The Time Salon

When all other psychological, social and political theories fail to explain why humans refuse to be accountable for actions they do in society or blatantly refuse to learn from such unmistakable lessons of history, I sometimes am given to my quirky fancy that there is some kind of Time Salon founded by an Extraordinarily Evasive League of Individuals, the ultimate Salon Du Temps where people check in, travel at rates approaching the speed of light and come back to Earth. That would explain why they would have absolutely no clue what had transpired, or are able to escape responsibility for an act they have committed before they engaged in time travel. And for those who are given to vanity as well, these time travel fugitives would have a bonus service done to them: they would be relatively younger than they would have been had they not done time travel. Imagine, not only would they be exculpated from their actions, they would also look good.

So if you were a client, coming into the Time Salon, you will be greeted by a very intelligent computer that I will name "Digit." Digit will ask you questions that could assign how much of the future you want to skip, depending on the responsibility you want to avoid as well as assign you your own personal dot in the "unwillingness index," a measure of one’s resistance to endure the natural milestones generally expected in a regular lifetime. It will also give you your own personal identification number that reveals your squeamishness to bear the physical signs of aging. But there will be a waiver for you to sign where you are made to understand that the cost of travel, aside from the financial, will also cost you the forgone opportunity to participate in the lives of family and friends and others with whom you are sharing this lifetime. The computer will then factor this all in to come up with the rate at how close to the speed of light you want to travel. This is the ultimate in Salon service – the science equivalent of hair-bonding!

Digit does not take up a lot of time in coming up with the final speed suited to your needs but you are given time in a Zen garden to sit and meditate the nature of time and space. Holographic Einstein appears in a gray and black Zen robe sitting right across your cushion. He seems ageless like you can’t tell whether he is 17 or 70. He chants in sutra fashion these words: "The faster an object travels, the slower time passes for that object as measured by a stationary observer so that one’s person’s past could theoretically be another’s future." You answer back: "Cool." (What else can you say to Einstein anyway?) Then he continues, barely looking at the sutra book this time: "No one really rests. All else on Earth travels 107,000 km/hr or 67,000 miles/hr around the Sun. That is why I called it relative motion." At this point, you ask Holographic Einstein what theoretically are the settings required for him to come back now in 2003 and be only 17 years old. He answers you back: "If in the year I was born, 1879, I boarded a spaceship that traveled at 99 percent speed of light and I returned to Earth now, I would only be 17 years old." But you, of course, realize that this Salon you are in now would not have been possible had not Einstein stayed on Earth and with his thought-experiment laid out for us the notion of space-time drastically different from that of Newton’s as well as the notion of stupendous amount of energy created by splitting atoms. But Einstein tells you: "Well, perhaps somebody else would have thought it up if not me." But you both know he did and in fact, for the record, he uttered, "Woe is me" when the atomic bomb was dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You feel woozy, touched by the shame and irony that this man who thought up the theoretical possibility of time travel is now in holographic form, trapped in the same room with you as you prepare to leave the remainder of the lifetime you were born in by time travel. You cannot explain it. You decide not to take the trip. You leave by the backdoor. You face the music.

This Salon is, of course, carved out of my own imagination, knowing that in theory, time travel to the future is possible. But the probability of time travel, more so in the form of a Salon, is even less so even with the latest cutting-edge technology. According to an Einstein exhibit that just ended at the Museum of Natural History in New York City, the most advanced technology is only wired to travel at .1 percent the speed of light. At this rate, it cannot slow time significantly. The fastest a spaceship has traveled so far is at .004 percent the speed of light. So to those who always say they are tired of this planet, it may be good to remind yourselves that a trip to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, with existing technology will take 80,000 years.

So unless the Time Salon exists and Digit does the necessary computations, there is yet no physical means by which humans could really cheat time and evade responsibility for their actions without others making sure they are held accountable. But then again, I guess it is not really time these humans are trying to cheat.