Past unexpected

A chance comment today set me thinking about time travel. Long a staple of science fiction, time travel is one of those things that is so unlikely to be encountered in real life that most people just accept whatever is presented to them.

But I'm not so easy to persuade. The well-worn and obvious cliches about time travel are either meeting yourself, or altering the past so that you no longer exist in the future. There's already plenty of words been expended on those, so I'll explore the more mundane...

First off, there's the 'Universal Translator' problem. Now whilst Captain Kirk and Doctor Who can just glibly explain that they have one, and so can communicate with any alien races that they encounter, the unfortunate truth about time travel is that you go back even a few hundred years and things have changed in ways that make you stand out like, well, like a time traveller.

For example, changes in the pronounciation of English are always ignored in films, except for certain cliches. It appears that going back in time quickly renders your speech so different that you may be unable to communicate (between 1200 and 1600 the way that vowels were pronounced in English changed markedly - this is one of the differences betwixt Middle English and Modern English). Worse, your eating preferences would also mark you out as an outsider (coffee, tea, potatoes and more are all comparatively modern), as would your behaviour to others and especially those higher in rank, and would your clothes, and your smell, or lack of it. Before shampoo, keeping hair clean and 'manageable' was very difficult, and so your hair might give you away, as would your watch, your shoes, your jeans, t-shirt, glasses, underwear, iPod, contact lenses, and your fillings in your mouth. Then there's germs, where your carefully constructed defences against the diseases of your own time are probably laughably ineffective against those of ancient times.

So, actual time travel is tricky for a whole set of reasons that have nothing to do with the technology, and anyone foolhardy enough to try it would almost certainly be unable to conceal their strangeness from the locals. In fact, one suspects that there isn't really a need for Temporal Policemen to stop people killing their grandparents or posting themselves stock market summaries, because trying to survive in a world as totally alien as the past, seems to be almost impossibly difficult,and potentially very life-threatening.

As with many interesting and exciting things, the simple truth is that the mundane nature of the real world makes them far less appealing and extremely unlikely.