If you could go back in time to meet anyone, who would that person be? George Washington? Christopher Columbus? Elvis Presley? How about going forward in time? What would you want to see?

Time travel is one of the most fascinating concepts that anyone could think about, and the possibilities are endless. As we have seen through plenty of fictional books and television shows, time travel can be a wonderful experience or have devastating consequences or both. It is depicted in several ways by people with many different visions on what it should look like, but very few of those depictions do a good job of displaying the effects of time travel, especially the effects of traveling into the past. If someone travelled into the past and changed history from what it was before, then we would only know of the changed reality. Humanity would have no knowledge of what the unchanged version of history was. The time traveler could possibly fade out of existence.

For example, should someone travel back in time and, say, kill Alexander Hamilton before he became important historically? Nobody would know he existed. Nobody would realize that all of the contributions he made were gone because people would have no idea that those contributions existed in the first place. New York would not have ratified the constitution (because Hamilton was the one who convinced them to do so) and no one would know that they had ratified it already, before the time traveler killed Hamilton and messed things up. The time traveler also could have been descended from Hamilton’s line, which would no longer exist, therefore the time traveler would not exist.

Also, depictions of time travelers helping their previous selves irritates me because the time traveler would have remembered seeing his/her future self in the past. In a children’s movie called Mr. Peabody and Sherman, Mr. Peabody and his son Sherman travel around in time to see different places and explore, but things go awry when young Sherman uses the time machine to impress a girl and accidentally messes up history. As the plot progresses, Mr. Peabody sets off with Sherman to fix time, and they encounter their previous selves in the process. However, they do not seem to remember encountering their future selves in their past. Although it is an interesting movie, it is a sloppy depiction of time travel.

My favorite illustration of time travel is in the book Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling. At least two thirds of the book does not involve time travel, but when the present situation rises to a matter of life or death for multiple characters, Hermione Granger and Harry Potter goes back in time to change the course of events and save the lives in danger. While in the past, they make sure they were not seen by their past selves, but follow their past selves in order to change what needed to be changed. It is almost a retelling of the first part of the book, but with Harry and Hermione filling in actions that seemed random at first.

An example would be when Harry Potter gets into a situation that he cannot get out of on his own and his future self saves him. When the reader first reads that part, he or she sees what Harry Potter sees in that moment: his father casting a spell to protect him. Later on in the book, when Harry goes back in time and sees his past self in that very situation, he realizes that his father does not save him in that moment and casts the protective spell. He remembers the situation and remembers someone saving him, so he saves his past self once he realizes that he is the one who casts the saving spell (not his father). The past is changed in a way that makes sense to the reader because the events that were changed align with events that happen earlier in the book.

Many people attempt to write time travel, but very few do so in a logical way. However, when time travel is written well, the story becomes much more interesting to follow. And so, when musing on the wonders of time travel, remember that as long as the effects of the time travel make sense, there are endless possibilities.