What if the past didn't leave?
Exploring the possibility that time travel isn't a trip in the way we perceive it to be.
Note: I went back and forth on whether I wanted to share this one, but with NC currently experiencing a winter storm that’s keeping me stuck inside and bored, I figured it was a good day to sit down and put this thought into hopefully a coherent structure for others to enjoy.
A couple of weeks ago I was out on a long run in Umstead State Park when that question sort of popped into my head. Every now and then my mind wanders to weird things like this, where it makes me think a bit more in the abstract than maybe the usual reflections on life and where I’m headed or where I’ve been.
I stopped for a second and put the song I was listening to on repeat. It’s a little tactic I use when a deeper thought or idea hits me mid-run. The music becomes more of background noise, almost like white noise, and it lets my mind drift somewhere else. My legs are still moving, but my mind is sort of gone. Running becomes the container and the thought becomes the thing I’m actually doing. I know, that all probably sounds strange…
And so the thought of… What if time travel isn’t about people from the present going into the past, but about people from the past already being part of the future really got me thinking.
(I know how that sounds. But stick with me.)
We assume time travel means departure and return. Someone leaves the “now,” visits the “then,” maybe messes something up, then races back to fix it. It’s always framed as a round trip from a fixed address. But physics…and I should be clear I’m not an expert in this but have spent a fair bit of time researching these sort of things…doesn’t actually support that framing. Einstein showed us that space and time aren’t separate things. They’re woven together into spacetime. And what counts as “now” depends entirely on where you’re standing and how fast you’re moving. Two people can genuinely disagree on whether something has already happened or hasn’t yet.
There’s no universal clock. No shared “present moment” ticking forward for everyone.
Some physicists seem to take this further. They call it the block universe theory which states that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously, like every frame of a movie already being laid out on a reel. We experience time as motion through it, but the whole structure is just, well, there. Already complete.
If that’s true, then “someone from the past” isn’t really from anywhere. They’re just located at a different point in the block. And in some sense, they’re already embedded in what we’d call the future too. Not traveling. Just.….connected across something we don’t have good language for yet.
I’ve thought about this more since that run. Mostly at night.
When we moved to Bridgeton, I picked up a habit of stargazing. Our little town has almost no light pollution and I like to stand in the backyard after Dakota and Felicia are asleep, look up, and just observe the sky full of stars. The kind of big sky that makes you feel small in the best way. Living in big cities never gave me this type of mystery to observe.
And it’s across these last couple of years that I’ve learned something about looking at stars, which I think links back to this thought. You’re not seeing stars as they are. You’re seeing them as they were. The light hitting your eyes left those stars millions of years ago. Nearly all of it started traveling before humans even existed on this planet. When you look up, you’re literally looking at the past.
And yet, there it is. Right now. In the present tense. The past arriving in real time, mixing with your current moment like it was always supposed to. It’s a strange realization that the light hitting your eyes isn't a memory but more of a physical arrival. It’s the mechanics of the universe delivering the past directly to your doorstep.
It makes me wonder how much of reality works this way…time folded and layered in ways we’re just not wired to perceive or understand. Even our own bodies are a map of this. We think of ourselves as new, but we are made of ancient carbon and recycled stardust. We are walking museums of the past, functioning in the present, planning for a future that…if the block universe is right…is already waiting for us to arrive.
Maybe this reframe has stayed with me because it removes the violence of time travel. The idea that you’re punching a hole in reality to go somewhere you don’t belong. Instead, it suggests the connections were always there. The loop was built into the architecture of consciousness. You’re not breaking anything. You’re just finally seeing what was already true to begin with.
It also makes me think about memory differently. And intuition. And those moments where something feels familiar before it happens…not in a mystical sort of way, but in a way that makes you wonder if consciousness is just a narrow flashlight moving through a structure that doesn’t care about our preferred direction.
What if memory and foresight are both just...a signal bleeding across something larger than we can perceive?
I finished that run without any answers. I’ve stood in my backyard a dozen nights since, still without them. Not having the answers doesn’t change how I live tomorrow. I’ll still make my morning coffee, do a little Me Time, show up for the work in front of me, try to stay present. But being present feels different when you consider that the present might not be the only place you are.
But okay…..that was a bit more than I thought I'd get into with this one. I didn't set out to rewrite the laws of physics! Just figured it was something worth writing down and sharing out with a few more people.
I’m learning sometimes that's all it needs to be.