After finishing an essay on the importance of truth Wednesday night, I ventured into the bathroom to brush my teeth only to discover a time/space anomaly occupying my sink. Cleverly observing how light from the bathroom fixtures seemed drawn toward the anomaly's massive gravitational field, I identified it as an infant black hole. I quickly realized the potential of the situation and began to tinker with the galactic time/space gap. Using only wire hangers, twine, a swivel chair, a cathode ray tube, ball bearings, and duct tape, I ingeniously constructed a working prototype of a time-machine based on quantum mechanics pioneered by Battlestar Galactica and the original Star Trek series. The machine operates by injecting mass against the hole's rotation to manipulate its event horizon and convert mass into enough kinetic energy to throw a person backwards or forwards into time.
Great. I had a time machine in my bathroom. What should I do with it? My initial impulse was to fly to Sweden's Nobel Foundation to pick up my Nobel Prize. Then, I could turn my house into a theme park (Quantum Physics Land) and offer the wealthy excursions through time for ludicrous amounts of money. Halfway through my ambitious daydreaming, however, I realized that my dream was not meant to be. I'm confident that one person's (me) unraveling of time/space for pleasure creates negligible impact relative to the grand scheme of the Universe. I've always wanted to test the asteroid impact theory of dinosaur extinction, attend a Beatles concert, shoot pool with Albert Einstein, and drop apples on Sir Isaac Newton's head from a hot air balloon. This was the perfect opportunity for me to live out these dreams and maybe more accurately chronicle history along the way (a la Bill and Ted's most excellent adventure). However, I'm a responsible human being with a great capacity for morality. For example, when all my other friends cut in line for the merry-go-round at Disneyland, I was always the one who stayed behind to keep watch. I worry about other people: the would-be beneficiaries of my machine. I'm afraid that they'll feed the dinosaurs when the signs distinctly tell them not to, take flash pictures of the Beatles, hustle Uncle Albert, or throw the apple at Newton's head a bit too hard. After all, the humanity's capacity for mischief has always been quite remarkable. I would hate to have my brainchild twisted to diabolical uses like the way nuclear energy was perverted into the atomic bomb for the Manhattan Project.
Thus, I have decided to make my temporal trips of curiosity (maybe even meet myself 2 years hence at MIT and congratulate myself on a job well done) then return to last week to repair the rupture in space/time before the fact. It's the best course of action for maximizing the opportunity provided by such a machine, without risking catastrophic Galactic chaos by permanently tearing the fabric of space/time and collapsing the Universe unto itself.
It is regretful that such an ingenious machine must be destroyed out of fear of misuse. I do, however, have faith that man will one day develop the machine independent of my discovery, in an era of greater responsibility for such power.
In the meantime, I'll keep working on that perpetual motion machine...