Time travel is ‘weird news’, vaccinating children isn’t

Icouldn’t resist watching all 18 minutes of an interview with Noah, a man who claims to have travelled in time. I consider myself a connoisseur of weird news, having worked in every part of newspaper editorial and survived with only moderate damage to my mental health. So I know that, with enormous pressure on resources, many media outlets are looking for quick wins, and Noah’s story amused me as harmless clickbait when I stumbled across it on a Scottish tabloid’s website.

I’m also a massive geek, especially for time travel stories, so I think about this stuff a lot. Just as I’ve drawn up detailed plans for surviving a zombie apocalypse and know exactly what I’d say if I met an alien, I’m clear on what I’d do if I could travel in time.

Once the altruistic aims had been met – save a few lives, deal with a few dictators – and I’d had some adventures, I’d let myself get selfish. A small amount of money in a long-term investment, repeated several times with help from multiple trips back in time, would make me comfortably wealthy.

Then the proceeds would buy a stable cavern that exists across many years and is filled with artefacts to be uncovered later. I’d have the ultimate man-cave filled with dinosaur skulls, Roman helmets and early comic books.

“I’d have the ultimate man-cave...

See? I’ve spent too much time on this. But it’s nonsense, of course. Whatever you might read in listicles about photos apparently showing time travellers, it’s just made up for fun and fantasy, and it’s important to know that.

I’m OK with such stories running in a “weird news” section if we can be confident people aren’t believing them, even if Noah is making credible predictions like humans landing on Mars in 2028. But when it becomes damaging it stops being funny.

Which is all a long way of saying: get your children vaccinated. Reports of health risks associated with vaccination are discredited, rabid lies, and spreading lies is dangerous. So don’t. And, even without time travel, I can say with certainty that, in the future, people will know this to be true.