If viruses could somehow reduce their entropy as a whole, they should be able to move freely through time, by being able to do so, strains of the future could infect populations of other organisms in the past. The way spread would occur is by means of spatial superpositioning.

Imagine there’s a human on the base of what would be the Eiffel Tower in the year 1676, they’re just minding their own business but at arriving home, realizes they’re terribly sick, even when they knew all precautions to not get sick were taken and the area they were in was empty of people at the time. Now, imagine a human in the year 2034, this guy is infected with a weird strain of time-travelling superbug, they are strolling in the beautiful city of Paris when they decide to stop at the base of the Eiffel Tower, this is the chance the superbug has been waiting for.

For us humans, time goes in an inescapable arrow of time, always forward, events from the past cannot be retrieved back. But for the virus, time is a free-to-move dimension, just like space is to us, so it is able to experience a lot of events from different points in time just as we are able to see and be in different points in space. Now, the two humans are in the same point of space, but not in the same point in time, so off course, for us they are completely unrelated and do not interact whatsoever. But for the superbug, which can travel through time back and forth, the humans are practically superimposed on each other.

When it is inside the body of the human from 2034, it can travel back in time 358 years, and when this happens, the superbug is now inside the body of the 1676 human, moving through time instead of space like regular viruses and bacteria do in order to spread. The way this species spreads, is by spatial superpositions, when two organisms are in the same point in space but in different points in time, this would impose an obvious challenge for regular viruses, but since this one has time-travelling abilities, it is the perfect opportunity to spread in the most effective way.

Now there are hundreds upon hundreds of implications this superbug could have in human history and the Earth’s life history itself, these will be explained thoroughly.

As human civilization advances, there is more and more people, more and more people visiting more and more times the same locations in space as other people has before, the bigger the population of humans, the more spatial superpositions are available for the superbugs to use, so statistically, the majority of time-travelling superbugs found in other points in time come from the far future, the further into the future they arise, the most common they are; since it is in the future where there are more spatial superpositions for them to spread.

Although it seems that the whole earth is theirs, there’s a few constraints that forbid them from over-thriving, let’s begin with the first one

Time travelling limit:

There is a limit on how far into the past they can travel back to spread succesfully, and we can say thanks to the Stratigraphy of Earth for this. As geological periods go by, points in time differ from one another in the height of their soil, The Permian soil was lower that the Triassic one, this is how paleontologist can get an easy record of time, the deeper you go, the furthest into the past you are looking at.

now, you may have already realized what this means for the time-travelling superbug, as geological periods go by, spatial superpositions become hard to pinpoint, since a point in space where a crow is in 2017 is now different in the y axis than a point in space in the Triassic where a T. rex was standing. if the time travelling superbug where to attempt to infect a T.rex trough a crow, he would fail misserably by a lot of meters high, it would appear way over the ancient dinosaur and perish to the lack of a livable environment (dinosaur gut).

so it is a pretty good limit set by Earth itself in order to forbid the superbug’s world domination, but what about if they found a way? what if they infect a human that is deep into a cave system? the spatial superpositions would still be low in probability, but if it were to find a spot it would work.

In a future in which humans are aware of this species of superbug, they take extreme precaution when looking for fossils. Fossil Shales are the most protected areas by health organizations, since they are in direct contact with stratifications that have not changed much through the pass of time, the amount of spatial superpositions available for the viruses to use is staggering, indeed, Fossil Shales are the places with the highest density of spatial superpositions, since billions upon billions of organisms have passed through those places, without stratification happening, Fossil shales are time-travelling superbugs’ hotspots of infection. Conversely, mountain ranges which have been constantly changing through time, would be the places with the lowest density of spatial superpositions, since very few organisms have passed through there, so high mountain ranges would be perfect quarantine spots.

Now are these organisms possible? Well let’s take a look first at its evolutionary stability, could an organism evolve time travel abilities?

Well, if an organism could somehow decrease its entropy, it would allow it to experience time more slowly, it would be able to cover a wider lifespan (although the ’amount of life’ that the organism experience is the same) and this would definitely be an advantage, it’d be more effective to both reproduce and spread.

So now, let’s say an organism started decreasing its entropy just a little, a second to it is 0.000001 % longer than a second to other closely related organism, so now, the trait is useful and it begins to become fixed in the gene pool of the species and organisms that are able to lower their entropy more will have a survival advantage, so the trait would not only get fixed but improved as time goes by. The entropy of the species gets to a point that it’s so slow, that time doesn’t go forward anymore, it stops. All of this is, of course, assuming entropy is the reason why we are always moving forwards in time.

So, the entropy of the organism is at its minimum, it is not bound to the inescapable flow of time anymore, the passage of time is inexistent, it is now as stationary as space. So, just like space, they can move freely through its dimensions. So now, time traveling is an ability that can be acquired through natural selection.

Still, there’s a little problem with this fictional creature, it is able to move through time, just like space, but it is not able to teleport through time, it cannot go from point A to point B immediately, it must move slowly step by step just like with space, a person cannot jump point of spaces in order to get to other ones, it must pass through every single one along the way. If I was to go to the building number 40 in a street, and I’m in building 1, I must pass through building 2, 3, 4, and so on in order to get to the number 40, I cannot just disappear from building 1 and reappear in building 40, I must move in space slowly until I achieve my destination.

Conversely, the virus cannot jump from year 2034 into year 1867 just like that, it must move through time slowly, passing through year 2033, 2032, 2031 and so on...

So for the virus to really by able to successfully reproduce through time and spread, it must need a continuous, uninterrupted row of spatial superpositions for it to grow. So yeah, it’s not looking really good for this hypothetical species, because, for a virus from 2034 to get to me, currently in my balcony in the seventh floor of the building I live in, there must be someone in this same exact spot for the next 19 years... And that’s not happening, look, I just moved, I’m not in that position anymore, 7 seconds, 8 seconds, 9 seconds, the spatial superposition continuum has been interrupted by this amount of time and still counting, the virus could not have gotten to me. Now I’m back in the spot, if the virus arose in me right now and it wanted to infect the me that was in the spot a minute ago, it would need to teleport about 64 seconds into the past. But it can’t do that, it cannot teleport, and teleportation is required for its survival and its success. Now... Can it teleport?

Humans have already achieved quantum teleportation, spatial teleportation at least, they were able to teleport a single particle from a point A to a point B positioned at an astonishing 500 kilometers away, although this was for only one particle, scientist of the field say that it could be possible with living beings, really small ones off course. Indeed, currently, as of September 2015, there’s a group of scientist trying to put a bacteria in a superpositioned stated, that is, they are going to place a single bacteria in two different spaces simultaneously, if they are successful, bacteria could also quantum teleport through space, nice.

So yeah, small organisms can spatially teleport, but that’s because humans made it so, can they develop a way of teleporting through space naturally? Could they evolve such a trait? Still, a time traveling virus could survive and thrive even if it can’t spatially teleport, hypothetically, in a future in which humans are thriving with a ridiculous, astounding amount of population.

Imagine in that future, there’s a plaza that is in constant presence of humans, a lot of them, imagine they all move through the plaza squeezed together, like a really crowded bus or a concert. They are always moving like that, a lot of humans, all day and night.The flow of people is unstoppable, somehow humans found a way of working through night as if it was day (nothing really far-fetched), so the flow of humans is constant and uninterrupted, a spatial superposition continuum. In this scenario, assuming humans live for a substantial amount of time in this greatly populated state, the time traveling virus could travel through time infecting people of the past, without them even noticing it.

The past plaza scenario suffers the same constraint other scenarios do, the limit on how far back they can travel, assuming people will live through this greatly-populated state for a long, really long time, through geological time periods (really unlikely for humans), the ground level will rise, changing the landscape of the plaza and hence, interrupting the spatial superposition continuum needed for the virus to thrive. However, if this overcrowded place was a skyscraper instead of a plaza, they would be safe and sound for a really long time.Imagine this plaza is now at the last floor of a skyscraper, something like a terrace, people must cross it daily in order to get from the south of the city to the north* so it is extremely overcrowded, perfect for the time-traveling virus to live and thrive, beyond that, it is extremely high, so the superbug will have perfect habitat for a long, long time.

How would the superbugs arise? Now we know why is it an evolutionary advantage to time travel and how could it time travel, through the decrease of entropy, but how could this decrease arise? Well, viruses are perfect for this adaptation, specially the modern ones, the ones that have like 4 or 7 genes, these are not only simple genetically, but also physically, they don’t have metabolism, and this is crucial for the abolishment of entropy in an organism.

We humans and most other organisms have metabolism, which allows us the transform matter into energy through chemical processes and heat release. When our bodies do these things we create more entropy, there’s more dissipated energy everywhere we go, from the entropy produced by our complex metabolism of food, to the one produced by our mere, constant heartbeat. Indeed, every move we perform, wether a marathon or a blink, stirs up the air around us, it adds up to the dissipated energy of the environment and hence, increases the entropy of the universe. If it weren’t for entropy, we wouldn’t be able to move, since moving as we know it requires dissipation of energy, and the cells and the inner workings of our bodies must be in constant motion for them to work. In a universe without entropy, we would have even evolved, there would even be galaxies nor nebulae, everything would be condensed in an unchanging, orderly speckle of energy, but that’s irrelevant to the story.

But viruses don’t live like this, they may have in the past, but they are much more simpler now, there’s no heart constantly pumping blood into them, there’s no osmotic pressure being pumped into hydrophilic and hydrophobic transport of proteins, nothing, they are just an unchanging, orderly bundle of proteins and enzymes stranded together. They only move when they reproduce, other than that, they are pretty much ignoring entropy, living their lives without having to succumb to its force.

So the further decrease of this movement and entropy is completely plausible within the reach of the virus workings, so it isn’t only a stable evolutionary advantage, but a possible one. There’s still a little problem viruses would need to solve, they still need to move, to spread and reproduce, so they would need to adapt a method of increasing their entropy after moving through time, this way, enabling them to spread through their host of said time period. This would be a kind of phenotypic plasticity, in which, depending on the environment, they would change their overall entropy between none and enough for them to move and reproduce.

So this viruses would be born with a certain amount of entropy exerted, as to spread through its home host, after which, it gets prepared to time travel by lowering its entropy to its minimum point, zero, now that the virus is not bound to the constant passage of time in one direction, it is able to move in time freely in any direction. After finding a new host in a different time period, the virus must again regain entropy, as to move through its host, reproduce and die.

Now the implications of its existence in such a universe like ours, would be really interesting. If a virus time travels to the past say, from 2045 to 1986, it would hit the people of the past hard and surprising to them, but then, these people of 1986 would have more time to study this organism, to understand its biology and to come up with a vaccine able to eradicate them all. So now, they know this species, and know how to eradicate the. So okay, they have the ability to eradicate them, but this would probably be impossible, let’s say the people from 1986 were able to eradicate the whole species by 1987, being optimist; well, back in 2045, there were a lot of these viruses, and they travelled to a lot of different time periods, say, to 1987, 1988, 1989, etc...

So although they had eradicated the ones that first appeared in 1986, there’s a constant income of other individuals from the same species from 2045. A constant resupply of time-traveling viruses directly from the future. So yeah, they can’t eradicate them, but, they do have the vaccine, so what does it matter? They can kill all of this resupply. (Remember they all come from 2045, so they are all the same, do not speciate, and do not evolve.)

So these people with the vaccine keep moving through time, lacking the ability to decide where to go or how fast, these people get to 2043 lets say, with their vaccine still working perfectly. Well, it is 2043 the same year this specific time-traveling viruses first arose, this is the year where the first organisms pertaining this species evolved, they are the progenitors of all those individuals that travelled back to 1986, to 1987, to 1988, to all this places in time. You might be able to tell where this is going, this founder organisms are perishing against the well-developed vaccines made by the humans from 1986, they are withering, they are dying, they are dead. They have been eradicated.

Now, the implications are, off course, paradoxical, confusing at the least. All this organisms are now dead, and so, the viruses that travelled back in time to initially infect people from 1986, were never conceived, they never existed. So 1986 humans were hence, never infected, and indeed, they never had the necessity to develop a vaccine, so they never did! But by not creating a vaccine, the virus is free to grow and evolve as it did in the original timeline, so they would be able to reproduce, and hence, would be able to go back in time to 1986 to infect the humans of that time period! Again (?

So what’s going on? The solution to this paradox lies in how we see time, we cannot know much of it, we’re really limited by our experiences. We move in time going in a fixed direction, and a speed which varies, but which we have no control of, so it’s really hard for us to imagine. If time works as space (or at least should) then we can see what’s going on as a Cartesian plane in which there are two different timelines, which diverge from a single one at 1986 and meet again at 2045

So if this is the case, then the paradox is solved, there’s no such thing as that, is just something hard to imagine and hence, confusing. But how would this timeline-divergence and rejoin look like to the people experiencing it? Well, when the people from 2045 terminated the whole species, that event had a direct influence back in 1946, which caused them not to make a cure, in which a new timeline appears that concludes by leaving a 2045 with a lot of TTVs and no cure. So at the very instant they finish eradicating the species, they will be in a world in which there never was a cure and they never eradicated the species, allowing them to go back in time and reproduce in 1986 and so, the cycle continues....

All of these ideas that serve as food for thought will be expanded thoroughly as we explore the universe in which viruses can travel through time! I hope your experience with this work is worth your time, we don’t move as freely as we would like to.