2.5. The Physics of Cyberspace: the Possibility of Time-Travelling?

A tormenting thought: as of a certain point, history was no longer real . Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality; everything happening since then was supposedly not true, but we supposedly didn't notice. - Elias Canetti

Originality is just a lack of reading. - Salvador Dali

The physical laws ruling in cyberspace and other virtual environments are very different from the ones we become used to in actual reality: "'Movements' in virtual reality are not quite the same as movements in 'old reality': for example, one can fly or go through walls since the material constraints of earth need not apply." (Poster 1995: 85) There are much more possibilities how to move and behave in virtual environments. But just flying or going through walls is by far not the limit. As these can also be reached in actual reality by aircrafts or sledgehammers, they seem to be boring in comparison to another age old dream of humankind: the dream to travel through time.

For a long time theoretic physics wanted to make the people believe that time-travelling is impossible due to a paradox which occurs when you travel to the past: you could change the course of history if you would travel to the past and could act there. Nowadays theoretic physicist including Stephen Hawking agree that time-travel is not as impossible as always thought. What has happened? Once again it has to do with physics's concept of reality. The way how time-space-continuum is described changed. See for this once again the basics of a fivedimensional worldview by Maarten Dillinger . When time is nothing else than a fourth dimension, scaled in meters in theory you can travel there, but so far it is beyond the possibility of human imagination. It was similar with learning to fly or travelling around the world. To be able to discover America somebody had to get rid of the idea that the earth is a disc and to realise the law of gravity was the first step to change our reality principle to fulfill the dream of humans flying. Today along with the exploration of Cyberia and a new paradigm-shift: every reality is a virtual reality, the dream to be able to travel through time becomes in the reach of human.

The creation of the media-sphere, cyberspace, Cyberia and VR becomes often described as fourth dimension or parallel universe, as we have seen throughout this text. And in fact these virtual spaces seem to form the parallel universes necessary to avoid the time-travel paradox.

It is no wonder that philosophy and mediatheory including theorists like Jean Baudrillard, Elias Canetti, Francis Fukuyama and Paul Virilio speak so often of 'the end of history', . The end of history does not mean that there is no history or time anymore, quite the opposite. Just like postmodernism replaced the 'grand narrative' through many 'small narratives', the one linear history becomes replaced by many small, parallel histories. With the end of the Gutenberg-galaxy and the shift to hypertextuality, time has lost its linearity, history its uniqueness. As already seen along Virilio's discussion of real-time, one-time and now-time, but also at the example of McLuhan's 'loss of linearity', this becomes a predominant notion in mediatheory. It is quite astonishing however, that none of these theories mentions the possibility of time-travelling which become imaginable by this changed perception of time, although there are allusions in nearly every corner of the field of mediatheory:

Rob Shields speaks of "Time is represented as motion-through and as speed which replaces temporality with its representation." (WWW: Cyberpunk Cinderella) Mike Featherstone speaks of "a future which 'has already happened.'" (Featherstone; Burrows 1995: 2) McLuhan: 'abolishing both space and time time as far as our planet is concerned' and 'all possible futures are contained in the present.' If you go through the text here again you will find endless more allusions to it by Rushkoff and especially Virilio: 'For the first time, history is going to unfold within a one-time-system: global time'. But nowhere in these theories the word timetravelling is mentioned.

To think of media as a sort of time-machine is an old idea of mine and for a long time I thought 'originality is just a lack of reading' (Salvador Dali) but as I am just looking for papers about time-travel I only find discussions about wormholes and speeds beyond lightspeed or obscure reports about 'hyperdimensional resonator' a la 'Back to the future'. Not many people seem to realise that you do not need to fly through a worm whole to be able to travel through time, but the Next Generation of the Starship Enterprise has its time-travel-device already aboard: the Holodeck: A device to simulate space and time. It does not make sense anymore to think of time and space in a conventional way, because the linearity of time becomes abolished in an electronic age. Everything is becoming replayable, reproducible, simulatable. History comes to an end replaced by many histories and through these histories you can travel like you can travel through space today. Cyberspace and virtual reality in fact behaves like a time-machine. Want to relive your early youth? Get into a datasuit and replay and relive the VR-records of your fifth's birthday. Want to travel to the future? Hook up to cyberspace, go to a MUD (Multi User Dimension), pick up an avatar (virtual body) and live in a space-station of the 21st century.

Of course VR is far from being a perfect time-machine so far, where you can go to any time in any reality-degree you like, but we also speak of 'we are able' to fly, when we can access just different airports on this planet with noisemaking clumsy aircrafts, or we are able to 'walk on the moon', when just one person did it so far or we are even saying that mankind is able to 'fly to mars', when all we do is sending up a probe, which sends back the virtual realities of Mars. In the same way we can travel to the past, by watching old movies or analysing the hyperreality of geological data and we can act there if we add the interactivity of VR.

(QuicktimeVR;Wear red-green glasses and move around with your mouse)

So let me formulate my tormenting thought: as from a certain point in history, history was no longer real , instead there were the virtual realities of many histories. Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality and mankind floated around in a time-space-continuum; everything happening since then was supposedly not true and we were able to travel through time, but we supposedly didn't notice.