Time travels allows one to go back in time and meet their parents as children, one could see George Washington, or even have a conversation with some cavemen. All of these occurrences seem wonderful until one looks at the travel restrictions. The short story A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, as long with the movie Back to the Future depicts the true dangers of time travel. It is about a hunter who wants to go back in time to hunt a dinosaur. When he returns from his trip, he realizes that he has killed a butterfly. This minor mistake caused major changes to the world he knows. Time travel is dangerous because it can cause terrifying chain reactions and create alternate timelines.
One danger of time travel is the cause of chain reactions and impossible outcomes. When the Eckel, the hunter, comes back into modern day, Everything from the English language to a presidential election has been altered, just because of a single tiny butterfly. This is caused due to the butterfly effect, or the domino effect. These ideologies mean if something is changed, it can slowly lead up to a more significant change. In the story, the tour guide also explains this chain reaction effect. He states how killing a single mouse can eliminate all of its millions of its offspring reproduced after the sixty million years. Each lost mouse also possibly contributes to a starving fox, which in turn leads to a starving lion. When the cavemen step foot on the world, the lion that they once hunted for food might have not existed, which causes him, or her, and all their offspring, including humans, to have never existed. This theory highlights how even changing a relatively microscopic event in the past can lead up to catastrophic events. These changes can also lead to an impossible outcome in time. One of the time travel paradoxes that still continues to boggle the human mind is the Grandfather Paradox. Suppose that someone goes back into time to kill their grandfather, for whatever idiotic nonsense reason. This means that their grandfather would have never met their grandmother, which means that the person’s parents were never born. The conclusion is that the person never exists. If the person never existed, then how did he kill the grandfather? This is just one of the many impossible outcomes of time travel. Traveling into the past is extremely dangerous and causes what some people call “a rip in the universe.”
Another danger of time travel is the consequence of creating another timeline, or also known as entering an alternative universe. Eckel returns from his trip, the world around him has changed in many ways, but Eckel is the only person to notice these changes because everyone else belongs inside this alternative timeline. This meant that Eckel is the only living being on the entire planet who belongs in another timeline. Creating alternative timelines is dangerous because there is no return. Trying to redo the changes seems promising at first, but one has to meet themselves in order to perform the change, which will obviously create even more alternative timelines. In the movie “Back to the Future,” a character introduces an alternative timeline by bringing a sports book displaying the outcomes of all the games. from the future into the present day. This caused someone to become extremely rich by winning all the bets, and that person was the new husband of the time traveler’s mom. In the movie, the characters simply redid their changes, but this is obviously impossible in real life. When someone from an alternative timeline enters another timeline, even interacting with anybody is dangerous. This is because before the person came back into modern day, their alternative self was acting normally inside their alternative timeline, but when they return, they will be missing the knowledge of the alternative individual, but posses information from the original timeline. Time travel is an extremely complicated and dangerous step to take.
In conclusion, humans should never time travel unless mankind somehow invents something capable of preventing changes. This is because making even the smallest change cause a catastrophic chain reaction or an impossible outcome. Additionally, time travel causes new alternative timelines to be created. Stephen Hawking once said, “If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?” This famous quote might just simply prove that time travel is impossible, or it shows that humans have already time traveled, but they have not interacted with anything.