According to the butterfly effect, if I wanted to stop myself from writing this blog all I would have to do is build a time machine, go back to 1997 when I was 14 years old and buy myself a Super Nintendo. That simple act would have triggered a series of events that would have changed the course of human history forever. Having that Super Nintendo would have  given me something entertaining to do after school and would have stopped me from trying out for the school play. I would have never played the part of Ebeneezer Scrooge and gotten addicted to attention. And by not being an attention whore I would have never made a crowd of hundreds laugh at me during the Mr. Kearns pageant as I pretended to have muscles during the swimsuit contest. The comedy bug therefore would have never metabolized within my blood and I would have never stepped on stage at an open mic night. I therefore would have never met Tig, David, and Kyle…or even my wife, Carah, who I met at a comedy club! We would have never moved to the big city, into a one bedroom apartment next to two car dealerships that constantly blast their flood lights through our bedroom window all night. I would have never become an insomniac from those lights, and ultimately, I would have never had the time to kill while being up all hours of the night to write this blog. A blog which, in some butterfly-ish way, may lead to curing all diseases and end world hunger…and also all wars.

So, is time travel even possible? Yes, according to this picture on the left. Here we see a young R.L. Blastoff preparing to send his associate into the wobbly time vortex. According to a TV show I once watched, Stephan Hawking believes it may one day be possible to enlarge tiny sub atomic wormholes enough for a man to pass through. I guess what happened was, a guy did just that. He traveled back in time through a wormhole to the black and white TV era and tried to make a documentary about it, but nobody took him seriously because he forgot to bring along his wormhole enlarger! Rookie mistake.

In that same TV show, called Steven Hawking’s Universe, Hawking described another means of time travel we discussed on the podcast. The speed of light kind. Oh – by the way – in the TV show Steven Hawking replaces his robot voice with a classy British one. Perhaps he listened to our guest, Shane Mauss’s advice. The TV show did come out before we recorded the podcast which means he would need to time travel backwards to tell himself to use a classy British narrator instead of the American robot one which is also the voice of Professor Blastoff. This is not a conspiracy. They are both just old school like that. Now that I think of it, maybe he went back in time and stole the idea of time travel from our podcast. I am not mad if he did, I just want to know the truth.

Now, the theory of time traveling by going the speed of light would take a lot of energy to test on a human. But apparently, as Shane was alluding to on the podcast, at CERN they have been clocking fast traveling particles in that large tunnel thing of theirs. Apparently they have been able to tell that some particles that usually fall apart within a short amount of time can last longer when they are shooting through this super high speed tunnel. That’s pretty cool, but to get us to travel 99% of the speed of light, it wold take 6 years to accelerate to that speed without killing us. The other option would be to orbit a massive black hole and let the gravity bend time. Either way, all I know is I get sick at Disneyland on the tea cup ride, so I’m out.

One topic we didn’t get to dive into was how we use current technology to project future technology. For example, the Back To The Future movies of the 80′s had a lot more to go off of than H.G. Wells did in 1895. H.G. Wells probably never could have predicted the ability to use silicon chips to store data as ones and zeros, and yet he was able to help father the very genre that gave us Star Trek and Star Wars, which inspired amazing advancements in modern technology such as the automatic sliding door! This begs the question: do some men…or women have the ability to glance into future Consumer Electronic Shows? If not, where does their enlightenment come from?

Well, we’ll leave that for another podcast, but it is fun to think about what could come in the next 100 years. Maybe in the future we will have a fruit tree that produces every variety of fruit that ever grew on Earth. Who knows what could be coming down the pipe? That’s for the New Thoughter Kids to decide. Oh, and if any of you do end up inventing that super tree I want 10%.

Just to wet your appetite, here is a cut clip on cool future inventions including invisibility and shape shifting!

With the ability to be invisible and to shape shift I’m seeing a future filled with horrific mind altering games of peek-a-boo with add campaigns that include fire breathing clowns appearing out of nowhere with a classy British narrator who screams, “Peek-a-Boo, this game ain’t just for babies anymore!” or “Don’t just scare your friends, scar ‘em!”

Well, my Super Nintendo has finally arrived, so I’ll catch y’all later.

Check out professorblastoff.com and  aaronburrellcomedy.com  follow me on twitter @airburple.

Listen to episode #40 Time Travel

• Professor Blastoff

Where do thoughts come from? My mind is a meadow where thoughts cultivate and grow, but the guy harvesting my thoughts seems to have a problem with letting them ripen. What I’m often left with is bushels of green blatherings. I do the best with what I am given, though. If that means I have to let the thoughts ripen in my frontal lobe a while before releasing them into the speech center of my brain, so be it. This is why I enjoy writing. I have plenty of time to look over my thoughts as they lie in front of me. I get to reflect on them a moment and then decide if they are worthy of representing my current condition. I also like having a record of my thoughts, to see how things have changed. My earliest writings display a desperate and unquenchable thirst for video games and chocolate.

A lot has changed since then. Video games have exploded into 3D and chocolate has joined forces with pretzels to form a new type of M&M, thanks to the New Thotter department at M&M Mars. Keep up the good work kids!

One early record I have from my childhood is the time my 5th grade teacher told us he could force us to think about an elephant. He then said, “Try not to think of an elephant for one minute.” Everyone failed but me. I succeeded because during that minute I screamed in my head, “Hamburgers are good! Hamburgers are good!” over and over again. I knew I had a one track mind, and as long as I stayed fixated on my favorite, non chocolaty, food I would be home free. Well, the teacher didn’t even believe I did it and that made me feel like a Jedi. Then I went home and realized how sad it was that I could only think about one thing at a time. This is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because if I want to forget about something all I gotta do is play video games. It’s a curse because I can’t think about video games and chocolate at the same time. I can change my focus real fast so I can think about both in the same second, but for some reason I can’t conjure up two mind’s eyes to think about chocolate and video games simultaneously. Even when I eat chocolate while playing a game, once I start thinking about how good the candy bar is I find my thoughts have drifted from the game. This is why I like roll playing games. They require hours of mindless level-upping. This allows me to continue playing video games using only my subconscious while freeing up my conscious thoughts for more important things like lectures on linear algebra.

But I don’t want one subconscious and one conscious mind, I want to have two conscious mind’s eyes. If there is someone out there who has two simultaneously active mind’s eyes, I would love to pick their brain. The only way I can imagine this functioning is similar to a multi-core computer processor. You would still have limits. For example, if you had two trains of thought going on at once, and one of them requested you to go cash a check while the other one requested you to go work out, one task would have to give. So naturally one would need two bodies to go with the two trains of thought, but would any one really want to be in control of two bodies? I could go to more than one class at a time, get an education twice as fast. I could use one to chase after athletic ambitions, and allow the other to binge on all the delicacies the world has to offer.

The only down side might be coming up with enough tasks to keep yourself occupied and not getting twice as bored or twice as hurt. If you double your pleasure your just as likely to double your pain. Taking this a step further, imagine having a global consciousness with one mind controlling all the bodies of the Earth. With he entire planet and all its resources at your whim, what would you do with it?  Obviously I would turn the planet into a galactic yo-yo, but then I would get pretty lonely and bored after realizing there was nobody there to be impressed by all the work that went into making a giant yo-yo Earth. Who would tell me how stupid I was for making the Earth spin so fast that it ejected most of my drones off it’s surface? I think we need to have other people to learn from, to teach and to throw ideas off of. In conclusion, there is a lot more to think about with respect to expanding out our consciousness. With technology advancing far into the future will we build such an entity? Are there pan dimensional hyper intelligent beings like this out there now, and more importantly do they still like chocolate and video games?

Go to professorblastoff.com for extras including some pretty cool fan art. Also check out aaronburrellcomedy.com to see what else I’m up to.

Listen to episode #39 Free for All: NTK

• Professor Blastoff