Could We Actually Send Jose Conseco Back in Time?

José Canseco can time travel. The once-juiced-up MLB star-turned-author-turned Worcester Tornado explains as such in a post at Vice. “I time travel all the time and have been for the last 20 years; it's real simple.” His time travel scheme is less wormhole-oriented than it is an actually kind of sweet and slightly weird recounting of learning to lucid dream. See, Canseco can really only time travel when he’s asleep, shutting his eyes and “zooming through the air” to different spots in his past, like high school or hugging his mother.

Time travel here is more about recounting memories than changing world events or making money in the stock market. In Canseco’s world there’s a few crucial rules attached, one of them being that a traveler shouldn’t be emotionally “wishy-washy.” “If you can't control your dreams properly,” he writes, “your cuddly kitten or loyal dog could turn into a wolf — or if you're really unlucky, a werewolf — and start attacking you.” There are other rules, too, like not being able to travel to the future, and not being able to change history.

Not being able to change history is good in that it gets rid of that big problem known as the grandfather paradox. You know, if you went back in time to kill your grandfather, there’d be no you left in the future to go back in time. One of the only ways out from that paradox is the idea of infinite worlds. Basically, this just means that every time a decision point is reached in the universe, where something could go one way or another, the universe splits into new universes for each possibility. So, you’ll wind up with an endless stack of universes demonstrating every which way a universe could possibly be, and they’re all real. Got it? This is actually a thing that scientists think about — some of them, anyway.

And then there’s the more conservative principle of self-consistency, which maintains that a time traveler cannot change the past because he or she was always a part of it. Jose couldn't kill his grandfather, simply because he’s alive. His own existence refutes the possibility of such a paradox.

In Canseco’s time travel scheme he just can’t do it — something will always prevent him from changing the past; it’s a rule. Which seems like a perfectly reasonable rule for the universe to have, but who’s enforcing it? The grandfather paradox doesn’t point to a specific prohibition within the universe’s laws that prevents time travel, just that it would occur if time travel were to occur, and that would be bad because the paradox can’t occur.

Also note that Canseco’s skipping around another, even huger time travel paradox by apparently just becoming himself in the past, even though it’s a different, dream-warped past than the actual past. Here’s this: “The other night I had a dream in which Dan Duquette, the GM who signed me to the Red Sox, wouldn't let me play because of a ‘technical issue.’ I looked at him and said, ‘Listen, I want to play tonight.’ He responded with something crazy like, ‘If you want to play, go get me vanilla Dippin' Dots with chocolate syrup on them.’” And every time Canseco fulfills a request, the manager comes up with something crazier. Which sounds a lot like typical dream fodder, really.

Later in the post, however, Canseco is able to travel back and attempt to give himself guidance as a young kid, but can’t. Here we have a problem. While you’ve added another Canseco to the past, there’s yet another Canseco just falling asleep, on deck, if you will. This Canseco is about to time travel back to the same place the original time traveling Canseco did. Which makes three, and there’s an infinite number of Cansecos falling asleep left to go, meaning that the world in the past, which started with adult Canseco and child Canseco, is now full of an infinite number of adult Cansecos and one child Canseco lost somewhere in the throng of people.

But, again, these are just paradoxes and don’t answer exactly why Canseco couldn’t go back in time, in terms of physics. That answer is still pretty much that you can’t go faster than light. If you could go faster than light, it would be possible, for example, to speed around the planet at some super-liminal speed and get back to where you started before you left (just imagine it). You can get right up to that FTL speed, but so long as you’re something with mass, it won’t happen. You’d just wind up a tiny speck of infinite energy at the threshold of light-speed. For a second back in the fall, it looked like neutrinos were going faster than light in an experiment based at CERN, but that was, fortunately, just a measurement error.

There might be a way around the light speed limit for Canseco, however, and that’s basically distorting space-time. Like, take two points on a sheet of paper and the distance between them is some amount. Now, fold the paper up kind of like a paper airplane with a crease in the middle and a couple of wings. Now, that distance to be travelled is a lot less. Imagine if you could do the same thing with space-time, reshape it such that your time traveler can just skip over part of it, going faster than light by going slower than the speed of light, just by taking a short cut. Alternatively, imagine crossing a ravine via a bridge versus going down and back up. This is more or less the idea behind wormholes, a tunnel or bridge between two different points on a distorted topological map of space-time.

Stephen Hawking isn’t a huge fan of the wormhole idea, contending that a radiation feedback loop would collapse any wormholes we might create. Imagine a typical audio feedback effect, with sound going into a microphone and out speakers and back into the microphone, amplifying on every loop. “The same thing will happen with a wormhole, only with radiation instead of sound,” Hawking wrote a couple of years ago in The Daily Mail. “As soon as the wormhole expands, natural radiation will enter it, and end up in a loop. The feedback will become so strong it destroys the wormhole. So although tiny wormholes do exist, and it may be possible to inflate one some day, it won’t last long enough to be of use as a time machine.” So, no way Jose.

But, in that same piece, Hawking points out that time machines do actually exist in the universe, and very large ones at that. These are the time machines to the future, violating the rules of Jose Conseco’s sleep time machine. All you need for a time machine to the future is a source of immense gravity. That gravity causes a dip in the fabric of space-time, kind of like a bowling ball sitting on a soft mattress. This distortion means that information takes more time to get from place to place and so time moves slower. So, if we had a black hole right next to Earth and sent a spaceship out to orbit it for ten years or so, and If time travelled at half the rate around the black hole as it does on Earth, then when they returned, it would be 20 years later for the planet and still only ten years later for them. So we could send Jose to the future. All we need is a nearby black hole, and a spaceship, for that matter.

Finally, one argument for the impossibility of time travel to the past is that Earth in the year 2012 isn’t clogged up with an infinite number of Jose Conseco time travelers from the future, all trying to warn Conseco not to get all juiced up and realizing they set the machine’s date wrong because their brains were all ’roided out.

• A Brief History Of Possibly Obsolete Time Travel Paradoxes
• A New Time Travel Possibility, No Black Holes Needed
• Is Time Travel Too Dangerous?