From Marty McFly to the Morlocks

Lately I've been thinking a lot about time-travel. Why, I don't know. But the idea has been following me around like a belligerent meter-maid. Why, I asked myself, has no one come back from the future, either to conquer the world or at least bet a sawbuck on the Red Sox. Turns out there are some very reasonable, uh, reasons, that we've never seen any physical evidence of time-travel. And there are some very simple axioms, which are very hard to dipsute, that lay the groundwork for proving time-travel possible. All of which is very encouraging to someone like me, who's always stuck in the past or daydreaming about the future, while this month's bills get lost in the pile of crosswords & comic books.

So...it turns out that in theory, you could actually go back in time & inadvertently cause the death of one of your direct ancestors & still not cease to exist. According to some English dude on the internet, one of the tenets of quantum, uh, physics...well, quantum something or other, is that for every decision made in the universe, a parallel universe picks up to account for each possible result. It's like, based on the principle of what an electron would do if faced with the option of becoming a proton or a neutron. How they prove that I don't know. Oh wait...the fact that they CAN'T prove what the electron would become is what makes the axiom feasable. You still follow me? I hope not 'cause I got lost myself somewhere around "So..."

Yeah so anyways, that whole last paragraph was a total waste of your time & mine. You can't go back in time, people! How can you go back to a time before time-travel was possible. It just doesn't work! That would be like someone trying to light their cigarette with a Zippo before Zippos were invented. It just ain't possible. At least, not according to the poindexters who hatched the whole concept of quantum-mechanics. Quantum-mechanics! That's what I was trying to think of. At least that's what I think I was trying to think of. And THAT'S why we haven't had any visitors in tin-foil suits. Yeah...I know what you're thinking. For a while, I too foolishly entertained the notion that UFO's were actually time-machines. That was before I came to the sound conclusion that if the UFO's were from the future, they would have at LEAST taken the spread on the Eagles/Patriots. The fact that the line stayed consistently at Pats +3 is proof that no otherworldly wagers were placed. If a visitor from the year 3035 had bothered to come back to this dismal era, they wouldn't have bet a measly grand or two. It would have been a bet big enough to put the trime-travelling Maverick in the futuristic cat-birdseed. And a bet of that magnitude would have wreaked havoc on the over/under. Numbers don't lie, people.