The idea of time travel has fascinated both scientific minds and storytellers for generations. It’s the heart of countless theories and the inspiration for some of the most imaginative fiction. We love to think about alternate realities and parallel universes, places where the past can be revisited, the future glimpsed, or whole new versions of life lived simultaneously.
Theoretically, it’s possible. Physics tells us that time travel and parallel universes aren’t entirely out of reach. But for now, we’re still waiting for them to materialize as verified, applicable science.
Yet, even without a time machine, I believe time travel is very real, and we experience it far more often than we think.
Time Travel Through Geography
If you want to experience the past, just travel to a developing country.
The world is divided into developed, developing, and less-developed nations—and moving between them can feel like traveling through time. Living in a developed nation, visiting a less-developed one is like stepping decades into the past.
When I spent a significant amount of time in my father’s hometown, it felt like I had gone back in time. It wasn’t just a different place—it was a different era, with its own pace and lifestyle.
Adapting required learning local roads, neighborhoods, restaurants, and basic services, and everything felt familiar yet foreign. It reminded me of walking the streets of Cairo in the late 1990s, where life moved in rhythms that felt untouched by modern urgency.
In some ways, I’ve experienced this kind of time travel multiple times. Certain neighborhoods in Cairo felt frozen in time, mirroring parts of NYC in the early 2000s. And then there’s Amsterdam, a city that feels like the future—almost as if you’ve traveled ahead a few decades to a world built for seamless efficiency.
Time travel isn’t always about moving backward or forward in history. Sometimes, it’s about stepping into a different reality shaped by geography, culture, and development.
Parallel Universes Hidden in Plain Sight
While physics tells us that parallel universes may exist, we haven’t found practical proof of them—yet. But here’s the thing: We don’t have to wait. We live in a world where multiple realities exist side by side, hidden in plain sight.
Every city, every culture, every lifestyle represents a different universe. Some are stuck in the past; others live in the future. Multiple versions of life coexist, each with its own rules and logic.
And that got me thinking—what if parallel universes aren’t about separate dimensions but simply about the multiple versions of reality we can step into at any given moment?
Rethinking the Beginning of Life
When we ponder life, we often think of it as something with a beginning and an end. Entire philosophies are built around the idea of the first moment, the starting point. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read or heard about “the beginning of life.”
But what if we stop looking at life from that singular beginning? What if we shift our attention to its continuous, cyclical nature? Suddenly, life becomes something far more expansive, far more complex.
The beginning moment—the physical existence of the Earth—concerns only one life cycle. The Earth itself has a life, just like everything on it. But the production of life never stopped. Human life never paused. In reality, what we call “life” is just a continuous production of life, generation after generation, cycle after cycle.
The Continuous Cycle of Existence
This shift in thinking raises more questions than answers, but I think that’s part of the point.
Where do we go when we sleep?
Where do we go when we die?
And more curiously—where do we go when we truly live?
Maybe life isn’t a single path with a beginning and an end. Maybe it’s a continuous loop, a production of experiences, a dance between parallel realities. And maybe time travel isn’t something we’re waiting to discover—it’s something we’ve been doing all along, every time we step into a new version of the world.
“Allah takes the souls at the time of their death, and those that die not during their sleep; then He withholds those on whom He has passed the decree of death and sends the others back till an appointed term; most surely there are signs in this for a people who reflect.” Quran 39:42
Final Thought
Time travel, parallel universes, and existence itself—they all exist in layers, just waiting to be experienced.
Sometimes we travel through time by visiting another city.
Sometimes we step into a parallel universe when we move to a new neighborhood.
And sometimes, if we’re really lucky, we find a way to exist in multiple realities at once—living in the past, the future, and the present all at the same time.
📢 What’s your experience with time travel?
Have you ever visited a place that felt like a glimpse of another era?
Let’s start a conversation—drop your thoughts below.
