Imagine going to the past in a time machine but then coming back just to find out that everything has changed. You’ve all watched or read about time traveling in sci-fi books or movies. However, there are many dangers that come with traveling through time.
In A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, there is a Time Safari where you can go back in time to hunt animals that are extinct in the present day. They do things in a certain way to prevent a different timeline such as having a floating path to walk on and only shooting animals that will be dead in the near future. However, on one of these trips to hunt a T-rex, one of them gets scared and runs off the path. When they get back to their time, they realize that some things have changed because the person that got scared stepped on a butterfly when he ran off the path.
The TV show called The Flash also shows the dangers of time traveling. The main character has superpowers that allow him to go so fast he can travel through time. His mother had died when he was young so he went back in time to save her. However, this made him lose many things he had in the original timeline. He went back in time again to stop the previous him from saving his mom in an attempt to fix the timeline. However, even though many things went back to normal, the original timeline wasn’t restored completely.
An analogy that was made in The Flash was a glass cup breaking. You can try to put the piece back to fix it but it’s impossible to make it into what it was before. This is what happens when you try to fix the new timeline into the original one. The hunter who wanted to fix what he had done in A Sound of Thunder didn’t even get the chance to try as they knew he couldn’t make things to what they were before.
All of the time traveling works should caution all of us about the dangers of messing up your timeline. With advancing technology, it should be possible to travel through time in the far future. If you ever get to travel to the past, be aware of the catastrophic effects you may cause.