On time travel, universe ending paradoxes, and alternate time lines

You may consider a note about time travel as frivolous, vulgar, or even foolish, but don’t kid yourself: if you could go back to your fourteen-year-old self with a bunch of hard-earned information about your future, you would. I have always said that time travel is not only improbable, it is impossible. The proof, however, is not really proof because you cannot prove a negative: just because we don’t think we have ever met a time-traveler, that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. We are obsessed with tales and stories of time-travel mostly due to our rampant nostalgia for the past and a yearning to correct all of the mistakes we know we made along the way. We know no one has ever come back from the future, nor has anyone ever returned to the past to alter the past. Only lucky people have ever won the lottery, but again, as far as we know–maybe the lottery winners were time travelers who were just pretending to be lucky when they knew the winning numbers all along. If someone were to travel to the past and change some major historical event–the sinking of Titanic, for example, and change the timeline–we would never know it, now, would we? Would a time traveler suffer a major trauma if they ran into their younger selves? Or would it be, simply, creepy? If I were a time traveler, I would go back to a time in American history, say the period between 1946 and 1963, get myself a Vermont farmhouse, and lead a quiet, undisturbed life, far from the noise of the maddening crowd. Or maybe the late 1890’s? I would never go back to the sixties or seventies, but the late seventies and early eighties, which were very anti-aesthetic, were an awful lot of fun. Sherman and Mr. Peabody taught me a very important lesson with their “Wayback” machine: the past is a distant country that we not only don’t understand, we idealize it all out of proportion. The past must be a closed book, or our daily reality would be an unpredictable chaos. If a coffee cup falls on the floor, the coffee spills, and the cup breaks. Hypothetically, the equations governing that particular accident may run both backwards and forwards, but the actual reality of the broken coffee cup is other: only glue will put it back together–it stays broken for all eternity. The obsession with time travel, either into the future or into the past, poses extreme ethical and moral dilemmas for the traveler. Changing the already established events of the past would alter the world in devastating ways, which is always the message of time-traveling movies, novels, and stories. If the time traveler accidentally killed a great-grandparent, would they instantly disappear? Or would they never have existed at all, unable to go back and kill that grandparent because they never existed at all? One could go crazy trying to understand the universe ending paradox of an impossible time loop. Yet, according to the equations both the past, present, and future all exist at once, indistinguishable from one another, but it seems that we can only access the present at any given moment. The impossibility of time travel is perhaps what makes it so much fun, so intriguing, such a conundrum. How I would love to tell my twelve-year-old self that everything will turn out fine and a bunch of other stuff about life that it took me forever to figure out.