Time Travel

You can see from it that in the entire history of the Earth, all of human presence comprises just 0.08% (that’s 8 one-hundredths of one percent) of all of Earth history.

Further, if you were to consider just the “interesting parts,” i.e. dinosaurs onwards, human history still comprises only 2% of that timespan.

The graphic further uses a fairly generous definition of “human history,” i.e. the last 4 million years. If we think of real human civilization as reasonably well-recorded history, we’re restricted to the last 4000-5000 years. Once again, even when considered against the timescale of dinosaur existence, we’re a mere eyeblink in history.

Consider also, that potentially millions or even billions of years of history lie ahead of us. Certainly the sun will last another ~5 billion years, and assuming no catastrophic scenario, that’s a lot more history. Not to speak of any post-Earth pan-galactic or extra-galactic history - that’s even more billions of years.

So when it comes to time travelers coming to visit “our period,” we are talking about, at most, a 5000-year period out of billions. Colloquially-speaking, you’re probably really only thinking of the last 200 years as “our period,” further narrowing the window to something practically infinitesimal. When you’re spinning the little time-destination dial to decide where to go on your time-travel backpacking adventure, our entire “period” is probably smaller than one little “tick” in the dial.

Think about what you do when you travel, geographically-speaking. You typically visit only three types of locations:


Culturally-significant, metropolitan locations where lots of people can be encountered in a dense area, increasing personal transaction volume. Big, interesting cities, like New York, London, Tokyo, etc.
Vacation locales, typically areas with exceptional climates. Cabo San Lucas or Hawaii, those sorts of places.
Extremely remote locales, untouched by human presence and notable primarily for their natural, unspoiled beauty. Alaska, a national park, an African safari, perhaps even Antarctica.

Our time period is a time period that is none of those.

We are certainly not a time-travel metropolis - I imagine such a time period would be a central “New York”-esque base of operations for time travelers and time travel operations. We certainly don’t have that in our day and time.

Likewise, we are not a time of unspoiled natural beauty. If a time traveler wanted that, there are hundreds of millions of years of dinosauria or other prehistoric periods they could journey to.

I’m not sure what a time-travel “vacation locale” would be, but presumably climate is not something you time travel for, so maybe there is no equivalent. The Earth was certainly a lot warmer in the distant past, so maybe there are a few million years in the Cretaceous with a dinosaur-proof resort somewhere. There’s certainly no point in traveling to the present time where all the good beachfront property has already been occupied by the “locals.”

No, instead, the current period is probably the temporal equivalent of flyover country. You might say, “What do you mean, it’s a time of unprecedented technological and cultural change!” Maybe so, you time-hick, but a small town in South Dakota that’s finally getting hooked up to teh internet or getting their first Olive Garden isn’t interesting to someone who already has ultra-fast broadband or lots of family-owned local Italian restaurants. You have to remember that these are people from the future. There’s nothing interesting to see here that they don’t already have. They have technology and civil rights and cuisine that you and I can’t even begin to imagine. You don’t visit small towns unless you have family still living there, and when it comes to time travel, family doesn’t really work that way.

So the likely reason that time travelers from the future aren’t visiting our period is (other than time travel perhaps being physically impossible) that we’re just not that interesting, and we’re not really that large. It’s only temporal-centric egotism that makes me believe otherwise.

— Yishan Wong