I've always been a big fan of time travel, and I'm very into the

In the words of Scott Bakula, actor and dreamer, we hear both longing and delight: “I’ve always been a big fan of time travel, and I’m very into the notion that some day we’ll be able to do it. Beam me up!” Though playful, these words carry the essence of humanity’s ancient yearning—to transcend the limits of time and space, and to step boldly into realms not yet possible. Beneath the humor of “Beam me up” lies the same fire that drove explorers to cross oceans and scientists to peer into the stars: the eternal desire to go further than we are allowed.

The idea of time travel is as old as myth itself. The prophets dreamed of visions of the future; poets sang of heroes who walked into the underworld and returned, touching both past and present. In Hindu lore, King Raivata Kakudmi is said to have visited the creator god Brahma and returned to find ages had passed on earth. In the West, philosophers like Augustine pondered the mystery of eternity, and modern storytellers, from H. G. Wells to Einstein, gave shape to time as a dimension to be crossed. Bakula, who himself played a traveler through time on screen, carries this tradition, linking myth, art, and science into one.

To be a fan of time travel is to be a fan of hope itself. It is to believe that the barriers of the present are not final, that the prison of now can be broken, that what lies beyond our grasp may someday be within reach. This is the same spirit that once looked at the moon and refused to see it only as a distant light, but as a destination. Those who dare to dream of time travel are in truth daring to imagine humanity not as a creature bound by limits, but as one destined to overcome them.

The playful cry, “Beam me up!”, evokes the vision of science fiction, yet beneath the jest lies wisdom. For fiction has always been the seedbed of reality. Jules Verne dreamed of submarines and space voyages, and generations later, those dreams became real. Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek imagined communicators, tablets, and universal translators long before engineers built them. Bakula’s jest, like theirs, is half in laughter, half in prophecy: today’s impossible may be tomorrow’s commonplace.

History itself is filled with examples of dreams becoming real. Consider the Wright brothers, mocked for their flying machines, yet within a generation men were soaring across continents. Consider Galileo, once silenced for saying the earth moved, yet his truth became the foundation of modern science. In each case, the dreamers who dared to imagine were the ones who prepared the way for reality. Time travel may seem distant, but the lesson of history is that distance itself may shrink.

Yet Bakula adds humility: “some day we’ll be able to do it”—or perhaps not. This recognition is part of the wisdom. To dream does not mean to demand; it means to keep the possibility alive. The universe may not yield time travel, or it may. What matters is not certainty, but imagination—the openness to wonder, the refusal to declare limits too soon. For imagination itself is the soil in which discovery grows.

The lesson is clear: never scorn the dream, even when it seems impossible. To be a fan of time travel is to be a fan of human potential, of imagination’s boundless horizon. Whether or not we bend time, we are already travelers—through centuries of learning, through worlds of invention, through the endless march of hope.

So I say to you: dream boldly, even if you must laugh while doing so. Cry out like Bakula, “Beam me up!”, not as a demand but as a declaration that your spirit longs to go further. Nourish the impossible with imagination, and one day, perhaps, the impossible will nourish you with reality. For in dreaming of time travel, we honor the greatest journey of all—the journey of the human soul toward the infinite.