Time travel is not, and may never be, possible. However, a committee at the prestigious Flagstaff Institute of Theoretical Physics has released a new report detailing just how stupidly dangerous travel to the past or future may be. The report is of special concern to our growing corps of chrononauts.
“If you go back in time,” stated Dr. Steven Hawkins at a press conference held in the Luau Room of the Particle Physics Research Institute and Brothel “you may affect causality in numerous ways; say by killing your parents before they screw you into existence, or rolling your ATV over the sherwlike creatures which gave rise to all modern-day mammals.”
However, Dr. Hawkins warns against an even greater threat. “The real danger isn’t from paradoxes. It’s from disease.”
The group warned that the past is rife with all manner of pestilence, disease, and infections including, but not limited to, every disease ever. The FITP committee hypothesizes that a time traveler venturing, for instance, to 25 AD to prevent the Crucifixion would perhaps succumb to amoebic dysentery within two days before he could prevent the salvation of mankind.
“It wouldn’t be a pretty death either,” stated Hawkins. “Even the 19th and early 20th Centuries aren’t safe. We advise not venturing back more than a couple of decades if time travel is ever invented. Which it won’t be, because it’s not possible.”
According to a high-level official at NACTA, the National American Chronambulatory Travel Administration, the report is of grave concern to the nation’s fourth largest department. Both the Armstrong Administration and NACTA refused to comment for this article.
So, while it may be interesting to see what Napoleon could have done with machine guns and a logistics planning computer, any chrononaut who heads to Austerlitz with a crate Kalashnikovs and a planeload of MREs is going to be too distracted by small pox, diphtheria or cholera to enjoy the battle. Furthermore, photographs of Napoleon with a mustache could be taken, which would demoralize modern-day Corsicans.
The future may be safe, though people in the future will probably imprison and quarantine you before you even have time to look up your great, great grandchildren in some sort of futuristic phone book. You’d actually be quite easy for a group of futuristic, leopard-human hybrids to capture and we imagine they will take many photographs of you with their prosthetic audio-visual communication hands.
“If you have to go back, say to prevent Buddhism or something,” Hawkins concludes “it would be best to wear a containment suit that you burn as soon as you return to the present. Of course, you won’t ever do that, because time travel isn’t possible.”