AI and Time Travel: Impossible Dreams We Won’t Stop Chasing

As a kid, I was obsessed with time travel. Movies like Somewhere in Time, Time After Time, and Time Bandits made me believe—if only for a moment—that bending time could be possible.

As an adult, that curiosity didn’t fade. After watching Primer, I spent years digging into the real science behind time travel: wormholes, faster-than-light travel, and Einstein’s theory of relativity. The deeper I went, though, the more impossible it all seemed.

One particularly devastating realization was that, according to relativity, an object with mass would need infinite energy to reach the speed of light. And even if we somehow could obtain infinite energy, that object would need infinite mass. Well, shit. So much for time travel.

Lately, I’ve been getting the same sinking feeling about AI.

The race to create machines that can think, learn, and reason like humans is the holy grail of AI. But much like time travel, the closer we get, the more we realize just how impossible it might be. The computational resources required are staggering. Some estimates suggest AI computing demand could consume as much electricity as a small country by 2027. (Source: Bloomberg).

For decades, sci-fi warned us about killer robots and hyper-intelligent machines plotting our extinction. The Terminator, The Matrix, Ex Machina—the fear was always that AI would outsmart us and decide we were no longer useful.

But reality is turning out to be far less cinematic—and perhaps more terrifying. AI won’t destroy us by becoming too intelligent. It will destroy us by consuming the planet before it ever even reaches that point.

The biggest existential threat isn’t rogue AI robots. It’s the machines we can’t see—the ones running in massive, hidden data centers, devouring resources at an unsustainable rate. The water needed to cool AI data centers alone is projected to skyrocket rapidly, with some reports showing that a single ChatGPT query uses as much water as filling a 500ml bottle (Source: Reuters).

The AI machines we fear won’t be coming for us with red eyes and metal fists. They’re already here, hidden in server farms, silently consuming our future, one algorithm at a time.