Doctor Who ," " Star Trek ," and "Back to the Future" characters climb into some wild vehicle to blast into the past or spin into the future. Once the characters have traveled through time, they grapple with what happens if you change the past or present based on information from the future (which is where time travel stories intersect with the idea of parallel universes or alternate timelines). 

Related: The best sci-fi time machines ever

Although many people are fascinated by the idea of changing the past or seeing the future before it's due, no person has ever demonstrated the kind of back-and-forth time travel seen in science fiction or proposed a method of sending a person through significant periods of time that wouldn't destroy them on the way. And, as physicist Stephen Hawking pointed out in his book " Black Holes and Baby Universes" (Bantam, 1994), "The best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, and never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future."

Science does support some amount of time-bending, though. For example, physicist Albert Einstein 's theory of special relativity proposes that time is an illusion that moves relative to an observer. An observer traveling near the speed of light will experience time, with all its aftereffects (boredom, aging, etc.) much more slowly than an observer at rest. That's why astronaut Scott Kelly aged ever so slightly less over the course of a year in orbit than his twin brother who stayed here on Earth. 

Related: Controversially, physicist argues that time is real

There are other scientific theories about time travel, including some weird physics that arise around wormholes , black holes and string theory . For the most part, though, time travel remains the domain of an ever-growing array of science fiction books, movies, television shows, comics, video games and more. 

Einstein developed his theory of special relativity in 1905. Along with his later expansion, the theory of general relativity , it has become one of the foundational tenets of modern physics. Special relativity describes the relationship between space and time for objects moving at constant speeds in a straight line. 

The short version of the theory is deceptively simple. First, all things are measured in relation to something else — that is to say, there is no "absolute" frame of reference. Second, the speed of light is constant. It stays the same no matter what, and no matter where it's measured from. And third, nothing can go faster than the speed of light.

From those simple tenets unfolds actual, real-life time travel. An observer traveling at high velocity will experience time at a slower rate than an observer who isn't speeding through space. 

While we don't accelerate humans to near-light-speed, we do send them swinging around the planet at 17,500 mph (28,160 km/h) aboard the International Space Station . Astronaut Scott Kelly was born after his twin brother, and fellow astronaut, Mark Kelly . Scott Kelly spent 520 days in orbit, while Mark logged 54 days in space. The difference in the speed at which they experienced time over the course of their lifetimes has actually widened the age gap between the two men.

"So, where[as] I used to be just 6 minutes older, now I am 6 minutes and 5 milliseconds older," Mark Kelly said in a panel discussion on July 12, 2020, Space.com previously reported . "Now I've got that over his head."

General relativity and GPS time travel

The difference that low earth orbit makes in an astronaut's life span may be negligible — better suited for jokes among siblings than actual life extension or visiting the distant future — but the dilation in time between people on Earth and GPS satellites flying through space does make a difference. 

Read more: Can we stop time?

The Global Positioning System , or GPS, helps us know exactly where we are by communicating with a network of a few dozen satellites positioned in a high Earth orbit. The satellites circle the planet from 12,500 miles (20,100 kilometers) away, moving at 8,700 mph (14,000 km/h). 

According to special relativity, the faster an object moves relative to another object, the slower that first object experiences time. For GPS satellites with atomic clocks, this effect cuts 7 microseconds, or 7 millionths of a second, off each day, according to the American Physical Society publication Physics Central .  

Read more: Could Star Trek's faster-than-light warp drive actually work?

Then, according to general relativity, clocks closer to the center of a large gravitational mass like Earth tick more slowly than those farther away. So, because the GPS satellites are much farther from the center of Earth compared to clocks on the surface, Physics Central added, that adds another 45 microseconds onto the GPS satellite clocks each day. Combined with the negative 7 microseconds from the special relativity calculation, the net result is an added 38 microseconds. 

This means that in order to maintain the accuracy needed to pinpoint your car or phone — or, since the system is run by the U.S. Department of Defense, a military drone — engineers must account for an extra 38 microseconds in each satellite's day. The atomic clocks onboard don’t tick over to the next day until they have run 38 microseconds longer than comparable clocks on Earth.

Given those numbers, it would take more than seven years for the atomic clock in a GPS satellite to un-sync itself from an Earth clock by more than a blink of an eye. (We did the math: If you estimate a blink to last at least 100,000 microseconds, as the Harvard Database of Useful Biological Numbers does, it would take thousands of days for those 38 microsecond shifts to add up.) 

This kind of time travel may seem as negligible as the Kelly brothers' age gap, but given the hyper-accuracy of modern GPS technology, it actually does matter. If it can communicate with the satellites whizzing overhead, your phone can nail down your location in space and time with incredible accuracy. 

Can wormholes take us back in time?

General relativity might also provide scenarios that could allow travelers to go back in time, according to NASA . But the physical reality of those time-travel methods is no piece of cake. 

Wormholes are theoretical "tunnels" through the fabric of space-time that could connect different moments or locations in reality to others. Also known as Einstein-Rosen bridges or white holes, as opposed to black holes, speculation about wormholes abounds. But despite taking up a lot of space (or space-time) in science fiction, no wormholes of any kind have been identified in real life. 

Related: Best time travel movies

"The whole thing is very hypothetical at this point," Stephen Hsu, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Oregon, told Space.com sister site Live Science . "No one thinks we're going to find a wormhole anytime soon."

Primordial wormholes are predicted to be just 10^-34 inches (10^-33 centimeters) at the tunnel's "mouth". Previously, they were expected to be too unstable for anything to be able to travel through them. However, a study claims that this is not the case, Live Science reported . 

The theory, which suggests that wormholes could work as viable space-time shortcuts, was described by physicist Pascal Koiran. As part of the study, Koiran used the Eddington-Finkelstein metric, as opposed to the Schwarzschild metric which has been used in the majority of previous analyses.

In the past, the path of a particle could not be traced through a hypothetical wormhole. However, using the Eddington-Finkelstein metric, the physicist was able to achieve just that.

Koiran's paper was described in October 2021, in the preprint database arXiv , before being published in the Journal of Modern Physics D.

Alternate time travel theories

While Einstein's theories appear to make time travel difficult, some researchers have proposed other solutions that could allow jumps back and forth in time. These alternate theories share one major flaw: As far as scientists can tell, there's no way a person could survive the kind of gravitational pulling and pushing that each solution requires.

Infinite cylinder theory

Astronomer Frank Tipler proposed a mechanism (sometimes known as a Tipler Cylinder ) where one could take matter that is 10 times the sun's mass, then roll it into a very long, but very dense cylinder. The Anderson Institute , a time travel research organization, described the cylinder as "a black hole that has passed through a spaghetti factory."

After spinning this black hole spaghetti a few billion revolutions per minute, a spaceship nearby — following a very precise spiral around the cylinder — could travel backward in time on a "closed, time-like curve," according to the Anderson Institute. 

The major problem is that in order for the Tipler Cylinder to become reality, the cylinder would need to be infinitely long or be made of some unknown kind of matter. At least for the foreseeable future, endless interstellar pasta is beyond our reach.

Time donuts

Theoretical physicist Amos Ori at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, proposed a model for a time machine made out of curved space-time — a donut-shaped vacuum surrounded by a sphere of normal matter.

"The machine is space-time itself," Ori told Live Science . "If we were to create an area with a warp like this in space that would enable time lines to close on themselves, it might enable future generations to return to visit our time."

Amos Ori is a theoretical physicist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. His research interests and publications span the fields of general relativity, black holes, gravitational waves and closed time lines.

There are a few caveats to Ori's time machine. First, visitors to the past wouldn't be able to travel to times earlier than the invention and construction of the time donut. Second, and more importantly, the invention and construction of this machine would depend on our ability to manipulate gravitational fields at will — a feat that may be theoretically possible but is certainly beyond our immediate reach.

Time travel has long occupied a significant place in fiction. Since as early as the "Mahabharata," an ancient Sanskrit epic poem compiled around 400 B.C., humans have dreamed of warping time, Lisa Yaszek, a professor of science fiction studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, told Live Science .  

Every work of time-travel fiction creates its own version of space-time, glossing over one or more scientific hurdles and paradoxes to achieve its plot requirements. 

Some make a nod to research and physics, like " Interstellar ," a 2014 film directed by Christopher Nolan. In the movie, a character played by Matthew McConaughey spends a few hours on a planet orbiting a supermassive black hole, but because of time dilation, observers on Earth experience those hours as a matter of decades. 

Others take a more whimsical approach, like the "Doctor Who" television series. The series features the Doctor, an extraterrestrial "Time Lord" who travels in a spaceship resembling a blue British police box. "People assume," the Doctor explained in the show, "that time is a strict progression from cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff." 

Long-standing franchises like the "Star Trek" movies and television series, as well as comic universes like DC and Marvel Comics, revisit the idea of time travel over and over. 

Related: Marvel movies in order: chronological & release order

Here is an incomplete (and deeply subjective) list of some influential or notable works of time travel fiction:

Books about time travel:

• Rip Van Winkle (Cornelius S. Van Winkle, 1819) by Washington Irving
• A Christmas Carol (Chapman & Hall, 1843) by Charles Dickens
• The Time Machine (William Heinemann, 1895) by H. G. Wells
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Charles L. Webster and Co., 1889) by Mark Twain
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Pan Books, 1980) by Douglas Adams
• A Tale of Time City (Methuen, 1987) by Diana Wynn Jones
• The Outlander series (Delacorte Press, 1991-present) by Diana Gabaldon
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Bloomsbury/Scholastic, 1999) by J. K. Rowling
• Thief of Time (Doubleday, 2001) by Terry Pratchett
• The Time Traveler's Wife (MacAdam/Cage, 2003) by Audrey Niffenegger
• All You Need is Kill (Shueisha, 2004) by Hiroshi Sakurazaka

Movies about time travel:

• Planet of the Apes (1968)
• Superman (1978)
• Time Bandits (1981)
• The Terminator (1984)
• Back to the Future series (1985, 1989, 1990)
• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
• Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)
• Groundhog Day (1993)
• Galaxy Quest (1999)
• The Butterfly Effect (2004)
• 13 Going on 30 (2004)
• The Lake House (2006)
• Meet the Robinsons (2007)
• Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)
• Midnight in Paris (2011)
• Looper (2012)
• X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
• Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
• Interstellar (2014)
• Doctor Strange (2016)
• A Wrinkle in Time (2018)
• The Last Sharknado: It's About Time (2018)
• Avengers: Endgame (2019)
• Tenet (2020)
• Palm Springs (2020)
• Zach Snyder's Justice League (2021)
• The Tomorrow War (2021)

Television about time travel:

• Doctor Who (1963-present)
• The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) (multiple episodes)
• Star Trek (multiple series, multiple episodes)
• Samurai Jack (2001-2004)
• Lost (2004-2010)
• Phil of the Future (2004-2006)
• Steins;Gate (2011)
• Outlander (2014-2023)
• Loki (2021-present)

Games about time travel:

• Chrono Trigger (1995)
• TimeSplitters (2000-2005)
• Kingdom Hearts (2002-2019)
• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (2003)
• God of War II (2007)
• Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack In Time (2009)
• Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time (2013)
• Dishonored 2 (2016)
• Titanfall 2 (2016)
• Outer Wilds (2019)

Additional resources

Explore physicist Peter Millington's thoughts about Stephen Hawking's time travel theories at The Conversation . Check out a kid-friendly explanation of real-world time travel from NASA's Space Place . For an overview of time travel in fiction and the collective consciousness, read " Time Travel: A History " (Pantheon, 2016) by James Gleik. 

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

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Ailsa is a staff writer for How It Works magazine, where she writes science, technology, space, history and environment features. Based in the U.K., she graduated from the University of Stirling with a BA (Hons) journalism degree. Previously, Ailsa has written for Cardiff Times magazine, Psychology Now and numerous science bookazines. 

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10 Ideas for a Time Travel Story

Here are 10 quick ideas for a time travel story, including everything from colonies in the distant past and future, to time traveling Jews, Jesus, and jealous husbands.

If one of these ideas inspires you to create a time travel story of your own, let us know and we’ll share it with out community!

1. Future War

A future dictator invades the past. He sends giant war machines into 19th Century London, Paris and Washington, and he demands that all world leaders surrender to him. It’s up to a team of time traveling heroes to stop him.

2. As Time Goes By

A scientist discovers that he can slow down time in a localized area. He can use this to visit the future (and stop off anywhere along the way), but he can never go back. At first, he uses the device to prolong his own life, spending a day inside the time-bubble as a month passes outside. Later, curiosity compels him to travel into the distant future in search of new wonders and a fresh start.

Our protagonist finds a future world full of wonders, and he begins to build a new life for himself. But when things start to go wrong, he finds himself traveling forward yet again. Eventually, the urge to travel forward becomes irresistible as he searches for perfection. Is he really searching for something, or just running from his own past?

As our traveler comes to the end of his life he realizes that, while he has seen more than most people, he hasn’t really lived at all. He’s spent his whole life running.

3. Doing Time

Using a time machine, a penal colony is established in Earths distant future – a future in which humanity is extinct and the sun is approaching the end of its natural life-cycle. When the end finally comes, do the guards evacuate the prisoners or leave them to their fate?

4. The Man You Used To Be

After his wife leaves him, a scientist travels back in time to be with her again. He’s determined to get it right the second time around, and thinks he knows what to do to keep her happy. But when he travels into the past he comes across an obstacle he hadn’t counted on – the past version of himself.

SEE ALSO: Travelling in time but NOT space

Desperate to be with his wife again, he plots to do the unthinkable – he plans to murder his past self and take his place.

There are two obvious ways in which this story could end, each equally as ironic. 1) He kills his former self and is happily reunited with his wife, but after spending one perfect day together the time paradox begins to kick in and he vanishes into oblivion. 2) He kills his former self, but his wife recognizes that he is not the man he used to be. Because of what he’s been through and what he’s done, he’s changed, and his wife can see it in his eyes. She leaves him again.

5. Future Tense

Fearing the extinction of humanity is on the horizon, a large group of humans travel into Earths distant future to avoid the catastrophe. They arrive in a time in which the Earth has recovered from the disaster, and in which all traces of human civilization have disappeared. Many animal species have evolved beyond recognition. In this new wilderness, they attempt to build a home.

Knowing that the end of human civilization is near, people are desperate to travel to the future colony. With a limited number of places available, people fight for the last remaining passes. Eventually, the future colony finds itself with too many mouths to feed.

6. Past Participants

With the destruction of Earth imminent, humanity begins colonizing the distant past. The colonization effort slowly begins to interfere with the timeline. Each group of colonists that arrives from the future has experienced a different version of history, with increasingly interesting results.

One group of time travel colonists is from a fascist timeline in which the Nazis won the Second World War, and they try to take over the colony. Another group reports having found the remains of the colony during a future archaeological dig, indicating that the colonization effort will eventually fail.

7. Populating Zion

A team of scientists rescue Jews from Nazi extermination camps by transporting them forward in time just before the moment of their deaths. Nazis are confounded when they open the doors to gas chambers and find that their victims have mysteriously vanished. In the future, thousands of rescued Jews struggle to understand what has happened to them, and they begin to hail the lead scientist as their Messiah.

8. Time Me Up, Time Me Down

After inventing a time machine, a scientist travels into his own future where he meets his beautiful future wife. Back in his own time, he meets his future wife for the first time (for her at least), but she isn’t interested in him. He tries his hardest to impress her but fails. How can this be when they are meant to be together?

Determined to win her heart, he travels back to their first meeting over and over again, trying something different each time. He even visits her past in an attempt to learn more about her, but nothing works. Becoming increasingly obsessed, he eventually resorts to kidnapping her. He takes her forward in time to show her their future life, but his actions have drastically changed the timeline.

9. Final Interview

A time travel agency sends a man to interview famous historic figures just hours before they die. The interviews are not only important to historians, they have also become a form of popular entertainment. After interviewing countless historic figures over a long and distinguished career, our protagonist has become something of a celebrity himself. One day, a younger man arrives at his home insisting that he be allowed to interview the protagonist. The protagonist realizes that the younger man is his future replacement, and that he himself is soon to die.

(Thanks to  Jorgen Lundman for this idea, the full version of which can be read here )

10. Jesus vs The Time Police

The technology needed for time travel exists, but it has been outlawed by most of the world’s governments. A special police unit or federal agency uses specialist equipment to track down illegal time travelers and prevent them from damaging the timeline.

Some of the time travelers are attempting to alter their own past for personal gain, others are rich tourists seeking a thrilling but illegal encounter with the past. One day, however, they track down a time traveler who has managed to evade them for several years. He has been living in the past for all this time, and he claims to have become an important historical figure. Doing a little research, they determine his claims to be true. The time traveler has had a profound effect on the timeline, and undoing his actions might have profoundly negative consequences. He has written himself into history – a history that the time-police have always accepted to be true.

The illegal time traveler might be a famous general, monarch, or president. He might even be a religious figure, such as Jesus (as such, he may not have had an entirely positive effect on history, but a profound one nonetheless). If the illegal time-traveler is Jesus, might his ascension to heaven actually be his forced return to his own time, staged by the time-police?The time-police are faced with a dilemma – set the timeline straight and undo his actions without knowing what the result might be, or allow him to continue living in the past.

This article was written by Mark Ball . With thanks to Jorgen Lundman.

Use our Random Story Idea Generator for inspiration for more stories.

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Past, present, paradox: writing about time travel, crafting a believable time travel story requires careful consideration of the logic at play. let's crack the temporal code on traveling through time in fiction.

Table of Contents

Time travel in fiction can open your story to infinite possibilities. Ever wondered what it would be like if somebody taught the Romans how to make a nuclear bomb? Do you need to retcon an event in your story? Time travel!

It may seem simple for your time-traveling characters to hop in Tony’s Terrific Temporal Transport and whiz through time, but there are many hurdles to overcome when writing about time travel.

Chief among these is dealing with time travel paradoxes, so let’s look at those, discuss how you can write convincing time travel stories, and explore how some popular stories handle it.

The Problem With Time Travel

Consider an ordinary day in your life. It follows a sequence of events where one thing leads to another. This is called causality , the concept that everything that happens results from events that happened before it. The problem with time travel in fiction, especially travel to the past, is that it often breaks the rules of causality.

This can lead to time travel paradoxes and unforeseen results , including:

• Continuity paradoxes: The act of time travel renders itself impossible.
• Closed causal loop paradoxes: Traveling to the past creates a condition where an idea, object, or person has no identifiable origin and exists in a closed loop in time that repeats infinitely.
• The butterfly effect: Even the smallest action can have massive consequences.

With all that in mind, let’s embark on a journey through time and explore these further!

Grandfather Paradox

This thought experiment posits the idea of somebody traveling back in time and killing their grandfather before their parents were born. Because the grandfather never has children, the time traveler—his grandchild—cannot exist.

However, if the time traveler never existed, they couldn’t kill their grandfather, so he would go on to have children and grandchildren. One of those grandchildren is the time traveler, though, who might go back in time and kill their grandfather. If that seems confusing, it’s okay—it’s supposed to be.

The bottom line is that if somebody travels to the past and changes something that prevents them from ever traveling to the past, they have broken the timeline's continuity.

Polchinski’s Paradox

American theoretical physicist Joseph Polchinski removed human intervention from the time travel equation.

Imagine a billiard ball travels into a wormhole, tunnels through time in a closed loop, and emerges from the same wormhole just in time to knock its past self away.

Doing so prevents it from ever entering the wormhole and traveling through time, to begin with. However, if it does not travel back in time, it cannot emerge to knock itself out of the way, giving it a clear path to travel back in time.

Bootstrap Paradox

The Bootstrap Paradox is the first closed causal loop paradox we will explore. This presents a situation where an object, idea, or person traveling to the past creates the conditions for their existence, leading to it having no identifiable origin in the timeline.

Imagine sending the schematics for your time machine to your past self, from which you create a time machine. Where did the knowledge of how to create the time machine begin?

Predestination Paradox

The most nihilistic of paradoxes explores the idea that nothing we do matters, no matter what. Events are predetermined to still occur regardless of when and where you travel in time.

Suppose you time travel to the past to talk Alexander the Great out of invading Persia, but he hadn’t even considered this until you mentioned it. By traveling to the past to prevent Alexander’s conquest, you caused it.

Butterfly Effec t

Less of a paradox and more an exploration of unintended consequences, the butterfly effect explores the idea that any action can have sweeping repercussions, no matter how small.

In the 1960s, meteorologist Edward Lorenz discovered that adding tiny changes to computer-based meteorological models resulted in unpredictable changes far from the origin point. In traveling back in time, we don’t know what effect even minor changes might have on the timeline.

How to Write Convincing Time Travel Stories

Time travel can be pretty complex at the best of times, but that doesn't mean writing about it has to be a challenge. Here are a few practical tips to craft narratives that crack the temporal code.

Ask Yourself, "Why Time Travel?"

If your story has time travel, to begin with, it likely plays a pretty significant role in the narrative. Define the purpose that time travel has in your story by asking yourself questions like:

• How and why is time travel possible in your setting?
• What does it mean for your story and your characters?
• What are your characters meant to use time travel for?
• Is the actual practice of time travel different from its intent?

If you can't be clear about time travel's purpose in your story, how can you convincingly write about it? To get crafty with time, you first need to master its relevant mechanics.

Keep a Record of Everything

You're asking your reader to potentially make several mental leaps when time travel is involved in a story, so it's imperative to have all of your details sorted. Do the work of planning out dates and events ahead of time by creating a time map for yourself—like a mindmap, but for a timeline.

You'll be able to keep a birds-eye view of the narrative at all times, be more strategic about moving the order of events around, and ensure that you never miss a detail. You may even want to have multiple versions—a strictly linear timeline and a more loosely structured time map where you draw connections between events and in the order they appear in the narrative.

In Campfire, you can do both with the Timeline Module —create as many Timelines as you want by using the Page feature in the element. You can also connect your Timeline(s) to a custom calendar from the Calendar Module for extra fun with time wonkiness in your world.

If a new idea pops up while writing, don't stress! You'll have your handy time map already laid out so you can easily see if a new scene or chapter makes sense, as well as where it will best fit into the narrative.

Never Forget Causality

I mentioned this concept earlier in the article, but it should be reiterated: The most important rule of time travel is that every action results in a consequence. Remember cause and effect : an action is taken (your character time travels to the past), and causes an effect, the consequence (the timeline is forever changed).

"Consequence" doesn't have to be a negative thing, either, even though the word has that connotation. The resulting consequence of a given action could be a positive effect, too.

Regardless, seek to maintain causality so you don't confuse your readers (or yourself, for that matter). Establishing clear rules for how time travel works in your setting and sticking to them will help you keep your time logic consistent and avoid running into narrative dead ends or plot holes.

Tips & Tricks For the Time-Traveling Author

Now that we’ve examined several obstacles you can encounter when writing about time travel, let’s see how you can either avoid them or exploit them. That’s right! Even time travel paradoxes present opportunities for superb storytelling.

Focus on the Future

Fortunately, all the named paradoxes here involve the past, so the easy way to avoid them is to not go there! Thanks to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, you don’t even have to invent a clever way to travel instead to the future.

An aspect of Einstein's theory is time dilation , in which the faster an object moves through space, the slower it moves through time. With this, you need only zip around at near the speed of light for a few weeks or months, and when you come back to Earth, years or centuries will have gone by.

Create a Multiverse

A popular trope in science fiction today, and a theory gaining popularity among theoretical quantum physicists, is the multiverse concept. According to multiverse theory, whenever an event occurs, every possible outcome of the event happens simultaneously, splitting the universe into parallels that each contain differing outcomes.

Since all these realities exist, perhaps changing the past is simply a way for time travelers to travel between realities, shifting their perspective to a timeline where things occurred differently than in their original reality.

Get Creative With Consequences

Instead of avoiding paradoxes, maybe you want them to occur. Leading to some fascinating stories, this can be approached in a variety of ways. Perhaps you want to examine the unintended consequences of the butterfly effect, create a time-traveling police force that enforces the laws of time travel, or simply break time itself and revel in the chaos that ensues.

Just be sure to remember the action-consequence rule and keep your timeline handy for easy reference—especially if you're toying around with multiple timelines!

Best Time Travel Stories

What follows are what I think are some of the best time travel stories. As you will see, the first two fall victim to time travel paradoxes, while the other two do a great job of exploring various elements we’ve discussed.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

The corporation Cyberdyne Systems has remnants of the Terminator from the first movie, which they use to create an artificial intelligence system called Skynet. Skynet then actually creates the terminators and sends one back in time. Thus, it gives humanity the technology to create itself in a classic example of a bootstrap paradox.

Back to the Future

In this film, Marty McFly travels to the past and inadvertently interrupts the event where his parents first meet. This causes a chain of events where Marty’s parents never get married and have children, threatening to erase Marty and his siblings from the timeline.

Some argue that the McFly offspring ceasing to exist is a great exploration of the consequences of time travel. However, they would never have been at risk had Marty not been in the past to impede their parents’ romance. And if he ceases to exist, he’ll never go back and get in the way, thus creating a grandfather paradox.

War of the Twins

In this second volume of the Dragonlance Legends trilogy by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, the mage Raistlin Majere travels into the past, kills a wizard named Fistandantilus in a battle for power, and assumes his identity. Throughout the book, Raistlin unwittingly follows the historical fate of Fistandantilus, in a wonderful exploration of the predestination paradox.

It’s hard to talk about time travel in fiction these days without mentioning Loki. The show explores two suggestions from my list above: the multiverse and policing the timeline. In this series, varying outcomes of events lead to branching timelines, creating a multiverse of possibilities. However, an agency called the Time Variance Authority exists to prevent this from happening, and they set out to eliminate any branches separate from what they consider the Sacred Timeline.

Bon Voyage!

I hope this exploration of time travel leaves you prepared to tackle these obstacles and opportunities that naturally present themselves when playing around with time.

Just knowing about the complexities of time travel and the paradoxes it can bring about is the best way to avoid trouble and create innovative storytelling moments. So, dust off your DeLorean, polish your paradox-proof plot, and get ready to write your adventure through the ages!

Learn more about making a timeline with Campfire in the dedicated Timeline Module tutorial . And be sure to check out the other plotting and planning articles and videos here on Learn, for advice on how to plan your very own time travel adventures!

Kimberly Van Ginkel

Author and avid reader. I love sharing interesting research and promoting other authors.

9 Rules for Writing Time Travel

I’m a sucker for time travel stories. I’ll read any book or short story, watch any movie or TV show, if it has a time travel element. I can’t get enough.

As a connoisseur of the art form – and as a novelist myself – I’ve developed these story-building tips for writing time travel

1. Give us the Shock & Awe

Writers are always told to start each story in media res , so it’s tempting to skip over the typical set-up scenes. With a time travel story, however, it’s best to introduce us to the characters before learn that time manipulation is possible. Why? Because if we watch them travel for the first time, we get to experience it with them.

Sure, we’ve seen hundred variations of this already, where the character who knows time travel doesn’t exist gradually comes to accept that it is real. It may be hard to find a fresh take. On the other hand, mastering the 4th dimension is a mind-blowing concept, so it ought to take a while to process.

The original draft of Groundhog’s Day opened with Phil Connors already trapped in his loop of repeating days. Had they filmed that version, we’d have been robbed of all the great build-up scenes where the tiny details of Phil’s day start to build, hinting at him that something is very, very wrong.

We’d have skipped past the catalyst of the story and the audience would be struggling to keep up.

Picture Marty McFly walking through 1955’s Hill Valley for the first time in Back to the Future . He has already been told that Doc invented time travel. The writers might have had him immediately accept that fact and jump straight toward some decisive action to change his predicament. Instead, they allowed him a little time for confusion, a period of denial, which also gave us time to look around with him and spot the changes in the town. With every new person or building he sees, we feel his sense of awe growing, taking in the enormity of where he is and what has happened to him. These few moments immerse us in the world with him.

It’s worth mentioning that in Palm Springs , Nyles has been repeating this day for years, but this works because we, the audience, get to watch the other main character, Sarah, enter the time loop for the first time.

This is the magic of a time travel story. Think of it as your “Dorothy opens the door to Oz” moment. Don’t rush it. This is often the most captivating scene of any time travel story.

2. Pick Your Method

Every time travel story has to have something that functions as the device, portal, or catalyst to time travel.

In H.G. Well’s The Time Machine , it was a literal machine that the hero climbed into, and that set the standard for decades of time travel stories. Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol stories employ hover-motorcycles that can jump through time. Doc Brown used a Delorean. Time Travelling with a Hamster (a very funny middle-grade book) uses a metal washtub wired to an old Mac computer.

Just like the wardrobe leading to Narnia, portals are a specific location that allows you to pass between times. In Stephen King’s 11.22.63 the portal is simply a staircase that they refer to as “the rabbit hole.” Star Trek TNG often utilizes worm holes for its time jumps.

Sometimes there is nothing mechanical involved, nothing that would give our characters any control of their destination. Any number of stories involve a character getting a concussion or struck on the head and waking up in another time. In The Time-Traveller’s Wife , Henry has a chromosome disorder that randomly catapults him through time; before each occurrence, he can feel the sensation of an impending jump.

3. Anything goes, as long as you explain it.

The important thing is to show the audience what your method looks like so that we know what to watch for during the story. Even if the character doesn’t know what caused it, if we witnessed him falling asleep and waking up in a different time, we have a framework for the story. We don’t know how the person will get home, but we realize something similar will have to happen to return them to their own time.

No matter what means you use to allow your characters to time travel, the important thing is to show the audience how it happened – at least, as much as your characters know – then give us the rules that govern it .

Doc Brown explains how to set the target date, load the plutonium, and get the car going 88 mph to trigger the time jump. When we see Marty doing exactly those steps a few minutes later, we know before he does that he’s about to travel to 1955. It also sets up the rules for bringing him back home.

In The Edge of Tomorrow , we learn that it’s the blood of the “Alphas” that allows the hero to loop through time. Therefore, if he gets a blood transfusion he will lose the ability. Until then, every time he dies the day resets. All of this is explained to him in the first act of the story, and is repeated again so the audience knows the rules and the way to end it.

It’s OK to keep the explanation brief, and even to leave out critical information, if that’s what your plot requires. But when you skip the explanation altogether, you’ll leave your audience wondering. You don’t want them to be distracted throughout the story, looking for clues that you haven’t dropped, as they try to understand how the hero is going to get back home.

4. Create Your Own Rules

Can the characters change the past? If so, can they make changes to their own future? How does the cause/effect work? There are a million permutations to this, and the most wondrous thing about his genre is that since time travel doesn’t really exist, your logic can never be wrong . How freeing is that?

The only thing your audience will expect is that you stay consistent with whatever version of time travel you set up initially.

Some of the most common time travel tropes are:

• “I know what I’m doing.” – the time-traveller knows both the original time line and the new version because he is immune to the effects of the change – see Jodi Taylor’s Chonicles of St. Mary’s series.
• “I used to know what was going on.” – as soon as the hero interacts with the time line, he is changing the past, including his own memories – see Looper , Quantum Leap (Sam and Al’s memories of events differ after a major change, as Sam is remembering only the original time line. For example: Watergate.)
• “There is no cause and effect.” – anything the traveller does are events that always existed. The past changes him as he changes the past, so there are no alternate time lines. – See The Time-Traveller’s Wife .
• “Nothing is able to change.” – the time-traveller is forbidden from making changes (not just a rule, but a law of physics) so they are viewing the past only. Alternately, they can make only minor changes that have no lasting effects. – See To Say Nothing of the Dog .
• “I’m only looking” – our heroes cannot move through time, but they can send technology that allows them to see the future or past – See Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus .
• “Time corrects itself.” – attempts at major changes are thwarted as the universe finds its own ways of staying on track. – See Night Watch (Sam’s mentor is killed when he visits the past and he is forced to take the man’s place, thereby making himself a major influence in his own young life.)
• “Everything changes.” – any large-scale disruptions in the time stream will completely disrupt everything “downstream” from that event. See Anderson’s Time Patrol series (These time cops base their operations a million years B.C. so that if anything upsets the time stream, their patrol can still exist to fix it.)

Know which type of story you are writing and stay true to the cause/effect rules you have created.

If your character goes back in time, confident that the past cannot be changed, then kills his own grandfather and blinks himself out of existence, both you and the audience are now in quite a pickle. This character who no longer exists was never there to kill the grandpa. Oops. You’ve introduced a paradox that is going to hurt everyone’s brain unless you have an amazing trick up your sleeve to get us out of it.

Paradoxes suck for everyone. Give your readers an expected structure and then stick to it so that we’re not left arguing with the screen that, “that makes no sense!”

5. Or Give Yourself an “Out” to Break the Rules

Because it’s difficult to write time travel without flirting with paradoxes, some writers give themselves a work-around — a way of breaking their own rules in a way that feels as though it’s still consistent.

You can cheat.

Avengers: Endgame is a brilliant movie. It’s so good, in fact, that it gets a pass on blatantly breaking its own rules about time travel constraints. The Hulk gives a short lecture explaining why they can’t change the past, they then go on to twist time in ways that make no sense against the structure of time travel in this movie (remember the scene where AntMan is turned into a baby, then an old man, then himself again in what appears to be seconds for him?). But all these discrepancies get glossed over by explaining that the Quantum Realm is mysterious. Ah, Quantum Realm, the magical spackle for filling in plot holes.

You can play dumb.

Ever notice how the main character in these stories is rarely ever the brilliant scientist who developed time travel? Not only is it easier to relate to an everyman character, it saves us all from having to understand the science. You can have your extremely smart person introduce it and explain the rules, then let your hero accept it on faith without thoroughly understanding it.

I love this method because it gives you, the author, the freedom to include as much or as little science as you want to. Gloss over as much as you want to and have the scientist say, “Just push this button” and you can forge ahead with your plot. It’s enough for the audience to know that someone in this world understands it all.

You can yell “Hey, look over there!”

One of my favorite “nevermind my rules” moments is from Grand Tour: A Disaster in Time . Our hero, Ben, has jumped through time to break himself out of prison. The viewer immediately has to wonder how the universe will reconcile this, as Ben has now changed his past and there are suddenly two of him living in town. The writer must have felt trapped in a corner as well, because he threw in this beautiful bit of dialogue:

Original Ben: “How can we both be in the same place at the same time?”

Time-Travelling Ben: “(Forget) the physics, Ben! By the time you figure out whether it’s possible or not, we’re gonna be dead. Twice!”

Easy as that! The paradox doesn’t really matter because we’re now diving back into the action.

Which brings me to:

6. Keep the Clock Ticking

When you have time at your command, why panic, right? Why rush anything?

Because stories need tension. And a great way to add tension is to give your hero a ticking clock. As the wise Rufus once said (in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure ), “No matter what you do, no matter where you go … the clock in San Dimas is always running.” They had only 24 hours to get to their history exam, despite being able to hop through time.

A less silly example is King’s 11.22.63 , where his time portal leads him to the year 1958. In order to prevent the JFK assassination, Jake must spend 5 years in the past. Because of that time commitment, the idea of doing it more than once becomes nearly impossible. Thus, in the countdown to November 22nd, his time is as short as everyone else’s. The time portal can’t help him anymore. And the tension is every bit as high as if he had never discovered time travel.

7. Flip the Script to Make it Difficult

We are rooting for people, not gods of time. It’s cool that they have this wonderful ability, but your story is more gripping if something happens to make them unable to use it. We want them to be able to suffer setbacks, something they can’t easily undo.

Perhaps there is something inherent in your rules of time travel that will constrain the hero. In the Time Patrol stories, one unbreakable rule is that a traveller can never visit the same time twice. So if they make a mistake, they can’t return to that same time to undo it. In About Time , Tim can travel at will to any day within his own lifetime. Just as he’s getting used to this ability, he discovers that changing anything that happened before his children were born will cause them not to exist.

Sudden reversals are even better. In Time Bandits , our heroes have a map of every time portal in world history … so, of course, they lose the map!

8. Choose a Global Background, Then Make it Personal

Give in to the temptation to choose huge moments in world history. Why not? That’s the lure of time travel — the great question of “Where would you visit if you could go anywhere at any time?”

The birth of Christ? The signing of the Declaration of Independence? Woodstock? Pompeii? The assassination of Lincoln? The birth of Rock & Roll?

The history books are open to you. Pick something awesome.

But here’s the thing – as cool as all of those are, the best time travel books are the ones that focus on people . The bigger your background event, the more important it is to show it through the eyes of the people living there.

Connie Willis set The Doomsday Book in the middle of the Black Plague. Instead of showing the cities, she sent her hero to live with a small family out in the safety (uh-oh) of the country. She also created a 2-book series, Blackout and All Clear , set during the blitzkreig of London. Her plucky historians mix with civilians and military personnel, forging relationships that make us care about the fate of those individuals.

King’s 11.22.63 is ostensibly about the JFK assassination, but the characters our hero meets along the way are so wonderful that, to be honest, I wanted the hero to give up on trying to save Kennedy and settle into his fake life in the ’60s.

Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series stretches from the Jacobite Uprising in Scotland through the American Revolution. We see wonderful scenery, experience famous events, and encounter great figures from history. But no one reads those books just for the historical details. The heart of that story is the romance of Claire and Jamie.

Remember that time-travel is a means of telling your story, not the entire story itself. Make your characters matter .

9. Be Unique

Time travel has been the source of some of the most creative sci-fi works ever made. Keep twisting it to create your own rules and your own wonderful stories.

Remember that it does not have to be linear time travel. Though most of the stories I’ve mentioned involve a person being displaced from his own time, there are other permutations to explore.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe involved a bubble existing outside of space-time so that elite diners could watch the death of the universe while enjoying cocktails.

Groundhog’s Day introduced such a charming notion of 24-hour time loops that it created a whole sub-genre, including the comedic horror film Happy Death Day .

And The Girl, The Gold Watch, and Everything allows its main character to stretch time, living an entire hour in the space between seconds. This gives him the superpower of incredible speed, as viewed by other people. Since we’re living in the time gaps with him, it makes for an intriguing notion of time travel.

One last thought … if you are looking for inspiration for a new type of time travel story, I recommend the book Einstein’s Dreams , a quick read with beautiful vignettes that illustrate different time theories.

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11 thoughts on “ 9 rules for writing time travel ”.

Hi. Releif. Im trying to be Mr. Spock as it pertains to my time travel rules. Doubably difficult for me as the ‘ Brain’ of the bunch needs to spew out some plausabile sounding techno babble. I need to be acurate too as Im postulating relativity theory. I think though I have a device to get arround that. And what doesnt fit, fits a quantum paradigm Im saving ( if I ever get to the writing part) for book three. Im going to definitly not abuse the priveledge of the readers crudility.

When you’re done, make sure to post a link here so we can all read it.

Thanks for a great article. Just starting to write my first time travel novel.

Like Liked by 1 person

Thank you, this was a great article! I’m planning to write a time travel story for NaNoWriMo.

Best of luck! NaNo is a wonderful challenge.

Wow, love the article Kimberly. Really glad that in addition to covering the different models of time travel and making sure the character story is more important than the time travel aspect — you gave great tips on how to get yourself out of a paradox. I tend to paint myself into a corner even when not writing about time travel. But those are some handy examples of how and why to break the rules, very freeing!! I wish I could go back in time and tell all this to my younger self. But then, I wouldn’t need to!!

Amazing article! It has helped me so much. Thank you!

This was a very helpful article. Thanks so much for posting it. I am trying to write a handful of time-travel short stories, keeping them under 5,000 words. I’m finding it difficult to develop the characters properly while operating in such a limited length.

I’m so glad you liked it. Let me know how you do with your stories. I have always had a harder time with short stories than with novels, myself.

Thanks so much! I will try to keep you updated. I learned a few lessons when I wrote my first and only (so far) book, “Nineteen for Lincoln”, which is a time travel novel set in Civil War Missouri, and then Tudor England. I did not market the book at all, even though it’s available on Amazon, B & N, etc. in print and Kindle. Sort of a shameless plug there, but I’m not looking to make money–I just love time travel. 🙂

I changed my name from “Anonymous” to DJoseph, by the way.

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Kimberly Van Ginkel is an internationally-published author living in the Midwest.

Her debut novel, “ In the Sleep of Death ,” has been described as “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell” meets “The Ten Thousand Doors of January.”

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21 Life-changing Trips Everyone Should Experience at Least Once

From African safaris to must-visit cities, these once-in-a-lifetime trips will make you want to plan your next great adventure.

Elizabeth Rhodes is a special projects editor at Travel + Leisure , covering everything from luxury hotels to theme parks to must-pack travel products. Originally from South Carolina, Elizabeth moved to New York City from London, where she started her career as a travel blogger and writer.

What's next on your travel list? With so many places worth traveling to, it can be hard to narrow down your top spots to visit.

Sometimes, it's the famous attractions, delicious food, and stunning hotels that draw us to a certain destination, and other times, it's the bragging rights that come with checking off every continent, country, or state. Whatever your motivation, we've rounded up 21 incredible trips, complete with once-in-a-lifetime experiences and iconic sights you won't find anywhere else in the world.

So, what makes a trip truly life-changing? That answer varies from traveler to traveler, but one thing is for sure: From African safaris to classic road trips, this list will make you want to plan your next great adventure.

Deciding between the historic cities of Rome, Venice, Naples, and Florence for the top destination to visit feels impossible, so the entire country of Italy deserves a spot on your list. Start in the Eternal City and head north through the rolling hills of Tuscany to visit Florence, followed by Milan or Venice, or go south to the beaches of the beautiful Amalfi Coast and Sicily.

New York, New York

Visiting the Statue of Liberty , standing at the top of the Empire State Building, walking across the Brooklyn Bridge: These are just a few of the things you can only do in New York City. Whether you dream of visiting all the places you've seen on screen, catching a Broadway show, or eating your way through the city's diverse neighborhoods, there's no doubt that NYC deserves a spot on your list.

Tokyo, Japan

Old and new come together in Japan's bustling capital city. Historic temples and shrines, busy shopping districts, delicious food, and some of the world's best theme parks and attractions — whatever your interests, there's something for you in Tokyo.

Paris, France

From watching the Eiffel Tower sparkle and viewing famous works of art at world-renowned museums to eating delicious French pastries, there are innumerable reasons that Paris deserves a spot on your list. Of course, other dreamy French destinations like Mont-Saint-Michel, Chamonix, and the Riviera are well worth a visit, too.

Busy medinas, intricate architecture, and a unique combination of cultural influences make Morocco unlike anywhere else on the planet. Whether you're traveling to bustling Marrakesh, pretty coastal cities, or remote desert towns (or hopefully, all three), a trip to Morocco is bound to be one to remember.

Monica Farber/Travel + Leisure

From the whitewashed homes of Santorini to the Ios party scene to the relaxing atmosphere of Milos, there's a perfect Greek Island for every type of traveler. Island hopping gives you the chance to experience more of what the country has to offer, but plan to spend a couple of days in Athens at the beginning and/or end of your trip.

T+L Backpack Quiz

Rory Fuller/Travel + Leisure

Machu Picchu

Seeing the historic ruins of the Incan Empire set among the breathtaking Andes at Machu Picchu is an undeniably life-changing experience. The stunning citadel ruins of Machu Picchu are worth the journey — and for some travelers, that trip, often taken by train or on foot as a multi-day trek , is a big part of the experience. Editor’s note: Machu Picchu is currently closed due to civil unrest in Peru. Visit the  official website  for the latest news and reopening details.

African Safari

Seeing majestic animals like lions, elephants, and rhinos in the wild is a dream best accomplished with an African safari . South Africa, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Kenya are among the most popular safari destinations — and in each of those countries, you'll find incredible lodges and tour operators who can help you spot these creatures in their natural habitat.

Whether you dream of cruising down the famed Nile River, seeing the Pyramids of Giza, or visiting the ancient Valley of the Kings, Egypt's historic wonders make the destination completely unique (and worthy of a spot on your travel list).

Unlike many of the action-packed trips on this list, the Maldives is synonymous with relaxation, luxury, and romance. A stay in an overwater bungalow set atop turquoise blue waters is the ultimate getaway that's worth the long-haul flight and oftentimes pricey accommodations.

Antarctica Cruise

Hoping to visit all seven continents? Cross Antarctica off your list with a cruise. Several major cruise lines have journeys to Antarctica, offering incredible views of the ice and wildlife from the comfort and safety of a ship. Travelers typically fly in and out of Buenos Aires en route to Ushuaia (where most cruises depart from); we recommend spending a few days in the fascinating Argentine city before your expedition.

Irjaliina Paavonpera/Travel + Leisure

Dubbed one of the natural wonders of the world, the Great Barrier Reef is a can't-miss for many wildlife lovers. Of course, Australia's gorgeous coastline, the iconic Sydney Opera House, and fuzzy creatures like kangaroos and koalas are also reasons to head to the destination. Fly into Sydney and spend a few days there before heading out to explore more of this expansive country teeming with natural beauty.

Galapagos Islands

Incredible and diverse plant and animal species make the Galapagos Islands another must-visit for nature-loving travelers. This stunning archipelago off the coast of Ecuador is best explored by cruise, so you can take in as many breathtaking landscapes and animals as possible during your trip.

Like the other countries on this list, India has countless destinations worth exploring, but one of the most famous attractions that travelers dream of seeing for themselves is the Taj Mahal. This 17th-century white marble mausoleum has drawn visitors to Agra for years. Luxury travelers might consider a train trip aboard the Maharajas' Express (with a stop at the Taj Mahal) as the ultimate experience. Travelers planning to visit the Taj Mahal or take the luxurious train ride will want to fly into Delhi, India's capital territory.

Petra, Jordan

The stunning ancient city of Petra is made up of several impressive structures carved into sandstone rock faces, including the famous Al-Khazneh. The city dates back thousands of years, making this UNESCO World Heritage site a must-visit for history buffs.

Passing through India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Bhutan, and Nepal, the Himalayas are home to some of the world's highest peaks — and that means breathtaking mountain views, too. For adventurous and active travelers, climbing Mount Everest (or at least trekking to Everest Base Camp) is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

American National Park Road Trip

The classic American road trip is a mainstay on many travelers' lists — and for good reason. The country's incredible national parks , including Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite, are best explored on road trips with stops at charming small towns and kitschy roadside attractions.

Great Wall of China

Stretching across China for thousands of miles, with sections dating back nearly 2,000 years, the Great Wall is regarded as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World. Visitors can hike along parts of the wall — some areas are located within driving distance of Beijing, so it's a perfect day trip from the city.

Easter Island

The hundreds of monolithic moai statues have drawn curious visitors to Easter Island for years. This remote Polynesian island is worth the lengthy trip for travelers hoping to see these impressive human figures, while also soaking in some incredible coastal views.

Northern Lights Trip

Catching a glimpse of the elusive northern lights is possible in several destinations close to the Arctic Circle, including Alaska, Iceland, Canada, Greenland, Finland, Sweden, and Norway. All of these places have incredible viewpoints (and even hotels where you can see the phenomenon from your bed ), in addition to great, wintry scenery. (The lights are best viewed from late fall through early spring.)

Thailand and Vietnam

A trip through Southeast Asia is a must for any traveler, especially foodies who love street eats. While you could spend weeks in each of these countries, Thailand and Vietnam can easily be paired for an exciting trip packed with lush scenery, cultural experiences, and delicious food. Have a little extra time to spare? Add Cambodia to the mix and include a visit to expansive Angkor Wat.

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Several Time Travel Story Ideas

• Posted on 14 Feb, 2020
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I’ve been working on my novel a lot lately, which is a time travel mystery/thriller. I’m currently about 200 pages in, and I’m satisfied that I’ve avoided a lot of sci-fi tropes so far. It’s a complicated sci-fi subject with a lot of moving parts.

If I’m being honest, the 7 ideas below are insanely weak. I’ll revisit this post sometime later this week. But if you’d like some better ideas, I’ve got a better list here:  10 time travel ideas.

Here are 7 sci-fi ideas…

• A man travels to the past solely in order to create a duplicate of himself. But the duplicate has an evil side and forces the man to swap places, taking his life in the future.
• An entire family time leaps to one hundred years into the future, only to find earth has been evacuated.
• A man travels back in time in order to murder someone who ruined his life, knowing he’ll have a great alibi.
• A man finds a time machine that a time traveler has hidden in the shed behind his house. He inadvertently damages it and the time traveler shows back up to the broken machine.
• A time traveler travels back in time in order to leave a hard drive with the richest man on earth, full of technological designs and secrets he knows the man has the resources to develop, much earlier than they were originally developed.
• A time traveler from far into the future (a few million years) shows up in present-day New York City. He’s surprisingly alien in appearance and has powers that we could have after a million years of evolution.
• A scientist invents the first time machine and immediately shows up to warn himself not to use it.

Let us know what you think about our ideas! Comment below to give us your opinion, add onto an existing idea, or submit one of your own!

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Back to the Future screenwriter says time travel has become “too convenient”

Co-writer Bob Gale explores Back To The Future’s massive influence on the time-travel genre.

Few movies have impacted the public’s perception of time travel more than Back to the Future .

Alongside co-writer and director Robert Zemeckis , Back to the Future co-writer Bob Gale crafted his vision of how time travel would actually function and what rules should apply — and those rules continue to impact our real-life understanding of time travel to this day. (Just ask Ant-Man !).

Gale tells Inverse when they set out to make Back to the Future , they deliberately wanted to make the rules of time travel clear to audiences… and to make time traveling seem difficult, keeping it from being the sole driver of the plot.

“We created a history of the McFly family that we then changed,” he explains, “but the rest of history stayed the same.”

And that, he says, is why audiences went along for the ride with them.

Back to the Future set the cinematic world on fire upon its release in 1985, grossing almost $400 million and sparking two almost-as-profitable sequels. Millions (if not billions) of people have spent time absorbing the trials and tribulations of Marty McFly and Doc Brown, along with considering the movie’s rules of time travel as real-life science.

More than three and half decades later, Inverse sat down with Gale to talk about everything he knows about the rules of time travel, Back to the Future’s impact, and our perceptions of how time travel works — even when, in his opinion, it doesn’t work as well in other films.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The Rules of Time Travel is an Inverse special issue exploring the evolution of science fiction's most imaginative sub-genre. From Marty McFly to Avengers: Endgame .

Bob Gale sits inside the DeLorean at a "Back To The Future" event in 2016.

Inverse : Many people’s ideas about the rules of time travel are shaped by fictional properties — including Back to the Future . Why do you think that is?

Bob Gale : Because nobody knows. It gives you a certain level of speculation.

In Back to the Future , we made the rules pretty clear — so clear, in fact, that Alan Silvestri (our composer who also scored the last two Avengers movies) told me that the reason that they have that scene [in Avengers: Endgame ] where Ant-Man says, "So, Back to the Future's a bunch of bullshit?” was added afterward because they showed the movie to test audiences and they said, "Wait a minute. You can't do that because in Back to the Future , Marty..." So they realized they had to hit that nail right on the head.

We did too good of a job, I guess.

How did you establish your rules of time travel for Back to the Future ?

One of the things we did in Back to the Future that turned out to be really smart, if I do say so myself, is that we created a history of the McFly family that we then changed, but the rest of history stayed the same. So when you went to see Back to the Future , Ronald Reagan was president of the United States when you went into the theater, and when you came out of the theater, he was still president of the United States.

We didn't change anything about the world of the audience. We only changed the world of our fictional characters, and the audience was totally cool with going along with that version.

“There isn’t a damn thing in Blade Runner that looks like Los Angeles.”

Whereas, if we got rid of Hitler, what would the world look like? Well, that's just total speculation. If you did something like that in a movie, it would have to turn out that, even though you thought you killed Hitler, he survived the assassination attempt, everything still remained the same, and the train still stayed on that immovable track, or you'd end up in a world so entirely different that it put off the audience.

We always would plot our movies with index cards, and sometimes we really had to depend on that stuff to keep in mind, "OK, wait a minute, he's going to do this, so we'd better set this up." It was really important for us: "How do we do it? How do we make the 1885 version of a Frisbee? What have we shown before that everybody understands?”

The hoverboard came about, obviously, because of the skateboard sequence.

In the Back to the Future mythology or universe, we were always trying to say, "Let's take this element and either project it into the future or put it back into the past." One of the most fun ways to do that was with the whole town because the town almost became a character. In 1985, the town square was a parking lot, but in 1955, it was a grassy area, and in 2015, they restored it. That stuff was all based around the story of towns.

You see so many movies that go into the future, and it looks like they tore everything down and started all over again. I love the original Blade Runner , I really do, but there isn't a damn thing in Blade Runner that looks like Los Angeles . But if you were to take somebody from New York in 1955 and bring him to New York today, they would know where all the streets were, they would know how to go to Central Park, and the subways are still going to the same places. Lots of stuff has been torn down and rebuilt, but the grid of the city is exactly the way it's been for over 150 years.

“Doctor Strange basically can do anything, and that's too convenient.”

Have other writers come to you for time travel tips?

In all the various interviews that I've given, the one element that I stress above all is a lesson that people don't seem to learn — you cannot use time travel as a plot device. You can't use it as a way to get yourself out of a plot. Somebody gets killed, "Oh, we'll just go back in time and stop the bullet from reaching his heart." That's lazy writing. It's too convenient that you happen to have the technology to solve a dramatic problem like that.

That's why, in Back to the Future , we made time travel really difficult to do. You had to go 88 miles an hour, and you had to have 1.21 gigawatts of electricity. It was tricky; you couldn't just cavort around time.

That's why a lot of time travel TV series are not that successful, because after a while, the audience just kind of shrugs and says, "OK, they can travel through time and do this because the writer or the director says they can," as opposed to feeling connected or that we're discovering something through the characters.

Think about a movie like Primer , one of the best time travel movies of the last 20 years, and it was made for no money. They were honest about the concept and true to what their rules were. Then look at a movie like Looper , which I know some people think is really good, but I had a lot of problems with Looper because the premise was that the only way you could get rid of undesirable people was to send them through time, as opposed to just dumping them in an incinerator?

I mean, Doctor Strange basically can do anything, and that's too convenient. Like, "OK, you can just do a time spell, and that solves all the problems of the last Spider-Man movie?" Doctor Strange makes a spell that doesn't work right the first time and then goes, "You know what, I can fix it." I felt like saying, "Why did I watch, then?" The two hours in between weren't necessary.

Where did you first learn about time travel?

My conception of time travel came from seeing the George Pal movie adaptation of [H.G. Wells'] The Time Machine back in 1960. I was nine years old, and I had read the comic book adaptation before I saw the movie. My mother wasn't sure I should be seeing a movie that had a picture of a green monster on the poster, but nevertheless, I managed to go, and it pretty much fried my mind.

Then, I read the actual book, and from there, I discovered various time-travel science fiction, notably Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein. When I got older, I read Robert Silverberg, who wrote some wonderful time travel novels. Of course, the Twilight Zone was also on TV at the time, and uncharacteristic of my mother, she loved the Twilight Zone, so I would watch that with her. They did a number of fascinating time travel episodes.

It just was a fascinating idea that there was a way that you could travel through time the same way that you could travel through three-dimensional space.

Ray Bradbury's great short story A Sound Of Thunder was another one that always stayed with me. I was probably in seventh or eighth grade the first time I read that, and the idea that just stepping on a butterfly could change the outcome of the whole political movement was a pretty cool concept.

And then, of course, there were the Twilight Zone episodes where somebody would go back in time and try to prevent some historic event from happening and fail. Those are all those kinds of questions that people wonder about.

The interior of the DeLorean DMC-12 from Back to the Future II.

When we think of time travel, we think about going forward, but something you did with Back to the Future is that you went backward — at least initially. What intrigued you about going backward?

I remember reading DC Comics, and they had a series called The Legion Of Superheroes . They'd have stories in the 30th century, and Superboy would travel to various centuries and have all these adventures with the superheroes of that era. But I always had a problem with it because it was like, "That's what you think the 30th century is going to be like."

The idea of predestination also never sat well with me, either — the idea that, no matter what you do, you're powerless because you're stuck on a track that's always going to go this direction. That kind of defeats the whole purpose of life, if you will.

So, with the idea of going backward, it makes sense that where or when you're going, you'd have an idea of what that world is going to be like. And then, of course, the inevitable question is whether you could change anything.

Before the first Back to the Future movie came out, there were time-travel movies, but there were many more afterward. How do you think Back to the Future affected the sci-fi movie market?

Time-travel movies before Back to the Future were not successful at the box office, which was one of the reasons we had such a hard time getting it made. We'd pitch this idea to people, and they'd read the script and say, "It's a great script, but time travel movies don't make any money. Forget it."

Once we proved that the right kind of time-travel movie could make money, they started making them.

The devil's advocate argument is that maybe they didn't make money because the vast majority were poorly written or just plain bad.

Well, no. Take a movie like The Final Countdown , which was pretty good. To understand it, though, it requires you to have enough knowledge of what happened at Pearl Harbor to get it. But then viewers were also in a situation where they'd see it and say, "They can't prevent Pearl Harbor because we already know that it happened."

Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future .

Did you hear anything anecdotally around the release of Back to the Future in terms of how your movie affected pitches coming into studios, movies being greenlit, or anything like that?

I'm not sure if I heard anybody specifically say that, but I would imagine that if Back to the Future hadn’t been a success, they would never have tried to make Bill & Ted .

They had a great idea with that movie because going in, you know it's a comedy about these two goofballs who don't know anything about history. So let's have a-rockin' good time with their ignorance. That worked because the audience said, "Okay, these guys are bozos, and we can get down with them."

Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future .

Would you travel through time?

There's a fun game you can play with people, and it's a good icebreaker if you're in a group of people at some event and you want to try to get to know something about them. You ask, "Say you have a time machine, and you get to take two trips. One of them is personal, and one of them is historic. Where do you go? What do you do?"

My mom was a musician. She played the violin, and in the 1940s, she had an act called Maxine and Her Men that played in various nightclubs in the St. Louis area. I would love to go back in time and catch her act. That would be a real trip to see my mom in her 20s as a virtuoso musician.

For the historic question, I used to say I want to go back to Dallas and the Kennedy assassination to find out if the shots really did come from the grassy knoll. Now, since Covid, I'd want to travel 20 years in the future and get my hands on a book about what happened in 2020. The other option is since Mark Twain is one of my literary heroes, I think it'd be cool to go back in time and catch a lecture by Mark Twain.

“People think going back in time would be so romantic, but it wouldn't be.”

People think going back in time would be so romantic, but it wouldn't be. We tried to give you a little flavor of that in the third Back to the Future because if you go back to the Old West, you can't take a hot shower. And every street would smell like horse shit. That's not really romantic.

We did the horse shit gag in Back to the Future 3 , and Marty walked around the town and saw how bad the conditions were for the Chinese people, too. We wanted to put some of that reality in there.

One of the great things about Sergio Leone’s westerns is that he always shows amputees. It's like, "That's right! That's how crude medicine was." Somebody got a bullet in their forearm, so they'd just cut it off. You see that and say, "Maybe I don't want to go to a time when they don't have penicillin or indoor plumbing."

Why do you think people love the concept of time travel?

Lots of different reasons. First of all, we're always seeing history after it’s been revised. You're hearing stories about the thing that they said happened. "This happened this way. This is what could have happened to the dinosaurs. These maybe had feathers." There's a history detective aspect to it.

There's also the thing about traveling to the future where you're wondering, "If I take this job, is it going to be okay?" You want to take a peek behind the curtain to find out if you're making the right decision or not. Everybody thinks when they're lying in bed before they go to sleep, "Dammit, why didn't I do this instead of that? Why didn't I tell that guy to go fuck himself? If I had another chance at doing that, I think I would tell him to go fuck himself."

It's just a very human thing.

• Science Fiction

Summaries, Analysis & Lists

Time Travel Short Stories: Examples Online

The short stories on this page all contain some form of time travel, including time loops. Some of them contain time machines or other technologies that makes the trip possible; in other stories the jump in time doesn’t have an obvious explanation. They don’t all involve obvious trips to the past or future. Sometimes, the story simply contains an element that is out of place in time. See also:

Short Stories About Time Travel

“caveat time traveler” by gregory benford.

The narrator spots the man from the past immediately. The visitor identifies himself. He’s surprised to find he’s not the first visitor from the past. He wants to take something back to prove he made it.

“Caveat Time Travel” can be read in the preview of  The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF.

“Absolutely Inflexible” by Robert Silverberg

A time traveler in a spacesuit sits in Mahler’s office. He’s informed that he’ll be sent to the Moon, where all visitors from the past have to go. The man tries to get out of it, but Mahler explains why no exceptions are possible.

“Absolutely Inflexible” can be read in the preview of  Time and Time Again :  Sixteen Trips in Time.

“Yesterday Was Monday” by Theodore Sturgeon

When Harry Wright wakes up on Wednesday morning he realizes that yesterday was Monday. Somehow there is a gap. He notices that his environment doesn’t quite seem complete.

“Yesterday Was Monday” can be read in the preview of  The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century.

“Death Ship” by Richard Matheson

The crew of a spaceship is collecting samples from various planets to determine their suitability for human habitation. While nearing a new planet, Mason spots a metallic flash. The crew speculates that it might be a ship. Captain Ross orders a landing to check it out.

“Death Ship” can be read in the preview of  The Time Traveler’s Almanac.

“The Third Level” by Jack Finney

The narrator has been to the third level of Grand Central Station, even though everyone else believes there are only two. He’s just an ordinary guy and doesn’t know why he discovered this unknown level. He relates how it happened.

“The Third Level” can be read in the preview of  About Time: 12 Short Stories.

“A Touch of Petulance” by Ray Bradbury

Jonathan Hughes met his fate in the form of an old man while he rode the train home from work. He noticed the old man’s newspaper looked more modern than his own. There was a story on the front page about a murdered woman—his wife. His mind raced.

This story can be read in the preview of  Killer, Come Back To Me: The Crime Stories of Ray Bradbury.

“Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving

Rip Van Winkle is lazy at home but helpful to, and well-liked by, his neighbors. He’s out in the mountains one day to get away from things. With night approaching, he starts for home but meets up with a group of men. He has something to drink and goes to sleep, which changes everything.

This story can be read in the preview of  The Big Book of Classic Fantasy .

“Twilight” by John W. Campbell

Jim picks up a hitch-hiker, Ares, who says he’s a scientist from the year 3059. He says he traveled millions of years into the future, but came back to the wrong year. Life in 3059 is trouble free, with machines taking care of everything. Future Earth is in trouble, with all life extinct, except for humans and plants.

This is the second story in the preview of  The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Vol 1 .  (49% into preview)

“The Man Who Walked Home” by James Tiptree, Jr.

An accident at the Bonneville Particle Acceleration Facility decimated the Earth’s population and severely damaged the biosphere and surface. Decades later, a huge flat creature emerges from the crater at the explosion site and promptly disappeared. There are other sightings in the years that follow.

This story can be read in the preview of the anthology  Timegates .  (18% into preview)

“An Assassin in Time” by S. A. Asthana

Navy Seal Jessica Kravitz recovers from the effects of the time jump. She’s done it before, but there are always side-effects. She’s on a highly classified, very important, and expensive mission. Previous jumps have familiarized her with the grounds. This time, she should be able to reach her target.

This story can be read in the preview of  AT THE EDGES: Short Science Fiction, Thriller and Horror Stories .  (17% in)

“The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” by Ted Chiang

Fuwaad, a fabric merchant, appears before the Caliph to recount a remarkable story. While looking for a gift, he entered a large shop with a new owner. It had a marvelous assortment of offerings, all made by the owner or under his direction. Fuwaad is led into the back where he’s shown a small hoop that manipulates time. He also has a larger gateway that people can walk through. The owner tells Fuwaad the stories of a few who did just that.

This story is on the longer side but doesn’t feel like it. Most of “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” can be read in the Amazon preview of  Exhalation: Stories .

“Time Locker” by Harry Kuttner

Gallegher is a scientist—drunken, erratic and brilliant. He invents things but pays them little attention after. His acquaintance Vanning, an unscrupulous lawyer, has made use of some of these inventions, including a neuro-gun that he rents out. During a visit he sees a locker that is bigger inside than out. Fascinated with the item’s possibilities, he offers to purchase it.

Some of “Time Locker” can be read in the preview of  The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century.

Time Travel Short Stories, Cont’d

“All You Zombies” by Robert A. Heinlein

A young man explains to a bartender that he was born a girl. He (she) gave birth to a child and there were complications. The doctors noticed he (she) was a hermaphrodite and performed an emergency sex-change operation.

A lot of this story can be read in the preview of  “ All You Zombies—”: Five Classic Stories .

“The Hundred-Light-Year Diary” by Greg Egan

The narrator meets his future wife, Alison, for lunch exactly when he knew he would. His diary told him. Everyone alive is allotted a hundred words a day to send back to themselves.

Most of this story can be read in the preview of Axiomatic .  (Select Kindle first then Preview, 57% in)

“The Dead Past” by Isaac Asimov

Arnold Potterley, a Professor of Ancient History, wants to use the chronoscope—the ability to view a scene from the past—for his research on Carthage. The government maintains strict control over its use, and his request is denied. Frustrated, Potterley embarks on a plan to get around this restriction, which is professionally risky.

Some of this story can be read in the preview of  The Complete Stories, Vol 1 .  (6% in)

“Signal Moon” by Kate Quinn

Working with the Royal Naval Service, Lily Baines intercepts radio communications to enemy vessels for decoding. One night, everything changes when she picks up an impossible message—a plea for help from another time.

Preview of “Signal Moon”

“Journey to the Seed” by Alejo Carpentier

An old man wanders around a demolition site, muttering a string of incomprehensible phrases. The roof has been removed and, by evening, most of the house is down. When the site is deserted, the old man waves his walking stick over a pile of discarded tiles. They fly back and cover the floor. The house continues to rebuild. Inside, Don Marcial lies on his deathbed.

“A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury

In the future, a company offers guided hunting safaris into the past to kill dinosaurs. Extreme care is taken to ensure nothing happens that could alter the present.

Read “A Sound of Thunder” (PDF Pg. 3)

“That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French” by Stephen King

Carol and Bill, married twenty-five years, are on their second honeymoon, driving to their destination. Carol experiences déjà vu; voices and images keep coming to her mind. Their drive comes to an end and she finds herself at an earlier point in their trip.

“The Clock That Went Backward” by Edward Page Mitchell

The narrator recounts the discovery surrounding a clock left to his cousin Harry by his Aunt Gertrude. As young boys they witnessed a strange event. Late one night Aunt Gertrude wound the clock, put her face to the dial, and then kissed and caressed it. The hands were moving backward. She fell to the floor when it stopped.

Read “The Clock That Went Backward” 

“Soldier (Soldier from Tomorrow)” by Harlan Ellison

Qarlo, a soldier, is fighting in the Great War VII. He doesn’t expect to be able to go back. The odds are against it. Qarlo anticipates the Regimenter’s order and gets warped off the battlefield. He’s not sure where he is but his instincts kick in.

“The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” by Alfred Bester

Henry Hassel comes home to find his wife in the arms of another man. He could get his revenge immediately but he has a more intellectual plan. He gets a revolver and builds a time machine. He goes into the past.

“Cosmic Corkscrew” by Michael A. Burstein

The narrator is sent back to 1938 to make a copy of a rejected story by an unnamed writer. Unknown to Dr. Scheihagen, the narrator adjusts his arrival to three days earlier. He wants to make contact with the writer.

“Time’s Arrow” by Arthur C. Clarke

Barton and Davis, geologists, are assisting Professor Fowler with an excavation. The professor receives an invitation to visit a nearby research facility. Barton and Davis are curious to know what goes on there. The professor says he will fill them in, but after his visit he says he’s been asked not to talk about it. Henderson, from the research facility, returns the visit. Something he says starts the geologists speculating about a device that could see into the past.

“The Final Days” by David Langford

Harman and Ferris, presidential candidates, are participating in a televised debate. Ferris is struggling to connect with the audience while Harman relishes the attention. The technician signals Harman that there are fourteen watchers. His confidence increases.

Read “The Final Days”

“Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters” by Alice Sola Kim

When Hwang is in a time he likes he tries to stay awake. Hwang jumps ahead in time when he sleeps. It could only be a few days; it could be years.

Read “Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters”

“Fish Night” by Joe R. Lansdale

Two traveling salesmen, a father and son, get broke down on a desert road. They sit by the car and talk about how hard it is to make a living. The father tells his son about an unusual experience he had on the same road years ago.

Read “Fish Night”

“The Fox and the Forest” by Ray Bradbury

William and Susan Travis have gone to Mexico in 1938. They’re enjoying a local celebration. William assures Susan that they’re safe—they have traveler’s checks to last a lifetime, and he’s confident they won’t be found. Susan notices a conspicuous man in a café looking at them. She thinks he could be a Searcher, but William says he’s nobody.

“A Statue for Father” by Isaac Asimov

The narrator tells the story of his father, a theoretical physicist who researched time travel. He’s celebrated now, but it was a difficult climb. When time travel research fell out of favor, the dean forced him out. He continued the research independently with his son. Eventually, they succeed in holding a window open long enough for the son to reach in. He brings back some dinosaur eggs.

“The Pendulum” by Ray Bradbury

Layeville has been swinging in a massive glass pendulum for a long time. The people call him The Prisoner of Time. It’s his punishment for his crime. He had constructed a time machine and invited thirty of the world’s preeminent scientists to attend the unveiling.

Read  The Pendulum

“Who’s Cribbing?” by Jack Lewis

A writer has his manuscript returned by a publisher. The story he submitted was published years before—he obviously plagiarized it. They warn him against doing this again. The writer has never heard of the author who first wrote the story and claims it’s an original work.

“Who’s Cribbing” is in  Time Machines: The Best Time Travel Stories Ever Written.

I’ll keep adding short stories about time travel and time machines as I find more.

Bon Voyaged

18 Eras In History That Time Travelers Would Visit First

Posted: May 8, 2024 | Last updated: May 8, 2024

Gather ’round, fellow adventurers and aspiring time-travelers, for I have a tale that will warp your mind faster than a DeLorean hitting 88 miles per hour! Hold onto your hats (and your paradoxes), because we’re about to embark on a journey through the space-time continuum! Just be careful, very wrong turn could lead to a wardrobe malfunction at the Renaissance faire or an accidental duel with a medieval knight!

Ancient Egypt

Witness the construction of the pyramids, marvel at the mysteries of the Sphinx, and explore the bustling markets along the Nile River. Just be sure to avoid any encounters with curses or mummies—those things tend to be a bit pesky! And remember, in ancient Egypt, cats were considered sacred, so be prepared to worship our feline overlords.

Classical Greece

Experience the birthplace of democracy, philosophy, and the Olympic games. Join Socrates for a lively debate or challenge Hercules to an arm-wrestling match—just make sure to bring your own olive wreath for the victory celebration! And don’t worry, if you get lost in the labyrinth of ancient Athens, you can always ask a minotaur for directions.

Roman Empire

Explore the grandeur of Rome, witness epic gladiator fights at the Colosseum, and indulge in a feast fit for an emperor. Just be careful not to anger the gods—those lightning bolts can really ruin your toga party! And don’t forget, when in Rome, do as the Romans do…which apparently involves a lot of olive oil and conquering neighboring civilizations.

Medieval Europe

Encounter knights in shining armor, explore majestic castles, and marvel at the intricate beauty of Gothic cathedrals. Just watch out for the bubonic plague—nothing ruins a medieval vacation like a sudden outbreak of Black Death! And keep in mind, if someone challenges you to a jousting match, it’s probably best to politely decline…unless you happen to have a spare suit of armor lying around!

Renaissance Italy

Witness the flourishing of art, science, and culture in cities like Florence and Venice. Rub shoulders with the likes of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, and maybe even snag a selfie with the Mona Lisa. And don’t forget, in Renaissance Italy, fashion is everything—so make sure to bring your fanciest doublet and hose!

Age of Exploration

Sail with Christopher Columbus or Ferdinand Magellan to discover new lands and chart unexplored territories. Just be prepared for a long journey—those ships aren’t exactly known for their luxury accommodations! And remember, when encountering foreign people, diplomacy is key…but it never hurts to have a few shiny trinkets to trade!

Elizabethan England

Experience the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and immerse yourself in the works of Shakespeare. Attend a royal banquet, try your hand at archery, and maybe even catch a glimpse of a mischievous fairy or two! And don’t forget, in Elizabethan England, gossip spreads faster than the plague—so watch what you say, or you might end up in the Tower of London!

French Revolution

Witness the overthrow of the monarchy and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. Join the revolutionaries on the streets of Paris, but watch out for flying guillotines—those things tend to be a bit messy! Just keep in mind, in revolutionary France, liberty, equality, and fraternity aren’t just words—they’re the keys to a successful uprising!

Victorian Era

Experience the Industrial Revolution, Queen Victoria’s reign, and the peak of British imperialism. Marvel at the wonders of steam power as you take a stroll through London’s foggy streets. And remember, in Victorian England, proper etiquette is everything—so mind your manners, or you might find yourself without a tea invitation! How bizarre.

Step into the neon-colored world of the 1980s, where big hair, leg warmers, and cassette tapes reigned supreme. Dance the night away at an iconic disco club, challenge your friends to a game of Pac-Man, and maybe even catch a glimpse of a DeLorean zipping through time! And remember, in the ’80s, fashion was all about excess—so don’t be afraid to rock those shoulder pads and acid wash jeans like there’s no tomorrow!

American Wild West

Live the adventures of cowboys, outlaws, and pioneers in the American frontier. Ride horses across the open plains, try your luck at a game of poker, and maybe even pan for gold in a rushing river! Just don’t forget, in the Wild West, it’s every person for themselves—so keep your wits about you, or you might end up on the wrong end of a showdown at high noon!

Belle Époque

Experience the elegance and cultural innovations of Europe before World War I. Attend glamorous soirées, witness the birth of the modern automobile, and maybe even meet a dashing count or two! And keep in mind, in the Belle Époque, beauty is paramount—so don’t forget to powder your wig and polish your monocle!

Roaring Twenties

Witness the Jazz Age, prohibition, and the rise of flapper culture in the United States. Dance the Charleston, live lavishly, and maybe even rub elbows with the likes of Al Capone! And remember, in the Roaring Twenties, anything goes—so throw caution to the wind and embrace the spirit of rebellion!

Ancient China

Explore the dynasties, philosophy, and technological advancements of China. Walk the Great Wall, study with Confucius, and maybe even discover the secret to immortality (spoiler alert: it involves a lot of herbal tea)! And don’t forget, in ancient China, harmony is key—so always strive for balance, whether you’re practicing martial arts or negotiating trade deals!

The Early 2000s

Enter the dawn of the new millennium, where flip phones, frosted tips, and Y2K paranoia reigned supreme. Groove to the beats of boy bands and pop princesses, binge-watch DVDs of your favorite TV shows, and maybe even try your hand at creating your own Myspace profile (just don’t forget to add plenty of glitter graphics)! Just keep in mind, in the early 2000s, the internet was still a wild frontier—so be sure to watch out for any prank calls!

Experience the isolationist period of Japan, samurai culture, and traditional arts. Attend a tea ceremony, practice the way of the sword, and maybe even catch a glimpse of a ninja in the shadows! And remember, in Edo Japan, honor is everything—so always act with integrity, whether you’re serving your lord or challenging a rival to a duel!

Aztec Empire

Explore the rich culture and mysterious rituals of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Witness awe-inspiring pyramids, participate in colorful festivals, and maybe even find the lost city of gold! And don’t forget, in the Aztec Empire, honor is everything—so always show respect to the gods and your fellow warriors, whether you’re conquering new lands or building a floating garden!

Futuristic Utopia

Travel to a speculative future where technology has solved humanity’s problems and society thrives in harmony. Ride hoverboards through gleaming cities, dine on cuisine synthesized from pure energy, and maybe even attend a concert performed by sentient robots! And remember, in this futuristic utopia, the possibilities are endless—so always dream big and never stop striving for a better tomorrow!

As our journey through time draws to a close, we are left with a tapestry woven with threads of adventure, wisdom, and wonder. From the majestic heights of ancient empires to the innovation of future utopias, each era has offered insights into the human condition and the evolution of society. Though our time-traveling adventure may end here, the echoes of history continue to reverberate, reminding us of the rich tapestry of experiences that shape our world.

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