Tom Thomas is a writer with a career spanning forty years in publishing, technical writing, public relations, and popular fiction writing.
“My business now is to weave circumstance, happenstance, intention, and mischance into stories.”

The Human Condition:

Low-Budget Time Travel – September 13, 2026

Science Fiction—including a few books of my own¹—has made the fantasy of time travel an almost-about-to-happen reality for many people. And there are physical theories about how, if you bend spacetime in just the right way, it can be realized.

Sorry. Even though I write about time travel as science fiction—or rather, science fantasy—I still don’t believe in it. We might make machines that can take us, at the great expenditure of time and energy, through the various dimensions of space. But no machine can take us forward or backward through the sequence of past choices and actions, of future desires and probabilities, that represents movement through time.²

But come to think of it, the very clever apes who became Homo sapiens found a way around that without even recognizing the physical problem.

We travel back in time every day. We remember personal experiences. Sometimes these are called forth effortlessly by a smell, a snatch of song, or finding an old photograph or memorabilia in a drawer. Others can be called up intentionally apropos of a certain day or time. For people and events who lived before us, we have the stories of our parents and grandparents. And for the last 5,000 years or so, we have had systems of writing—and before that, oral poetry like that of Homer—which capture the personal experiences of others like us. The most gifted among those writers and poets can make the experience come alive in your mind with just the right words and phrases, similes and metaphors, so that hearing the poem or reading the words creates lasting images you can recall as if they were your own memories.

But can we move forward in time as well? Prediction is harder, of course. Many of us have dabbled in devices like the Tarot cards and Ouija Board. The Tarot is a system of knowledge going back to the Gypsies or Roma with origins in northwestern India that can be used for divination. They make interesting reading as an alternate human “bible” but are not notably successful at predicting the future.³ And the Ouija Board is a more modern invention, a 19th-century parlor game based on the then-current enthusiasm for spiritualism. It, too, is remarkably unreliable.

Everyone wants to predict the future. People in business pay consultants huge sums to create plans that, if executed flawlessly, are supposed to lead to a known result. As the old Cockney barkers would say, “You pays your money and you takes your choice.” But really, it’s still “chance.” In modern terms, scientists and computers will calculate the odds of every future event from weather to earthquakes to your living to be 100. But all are based on extrapolation of trends from previously observed events. That is, looking back to look forward. And, of course, the internet has now enabled betting sites where you can put your money on the outcome of sports competitions and virtually any other proposition you can frame.

On a personal level, and going back to simple, everyday cogitation, we can visit the future briefly by mentally examining the likely outcome of our plans and actions. You do this—or you should—with almost every step you can imagine taking. If you pause one more minute in deciding what to wear, will you miss the bus? If you add vanilla extract to this recipe, will it improve the flavor? If you take another two aspirin right now, will the pain finally go away? Like the consultant and the scientist, you are using your knowledge of past actions and their results to predict the future. Adults can do this from experience. Bright children learn to do this eventually.

We also make plans for the day, for the week, for the next vacation that may be more or less detailed than just waking up and seeing what happens. Those plans seldom include random events like a fall that breaks a limb, a car accident that puts you in the hospital, or a meteor strike that wipes out the city. We plan for what we can reasonably expect and leave the rest either in the hands of God—however we conceive Him or Her to be—or in the outside ranges of probability.

Visiting the past and anticipating the future are a form of low-budget time travel, no machine required. They are not 100% proven safe nor are results guaranteed. But anyone can do it. Bon voyage!

1. See my trilogy starting with The Children of Possibility.

2. Einstein’s general relativity might speed up or slow down the subjective passage of time between observers in different frames of reference based on speed of travel and the effects of local gravity. This is not the same thing as leaping ahead to the world of 2100 AD or going back to visit with your grandfather as a young man.

3. Except as cues to the Tarot reader’s own internal sense of what may lie ahead or would be an appropriate answer to the question at hand.

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