Time travel has always fascinated me.

Not that it’s possible or anything – but isn’t it a cool idea?

I loved the Back to the Future trilogy, mainly because it shows you that regardless of how impossible a task may seem, “If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.”

So in honor of time travel, I’m going to share several important (to me) events I would certainly travel to witness, if I had my own time transporter. There could be others, and these are in no particular order.

Aviation has always fascinated me, especially since I read a book about the Wright Brothers years ago.

It sounded so cool – two brothers and a dream, achieving the first heavier-than-air flight. That fascination continues to now, and I recently began work on my private pilot’s certificate so I can participate in ‘the dream’ myself. But given the chance, I’d go back to Dec. 17, 1903: Kitty Hawk, N.C. and witness the first flight for myself.

I’ve always thought it would be interesting to meet Thomas Alva Edison, so I’d probably travel to 1878 and try to hang around Menlo Park until 1880, to see the work on improving the light bulb.

Witnessing the birth of the Internet could happen in 1980 when I meet Tim Berners-Lee, the credited inventor of the World Wide Web which has so changed our society.

Linux has changed the way the world thinks about software. For the most part, it was the first open source project to attract worldwide press.

A visit to Finland in the summer of 1991 would allow me to meet Linus Torvalds, the original author, during the primary development phase.

April 1, 1976 marked the founding of Apple Computer. It would be a pleasure to meet Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak as all of this development was going on.

It would be educational to spend several “destination time” years at this alone.

SpaceShipOne flew in the summer of 2004 and shortly thereafter in the fall, claiming the Ansari X-Prize and marking the first non-governmental space flight. When I look back, I can’t understand why I didn’t road trip out to see at least one of these voyages.

Most importantly, I would like to travel to approximately the year 0, A.D. and meet Jesus. Could I express the gratitude in my heart? Would I even be able to say anything? I won’t have to wait that long to meet Him for eternity, anyway, but it would still be a neat trip.

One could put quite a résumé together as a time traveler. You could truly work on every technological advancement for the past few centuries. But my gut feeling is it would be hard to convince the interviewer you were telling the truth when your résumé spanned several centuries.

Being a time-traveler would have its drawbacks, though. I’d probably have to write some software for my PDA to keep track of what day it is in real life, and where I am at the “present” time. I’d have to keep that PDA well hidden. They’ve only been around a couple decades, and if I carry one around during any other time period it’d probably raise suspicions. Slightly.

Not even a time machine would make me live longer, and it would be hard to keep family and friends from being suspicious when I age five years over the course of a day. Since it’s my own little world already, we’ll just say I found the fountain of youth.

Focusing on the past also tends to make us not focus on the present or the future, and why would I want to do that? I’m excited to be alive now, doing my best to follow God’s plan for my life – what higher calling could there be than that?

Besides, I’d probably screw up the space-time continuum and destroy the fabric of the entire universe.