One of the curiosities of general relativity is that it seems to allow time travel. Various physicists have discovered solutions to Einstein’s field equations that contain loops that return to the same point in space and time. Physicists call them closed time-like curves.

At first glance, these kinds of time machines seem to lead to all kinds of problems, such as the grandfather paradox. This is where somebody travels back in time and kills their grandfather meaning they could never have been born and so could not have gone back to kill the grandfather.

Over the last week, while I was working on concepts of Embryology and embryo-freeze; I kind of had an IET of a different kind. While, at the outset time-travel seems quite lame, impractical and all of its synonymous hyperbole; I thought, there’s one practical “partial time-travel” idea that I have. I will try outline my IET in this blog post.

As I mentioned earlier, I was doing some research on embryology and stumbled upon this concept of “Cryopreservation” and was totally fascinated by it. Essentially, Cryopreservation or cryoconservation is a process where cells, whole tissues, or any other substances susceptible to damage caused by chemical reactivity or time are preserved by cooling to sub-zero temperatures. At low enough temperatures, any enzymatic or chemical activity which might cause damage to the material in question is effectively stopped. The theory is that by freezing cells you can effectively put them in "stasis", preventing them for dying, growing, or doing anything really. At these cold temperatures, tissues are sealed in a status similar to that of suspended liveliness. The natural decaying process slows down in cold conditions simply because the metabolic procedures of genetic tissues slow down spectacularly in the extreme cold state.

Now, let me explain the connection between the “partial time-travel” and cryopreservation. To begin with, I’ll paraphrase my definition of “partial time-travel”. Unlike, the most commonly known use-case for time-travel - which is to go back in time; I wanted to define “partial time-travel” as a concept where you can go ahead in time keeping certain entities and people around you exactly as they are at this point-in-time (of-course, with a caveat that you cannot comeback *which might get solved if you can time-travel backwards though*). 

So, simply put, its a way in which you can move to your future by keeping some people around you in their current state; Let me elaborate with a possibility. Let’s say you want to feel your parents’ emotion and you would want to understand it from their position. The best possible way to do this is to be in the exact same position as they are. Which means, you need to be their age and should have treaded all the paths of (their) life. Essentially, if they are in their 60s today, you need to keep them in their 60s till you get to your 60s and then spend time with them. Its not just parents. It could be that you might want to spend time with your kids as friends when they turn into their 30s or 40s. You might want to see the technological progress 100 years later and what not?

Ah! I suppose you got the connect. Yes. (Connecting back to being your parents’ friend at 60s). I was thinking if we can Cryopreservatively freeze our parents till we turn 60 and then unfreeze them and spend the rest of our life together as friends from there on. Or freeze ourselves today and unfreeze when our kids get to their 30s or 40s so that we can be their friend. Wouldn’t that be wonderful and still be a practical possibility?

Yeah. Just some random thoughts, or, as I call it better..Idiotic Emission of Thoughts :)