For over a hundred years, we’ve been enamored with the idea that someone could potentially
travel through time. But time travel, if it’s possible, would have dangerous
implications for humanity. Are these dangers enough to keep time travel a secret?
This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question:
why would the government want to hide proof of time travel?
Do you need the big questions answered? Are you constantly curious? Then why not subscribe to
Unveiled for more clips like this one? And ring the bell for more thought-provoking content!
In order to travel through time, you need to travel extremely fast. Because time is relative,
if you rocket away from Earth, then return, you’ll find that less time has passed for you than for
everyone back home. This strange phenomenon is known as time dilation, something indicated by
Einstein’s theory of special relativity, and for which we have lots of evidence. Currently,
while this does happen to astronauts on the ISS, it happens in fractions of seconds,
so it’s not a noticeable difference. But if we can build spaceships that go significantly
faster than our current ones and stay in space for far longer, the effects of time dilation
really would enable time travel to the future. The problem with traveling to the future, though,
is that you’d be stuck there. Traveling backwards through time requires you to go fast as well,
but you’d need to break the speed of light, something that scientists all agree is impossible.
The laws of physics may allow for time travel, however, via black holes or wormholes - although
we’ve yet to prove that wormholes even exist. Wormholes could connect two points in space-time
and send you to the past if you went through one, but they have some massive drawbacks.
First is that even if we prove wormholes are out there, it’s likely that there aren’t any close to
Earth. The nearest black hole to Earth, nicknamed The Unicorn, is more than 1,500 lightyears away,
and it’s not likely there’s a wormhole any closer. Considering that it would take a
space shuttle over 37,000 years to travel just ONE lightyear, this is a completely unfeasible
distance to travel. Another problem is that you’d have no idea where or when the wormhole would open
up – it could send you to the future for all we know, on the other side of the universe.
Finally, the interiors of both wormholes and black holes are so radioactive that this alone
would kill you if you attempted to traverse them. But there are plenty of conspiracy theories that
time travel could be possible here on Earth. One popular, though baseless theory is the notorious
“Montauk Project”. The theory claims that somewhere in Camp Hero State Park, or the
surrounding area on Long Island, New York, the US government was conducting top-secret time travel
experiments, among other things. It’s never been exactly clear how the scientists were trying to
achieve time travel, but the story has certainly captured the public imagination. Though the idea
is a little frightening, scientists have been working on the possibility of creating artificial
black holes here on Earth. Stories have even appeared over the years claiming that this has
already been accomplished. It’s possibly the only feasible way we could achieve backward time travel
without leaving Earth, since existing black holes are much too far away to be used as a solution.
If American scientists have managed to develop time travel by creating black holes
in laboratories, it makes sense that they would want to keep it a secret. When CERN’s Large Hadron
Collider began operations in 2008, conspiracy theories alleged that it was going to produce
a “quantum black hole” that could destroy the planet. There were many people frightened that
switching on the particle accelerator would spell doom for humanity and that the world
would end when a black hole was created. Avoiding this kind of mass hysteria could be a reason why
a time travel project that relies on artificial black holes could be being kept under wraps. Black
holes are already existentially threatening, and black holes on Earth under the control of
any government would be undeniably frightening. Even a small black hole here on Earth could be
sufficiently massive to destroy our entire planet, and would be far more destructive than any bomb,
since it would continue to grow in size until the planet was devoured.
If this is the power we need to harness to travel back in time, then it’s probably better we don’t,
as exciting as the prospect of time travel is. So, it’s certainly possible that, if this were the
case, the government developing the technology would decide to keep it a secret in order to
stop anybody else from having that power. But that doesn’t have much of a historical precedent. Many
countries have developed superweapons and advanced technologies that they then used to increase their
power, with nuclear weapons being a prime example. The idea of time travel reliant on black holes
isn’t too dissimilar from the nuclear age and the creation of atomic bombs. But, as we all know,
the existence of atomic bombs wasn’t kept secret. Initially, President Truman did attempt to keep
the US’s successful Trinity Test under wraps, not realizing that Stalin’s spies had already
informed him. And all that secrecy was lost when, in August 1945, two nuclear bombs were dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Having artificial black holes and time travel that could be weaponized
wouldn’t work as any kind of scare tactic or deterrent if people didn’t know about it.
On the other hand, though, a nuclear detonation might be a lot harder to hide than a black hole
kept in a top-secret laboratory used for time travel. The black hole would only really be
destructive if something went horribly wrong with whatever methods are being used to contain it.
After the US dropped the bombs on Japan, it wasn’t like it could deny
what had happened. The entire world had witnessed the devastation of these new weapons,
which are so dangerous that they have never been used in warfare since. The US government
may want to hide proof of time travel because it doesn’t want to begin a time travel arms race,
giving other countries the opportunity to develop time machines and black holes of their own.
But there’s another scenario, too. The government may not have time travel at its
disposal currently, but could be hiding evidence of time travelers coming here from the future.
There are plenty of alleged time travelers who talk to the media and give out predictions for
the future of the human race, and a lot of the time, those predictions aren’t great. One supposed
time traveler claimed on TikTok in 2021 that on August 20, 2022, Earth’s sky will turn green for
five hours, after a planet full of green rocks explodes. They’re not the only “real-life time
traveler” using TikTok to give predictions of the future. One even predicted that in February 2022,
Atlantis would be found; suffice it to say, this did not happen.
But baffling claims like this would be a great piece of misdirection from a government trying to
hide genuine time travelers from the future, who may have legitimate warnings that have been lost
in the crowd. If, for instance, a time traveler claimed a nuclear war started by a particular
superpower is on the horizon, the superpower in question would probably want to keep this
story suppressed rather than address it. There’s also the possibility that time
travelers from the future aren’t trying to help us at all, but are “time tourists”.
Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking said that the distinct lack of “time tourists” could be
proof that time travel is impossible, though he did put forward theories about how black
holes could be utilized to achieve this end. He famously held a party for time travelers,
only releasing the invitations after the fact, but none showed up. However, maybe that’s because they
were all posting about Atlantis on social media with nobody taking them seriously. Or, perhaps
the reason we never see time travelers from the future is that events can never be changed without
creating paradoxes that violate the laws of physics. If countries have access to time travel
technology but can’t actually change anything in the future or the past, then they might want to
hide the proof of it to avoid awkward questions. If time travel did exist, it would be so
phenomenally dangerous for myriad reasons that it’s probably better off if the public didn’t
know about it. And that’s why the government would want to hide proof of time travel.
What do you think? Is there anything we missed? Let us know in the comments, check out these other
clips from Unveiled, and make sure you subscribe and ring the bell for our latest content.