3rd Place in Derby #348: Time Travel Redux, with 161 votes!

Here are two statements: 

1. We, humankind, have not invented a time machine.
2. We, humankind, will never invent a time machine.

That might appear to be an observation and a prediction, but actually it's two facts. The first one proves the second. Were a time machine to be invented in the future, it would be invented now too, because a time machine would essentially flatten time.

There would be no "time periods." All kinds of things and all kinds of people would exist simultaneously. Eras would be impossible to define. Moments would grow more powerful. A sensation, a feeling, a fright, a perfect knuckle crack - these would be our only landmarks without trends or definable events.

What I'm getting at is maybe we don't need time machines. Maybe, for sanity's sake, we need something that we can't control, something we can't beat. We need a variable that we can't alter to give us something to work against. 

In other words, we need time to be time.

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