It would be nice if a delightful wormhole existed nearby. We could all travel through it to go visit different points of time on holiday. It would be grand fun. However, there is no such thing. Thus, that method of time travel, if really possible, is just a theory on the minds of some. Time travel can be seen as different things when one gets right down to it.
Take an ordinary healthy adult person and pause their body from aging. Do it by freezing them, by stasis, or by injecting them with a chemical. The details on this are not important. Just make sure they are stuck. Make sure the world, and time, moves forward without them.
Now, here’s the tricky part. After the world, and time, has aged a bit, you wake the person. You let the alarm go off blaring. You press play. You unstick them, unfreeze them, or inject them with a ‘go’ chemical. Again, the details are not important.
Time is relative. The unstuck person feels like he has traveled in time. Who are we to argue?
For thousands of years, people attempted to write down history, even attempted to make it interesting by engaging in dramatic and exciting story-telling, but to no avail. Person after person, civilization after civilization just kept making the same mistakes. They kept repeating the same kind of suffering over and over. Growth was limited.
The planet was dying. Something had to be done, so many people volunteered to travel to the future, to be living breathing interactive historians. Why read about a war when you could talk to someone who has seen it? At least, that was the justification for the first wave of time sleepers. Out of the thousands of volunteers, only thirty-two were chosen. An additional forty-eight were chosen to be their care-takers. Among them were pilots, doctors, engineers, scientists, botanists, anything one might need to survive in outer space on a specialty designed space craft that was going to travel away from Earth for one hundred fifty years before coming back. Several generations of the care-takers would have to keep things up and running and to keep the time sleepers stable. That meant generations of families. Over time, it also meant a new religion. (more…)