Against Time Travel

The metaphor is everywhere: we “move through time” as if it were a place. We imagine ourselves carried along a river, or seated in a vehicle whose engine is the ticking of clocks. From there it is only a short step to fantasy: if time is a place, perhaps we could visit its other districts. Past and future become destinations, waiting rooms, or holiday sites. Thus is born the dream of time travel.

But the metaphor deceives. Time is not a place and cannot be traversed. What we call the “flow of time” is nothing more than the unfolding of events, the continual actualisation of possibility. To project this process as if it were a landscape through which one might stroll is to mistake construal for ontology.

Relationally, the error is clear. Events are not coordinates within a terrain called “time.” They are the fabric of reality itself. The past is not a location behind us, nor the future a country ahead; both are relationally constituted by the possibilities that have been cut off and those still open. To “move through time” is not to change our position along a line but to participate in the ongoing alignment of events.

The image of the time machine — the vehicle that slips its tether to the present and glides to another temporal address — is the triumph of metaphor over thought. It confuses representation with being, and turns the necessary asymmetry of actuality into a symmetry of travel.

The relational alternative is disarmingly simple:

• The past is the set of possibilities that have been closed.

• The future is the set of possibilities not yet cut.

• The present is the event of actualisation.

There is no railway of time to ride, no district to visit, no coordinates to which we can return. There is only the ever-renewed becoming of events.

So the polemical cut is this:

Time is not a place — and time travel is a tourist map to nowhere.