Back to the Future

The Back to the Future trilogy of movies featured a modified DeLorean vehicle that was capable of time travel once it hit the speed of eighty eight miles per hour. The vehicle is powered by plutonium but later, when Marty McFly doesn’t bring spare plutonium with him when he time travels, the DeLorean is powered by a lightning bold containing 1.21 Gigawatts of power.

Currently, we all know that time travel doesn’t exist, but a few questions about time travel and the science behind “Back to the Future” movies still persist. Firstly, is it possible to generate 1.21 Gigawatts of power? Also, is time travel even possible, and if it were, what would happen to our planet?

Weather it is possible to generate upwards of 1.21 Gigawatts of power from a lightning bolt is currently uncertain. Through research, I have found that some people agree that it is, while some others say that it is not.  For analysis purposes, let us assume that a lightning bolt can produce at least 1.21 Gigawatts. If we set up a test mimicking exactly how the bolt of lightning got to the DeLorean in the movie, will it be possible that our vehicle will receive 1.21 Gigawatts of power? The full effect of the lightning bolt is only sustained upon impact. In the movie, the bolt of lightning hits the clock tower and then travels down a bunch of cable before coming in contact with the DeLorean. The entire process takes about four seconds in the movie. It is unclear to me exactly how much the power of the lightning bolt would dissipate over this amount of time, but it would be safe to say that a bolt of lightning must be able to provide well over 1.21 Gigawatts of power if it were to propel Marty McFly back to the future. Even though it may be impossible for a bolt of lightning to produce 1.21 Gigawatts, the Hoover dam can create much more energy than what is needed for the DeLorean to travel in time. The Hoover dam can produce 48 Gigawatt hours of energy per day. If we could make a machine capable of time traveling that required 1.21 Gigawatts of power, and we found a way to store up at least that much from the Hoover dam, we could potentially time travel.

So is time travel possible? Well, some physicists say it is. In fact, time travel into the future is happening all the time. Einstein’s theory of relativity can help explain this. “The faster an object moves relative to another object, the slower it experiences time. “ For instance, GPS satellites orbit the earth at a speed of 14 000 kilometers per hour. Since they travel so quickly, the clocks of GPS satellites move ahead seven microseconds of Earths clocks every day. This practically means that these satellites are “time traveling” at a rate of seven microseconds every day.

This news isn’t quite the same for time travel to the past. Quantum mechanical experiments that have been carried out showed that “time lines remain self-consistent.” These experiments were "the moral equivalent of sending a photon a few billionths of a second backwards in time and having it try to kill its former self.” Unfortunately, the photons could never kill themselves; they couldn’t interfere with their former selves. If this is true, it means that if you were to go back in time, you would not be able to change the past. Time travel to the past has stumped scientists ever since it was proposed as an idea, and we have made pretty much no progress towards being able to do so. It seems like time travel to the past is highly improbable.

Even if time travel to the past was possible and we could change our previous actions, what would happen to this world? In Back to the Future, Marty’s mom in the 50’s falls in love with him, and doesn’t meet her actual husband. This means that Marty doesn’t exist, and he starts to disappear. Imagine if this were to happen in real life, all it took was the mistake of one time traveller to make you disappear. If anyone could just travel to the past, it could cause major problems for this world. Imagine every time something goes wrong, someone hops in a time machine and decides to go back in time to fix the issue. If this was to happen, and the time traveller was to interfere with their former self, it could cause a large issue. If someone were to go into the past and interfere with your parents meeting each other, you would disappear and never know why. Instead of straight up killing people, murderers could use this strategy to make it harder for the detectives to figure out who the killer is. Hence, I think travel into the past is a really bad idea. I don’t want to suddenly disappear one day, and never know why.