Certain earth animals can time travel two different ways. They are both methods of what I call ignorant time travel. If you can somehow ignore time’s ordinary passage and “wake up” in the future – that is ignorant time travel.
The first method is obvious. Hibernation by bears and other species is prompted by a large overfeeding of the animal which is followed by a months long, winter “sleep”. Tadah! It’s like time travel for the bear. There is no problem with cause and effect because the bear can never go back.
Wood frogs can literally freeze and thaw as many times as winter demands without damage. Proteins in their blood cause it to freeze first, sucking the water out of most of the rest of the frog’s cells. In the meantime the frog’s liver makes glucose that fills the cells again. This results in little damage from freezing which affects almost all other life forms. So the frog freezes when it’s cold and hops away when it warms up.
The first method has long been wanted by science fiction authors. So much so that instead of calling it hibernation it has the term suspended animation.
Freezing then being thawed and awakened has the technical sounding term cryogenics. So far it has been impossible because the water in our cells ruptures the cells when it freezes. This hasn’t stopped such authors like my namesake (Larry Niven) from writing about “corpsicles” being thawed successfully and it has become a trope, now, by such shows as Futurama.
I think little headway has been made with either method in science because we need to experiment on human beings to allow these methods to work for us. So they must show that it is very likely to successfully work on humans before doing the experiments. First they should have to prove that it works on a non hibernating species or a non wood frog. Only then would it be likely that we could time travel into the future.
But what if it doesn’t work, that their are limits to the things that can be done to humans and still allow us to live?
I think if we are defeated in this that we somehow may be able to mix hibernater/wood frog’s DNA with humanity’s DNA in such a way that our partial descendants can successfully time travel.
Look we’ve managed to do things that only animals in the past could do – like fly. I see no reason why we can’t use ignorant time travel like the animals do. Besides, as a Canadian I’d like to skip each and ever winter. Xmas can be moved and hockey really isn’t that great. And this should allow me to outlive my tropical friends who might not skip anything.
