After reading a post on Geeky Stuffs about how to embed a Kindle eBook on your blog, I decided to try it. Especially since I had already started this post when I saw the how-to – it worked out perfectly!

(Update: It did not work. I tried several times and the How-To was incorrect somewhere. Click the link below to read the sample.)

I just downloaded The Time Machine on my iPhone Kindle app. I read the book as a teen and have seen the old movie several times but I want to read it again.

The idea of time travel fascinates me. I am a big Doctor Who fan and as those of you who share my obsession know, it’s all about time travel.

I was recently asked where I would go if I were able to time travel. My first question is – is this a technology that would available to me long-term, or just once? If I had the pleasure of using a time machine any time I wanted, that would definitely alter my chosen location. But if I could only choose one place, for one adventure, before the ability were to disappear, I would choose somewhere else.

I know the ability to time travel is not viable, but Oh the Places I’d Go, as Dr. Seuss would say. We think social media connects us with a lot of people now, but imagine how many people we would know if time travel were an option. I wonder if our brains could handle all the information we would acquire, all the faces we would have to remember, all the events and timelines we would have to keep straight. Then there is the issue of who would be allowed to time travel – only scientists or historians? Could the travelers take people from the past with them when they left? Would there be innovation since the future ‘us’ could come back and tell us how to do it better? Then the future, future ‘us’ would tell the future ‘us’ that we were doing it wrong…that could get incredibly confusing. Or would there be one new species of time travelers, that shape our past, present and future quietly, letting us think ideas are our own?

Why, in every time traveling story, is it some big secret that the protagonist has discovered how to time travel? Shouldn’t they share it with the world? Or would the repercussions be too severe if everyone got ahold of the technology? Would the government stifle the discovery? How much, I wonder, would it alter our destinations? There should be a time travelers code, similar to that of all great secret societies, that says, “Time traveling is ok, only if no major human events are altered in the course of the adventure.” But that begs the question, how small or big does the action have to be to alter an outcome? Could just one small glance or smile alter the course of a major event? Could one thoughtless sentence have an impact on the pillars that uphold a much larger moment?

Is it just better for all societies that we are not able to time travel since so many factors complicate the seemingly harmless venture? In the realm of impossibility, the above conclusion makes me sad for the fraction of the possible, in the impossible…