A BRIEF MOMENT IN THE CATBIRD SEAT

Time Travel is only "impossible" if Space-Time is LINEAR... That is, if the past necessarily comes BEFORE the present, and the present necessarily comes BEFORE the future.

That's a rather primitive view of Space-Time, if you know anything about Einsteinian Physics.

One of the popularly-forgotten points that Albert Einstein made about Space-Time is that ALL Time and ALL Space occur SIMULTANEOUSLY. That is to say, the Big Bang (if it occurred) happens at the SAME TIME the Solar System was formed, which happens at the SAME TIME Homo sapiens evolved, which happens at the SAME TIME we first set foot on the Moon, and so on and so forth.

In other words, the entire Universe, from beginning to end, is but ONE and the SAME MOMENT in Space Time. According to Einstein.

How do you wrap your mind around that?

Well, actually, we CAN wrap our minds around that concept fairly easily. Consider the lowly Compact Disc.

Chances are, there's a Compact Disc within your reach at this very moment. Pick it up, turn it over in your hands, scrutinize it.

What are you looking at?

You're looking at a complete Universe, with a beginning and an end, containing as much information as can be currently crammed into a Compact Disc. You're looking at the beginning and end of that Universe simultaneously, and everything that occurs in between.

 At a glance.

You're looking at a Universe from the perspective of God. You're looking at a Universe from the perspective of the 11th Dimension.

From your 11th Dimension perspective, every song on the CD occurs simultaneously. Every spoken word on that CD occurs concurrent with all the others. All the information on that disc is hanging static in Time and Space...

That CD Universe is WAITING for you to apply your micro-laser technology to READ IT in a linear fashion that makes sense to you.

Human consciousness is the intersection of the micro-laser and the CD surface, okay? So we four-dimensional Humans always perceive the Space-Time continuum as moving along in a linear fashion.

But, from the perspective of the 11th Dimension, we can stop, jump forward or backwards in Space-Time, select specific points to inspect, listen to the same song repeatedly, or run the entire CD Universe in an endless playback loop.

The same thing applies to the macro-Universe, the infinitude that surrounds us. Our meager Human consciousness perceives the Space-Time continuum moving along, moving past us, inexorably from the past into the future, one footstep falling after the other.

Ultimately, however, there's nothing to prevent us from skipping around in the Space-Time continuum, go visiting any point in Time that we wish, because it's all happening SIMULTANEOUSLY, and it's all contained in this gigantic CD we call the Universe.

The problem, just as with the CD in your hands, is that you can't distinguish precisely WHERE one song ends and another begins unless you plug in the CD and allow the micro-laser (consciousness) to track the selections. Whereupon, you're right back to your linear perception of Space-Time.