The idea that humans might be able to travel backward or forward in time, an idea that has been of occasional interest, particularly during this last hundred years. H. G. Wells (1866-1946) in The Time Machine (1892) imagined a machine that could transport its occupant forward or backward through time and deposit him or her in what would inevitably be an alien culture.
At the time of its publication, Wells’s fiction was greeted both with interest and ridicule. The Pall Mall Gazette invited him to say how he thought humankind might develop in the next million years, and Punch satirized his ideas in an anonymous poem “1,000,000 A.D.”