In the story A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, a group of hunters travel back in time to hunt dinosaurs, but unconsciously changed the future when one of them stepped on a butterfly. This highlights one of the themes of this story, that time travel can have immeasurable consequences. I think that time travel couldn’t ever be invented, and even if it could, it shouldn’t.
There is a great likelihood that time travel could not be invented, because the very concept of time is human-made. The units used to measure time(seconds, minutes, hours, months, years, etc) are all man-made, based upon certain needs, like a day is based on how long it takes for the Earth to rotate once. Since the concept of time is human-made, it would be impossible to travel through time because time as a thing doesn’t exist. Time is, by physics, what a clock reads. It is not a tape that can be rewinded and played again.
Putting aside if time travel can even be invented, it should not be, because as the story described, there is the butterfly effect, in which if one small thing is changed, the future might be altered beyond comprehension. Something similar to this is in the food chain, when one primary consumer consumes a small amount of toxin, that toxin will be magnified tenfold in secondary consumers, because they consume a significant amount of the primary consumers, and the toxin would be magnified hundredfold on tertiary consumers, since they consume a significant amount of secondary consumers. This same situation can be applied to time, where small changes are magnified over time, and it is impossible to control. If time travel is made available, even to a small amount of privileged people, they would be tempted to change the past, and that could be catastrophic.
Right now, we can only hope that time travel won’t exist in the future. Time is not something to be dealt with lightly, and we should be wary of the effects of our actions.
