The Lazy Man’s Guide To Time Travel

By Joshua Tyler | Updated

Time Travel is one of the most well-used concepts in science fiction, but there’s a problem. It’s always a lot of work.

Whether it requires making insanely difficult calculations to judge how fast to fly around the sun, or rolling up your sleeves to turn an 80s sports car into a styling way to visit the future, time travel never seems easy. It doesn’t have to be that hard.

For today’s stylishly lazy slacker, time travel is only worth the trouble if it doesn’t take much effort.

what if you to visit the future and pick up one of those sweet flying cars but don’t want to have to put forward more effort than it takes to open a can of Pepsi? Don’t worry, science fiction history is full of easy, effort free ways to leap through time and watch your conception. 

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This is the lazy man’s guide to time travel.

Cryogenic Freezing

Get Frozen

It’s not just easy, it’s relaxing. It’s the next best thing to time travel by nap. 

Cryogenics is a tried and true staple of the time traveling genre. Freeze yourself and you’ll end up in the future. It was Cryogenics which accidentally brought slacker pizza delivery boy Philip J. Frye into an awesome, talking head future on Futurama. Of course, it’s also responsible for Khan Noonien Singh, the genetic jerk from the past who stuck a bug in Chekov’s ear while releasing his wrath during Star Trek II

Austin Powers frozen in time
Austin Powers in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)

You hop in a box, put your head on a pillow, get kind of cold, fall asleep, and when you wake up Taco Bell rules the world and Starbucks is now a house of ill repute.

Sure, from then on out you may have a trouble controlling the volume of your voice, but that’s a small price to pay for all the juice you can wheeze and suddenly being the smartest man in the world.

Time travel on Lost

Relax In A Time Jumping Island Paradise 

Smoke monsters aside, that island on Lost was pretty nice. It’s literally Hawaii, since that’s where they filmed it.

Sure, all that time travel on Lost looked like kind of a pain, but it’s only because Jack and the gang don’t know how to relax. 

Dharma’s time traveling island on Lost (2004)

Sure you could run around the jungle pissing off the smoke monster, but if you’re on a time traveling tropical island, why not set up a lawn chair on the beach and wait for Kate to run by in a bikini instead? 

It’s a safe bet to assume that somewhere on any decent time traveling tropical island there’s a supply of Dharma Mai Tais. Mix up a batch, fire up some Jimmy Buffet, then relax on the sand and embrace life as a time-traveling beach bum.

Time Travel in Groundhog Day

Be A Jerk 

We never really know exactly what it is that sends Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day character Phil back in time to repeat the same day over, and over, and over again. My educated best guest, after watching the movie a dozen times, is that his time travel situation happens because he’s a jerk. 

Let’s face it, being a jerk can be kind of fun. If mocking old ladies and pushing dudes into puddles will give me the ability to time travel, then count me in. 

Bill Murray kissing Any MacDowell
Bill Murray pushes the return button in Groundhog Day (1993)

Quantum Leap had it all wrong. 

Master the universe by being one of the most loathsome members of the human race. Travel through time with the Bill Murray method and when you’re finished, simply tongue Andie MacDowell and you’ll find yourself back home. 

What’s all this garbage about setting things right? No thanks. It’s easier to be a jerk.

Bill & Ted time travel

Time Travel By Telephone

If you want see the Mongols ruling China, just make a call. In Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure time travel was so easy, even a couple of idiots could do it, and did. 

A phone booth falls out of the sky, you dial a number, and suddenly you’re hanging out with Socrates learning his most excellent method. 

Bill & Ted dial up the past in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)
Bill & Ted dial up the past in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

Sure a lot of work probably went in to making these time traveling telephones, but the guys who made them don’t seem to want anything in exchange for their use except a quarter. 

Dial up Lincoln and plan an eating at the food court, but leave that short dead dude Napoleon where he belongs, in the past.

Time travel by reading

Take Notes

In The Butterfly Effect Ashton Kutcher plays a guy who can travel back in time by reading his diary. Granted, time travel through reading seems to result in a pretty terrible headache, but as long as you’ve got a bottle of Advil it’s a minimum effort way to change your past. 

Ashton Kutcher reads his diary in The Butterfly Effect (2018)
Ashton Kutcher reads his diary in The Butterfly Effect (2018)

There’s no slingshot around the sun or complicated, outer-space singularity required. All you need is a third-grade education and a lifelong habit of taking extensive notes. 

Just be careful where you step, the butterfly you crush today could be your uncle tomorrow… or something.

Hot Tub Time Machine time travel

Party In A Hot Tub

Normally getting in a hot tub will absolutely not send you spiraling through time. But as proven by Hot Tub Time Machine, if you get in one and party hard enough, it just might send you to meet your future self.

It’s the partying that’s the key, which does sound like a lot of effort, but ultimately it’s about the guests. You could always just lay in the hot tub and spill beer on things, while letting your party guests get rowdy around you.

Wet Time Travel

In Black Knight Martin Lawrence is the janitor at a medieval theme park. He’s basically a loser slacker who, stumbles on a medallion in the park moat and is instantly transported back in time to England where his life is suddenly awesome. 

Martin Lawrence in Black Knight (2001)

Science? Who needs it. Why spend the time and money necessary to invent a flux capacitor when you can get a minimum wage job, fall in some water, and wake up as Sir Lancelot? All you really need for time travel is bad balance and a pair of floaties. 

Wet medallion. It’s the slacker way to leap through time.

Get Kidnapped by Aliens

In Flight of the Navigator 12-year-old David falls in a 1978 ditch and when he wakes up a few hours later it’s 1986. Though the world has moved on, for him no time has passed, and it’s all thanks to alien kidnappers who whisked him away in stasis for further study and then dropped him back on planet Earth when they were done probing him. David on the other hand, remembers nothing, so there’s no invasive probe trauma to deal with. 

Sarah Jessica Parker flirting in Flight of the Navigator (1986)
Sarah Jessica Parker flirting in Flight of the Navigator (1986)

It’s really the laziest way possible to go, the time traveling equivalent of sticking out your thumb and hitching a ride. As a bonus, this time traveling method often results in time spent flirting with a twenty-year-old Sarah Jessica Parker. Worth it.

This also worked out pretty well for Arthur Dent, whose friend Ford Prefect stuck out his thumb and it lead to them traveling through time to visit a restaurant at the end of the universe, in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker books. They even got to see The Legendary Prophet Zarquan, though he was a little late.

Red Dwarf Time Travel

Disobey Orders

Dave Lister is laziness given form, so when he travels three million years into the future, you know it didn’t take much effort. 

On Red Dwarf he disobeys orders by smuggling a cat on board, and as punishment he’s thrown in stasis. There’s an accident, everyone else on board ends up dead, and it’s three-million years before anyone bothers to let him out. 

Dave Lister helps John F. Kennedy on Red Dwarf
Dave Lister helps John F. Kennedy on Red Dwarf

Later in the series Lister does a lot more traveling, using such vague devices as a “time hole”. 

Mostly, time traveling for Dave Lister seems to involve forgetting to duck. If you’re looking for a way to go back in time to talk John F. Kennedy into assassinating yourself, then disobey orders and tag along with Dave.

Time Portals method

Random Desert Portals

Most time travel takes a machine or some kind of super power, but there’s one kind that requires the least effort of all. Randomly occurring time portals.

It might be something someone built a long time ago and left laying around in a desert. Or it might be something of unknown origin that turns a cave into a time loop creator. 

What’s certain is that these always seem to appear in some sort of desert-like environment.Which means you might have to break a sweat to get to it.

Andy Samberg in Palm Springs (2020)
Andy Samberg in Palm Springs (2020)

But that’s all you’ll have to do.

To use a randomly occurring time portal, you walk in and you’re either in the roaring 20s or repeating your own life from a few weeks ago, ending up stuck at an endless party. Either way, taking a walk into something that happens to be lying around is without a doubt the easiest form of time travel there is.

We recommend this as the ideal form of time travel, for minimum effort adventurers.

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