Alien Time Travel Technology

After wading through years of fruitless research and encountering failures enough to make the heart sick, I accidentally got into communication with an intelligence whose home was no single sphere but the universe, one to whom human time was nought, as were also human fears, joys, sorrows and emotions. The fortunes of mankind meant no more to him that thosee of a tribe of insects, one year swarming over the earth, the next swept out of existence.

He would not let me address him in the language intercession. “I am like you,” he said, “but of a different sphere and a different power. I am not immortal; nothing is immortal. Neither the Earth, the Sun, nor the God who made them. Everything is passing away, or rather, dissolving, to be re-fashioned into other forms.”

Your time scale has been altered. A minute in the outer world would be a year in this room.

The past—could there be such a thing as a time-shift? The whole idea was a paradox, wasn’t it? Like that yarn about the chap who went back in time and murdered his own grandfather.

I znów mi się przypaliło—jedno spiralne ramie, od spodu, na trzysta parseków—i znowu wybiegła mi słonecznica, i ścięło się, i będzie zgęstek, i powstanie białko, przeklęte białko! I znowu będzie ewolucja, i ludzkość, i cywilizacja, i będę się musiał tłumaczyć, usprawiedliwiać, składać we dwoje, przepraszać, że to niechcący, że przez przypadek . . . Ale to wy, nie ja!

translate

And I got burned again—one spiral arm, underneath, three hundred parsecs—and again a sunflower came out of me and it was choked and there will be a bundle of white, cursed protein! And there will be evolution again, and humanity and civilization, and I will have to justify, justify, put together, apologize that it’s accidentally, that by accident . . .

Steve, you know what this is, don’t cha? It’s a time-space warp.

Now that sounds like we’re dealing with a time-space warp.

This is totally rad. You’re like my big little brother.

Troi: Captain, sir, this is not an illusion of a dream.
Picard: But these courts belong in the past.
Troi:I don’t understand either, but this is real.

Sf is full of this sort of thing, from the power fantasy of the alienated child to the alternate history where Hitler is strangled in his cradle and the Library of Alexandria is saved from the torch.

Kirk: [pacing in front of a lineup of the crew] Who started the fight?
O’Brien: I don’t know, sir.

It would bring our sponsors down upon us like so many angry hornets. The Unchanging would yank time travel out of human hands—retroactively.

The goal of this device is nothing less than complete knowledge, knowledge of everything that ever has been, that ever will be, that ever could be.

And she was continually amazed at how easily everyone else accepted their situation, the blunt, apparently undeniable reality of the time slips, across a hundred and fifty years in her case, perhaps a million years or more for the wretched pithecine and her infant in their net cage.

If one of these people dies young, that will pay your debt.

Ignoring this, I sit down at the table to pick up a cup and spit calding hot coffee into it. Then I proceed to vomit food onto my plate so I can sculpt it with a knife and fork into peas, carrots, and omelette.

Neil [wavinghand]: Let the explosion never to have happened.

Sir: [pointing at a billborad of the Space Shuttle] That is why we leapt into the future. We fly that back to the armada and show them where this planet is.