A couple of weeks ago, I speculated on the Bears’ playoff chances with help from PlayoffStatus.com. Unfortunately, things haven’t gone entirely the Bears’ way, the regular season is over, and their chance of reaching the postseason is listed at zero percent. However, I would argue that this projection fails to consider potential external factors that could lead to a playoff spot.

Of course, there’s the “24 scenario.” If you’ve seen the third season of the television show “24,” you will recall that an international terrorist maintained control of twenty or so nuclear weapons, all of which were located in major American cities. President David Palmer had no choice but to comply with his wishes, so in effect, he was a sort of “shadow President” who was able to leverage his power to have virtually any order executed. Now, just suppose this international terrorist were a Bears fan, and demanded that they be awarded a playoff slot. While this scenario is highly improbable, it is not absolutely impossible, and there are a lot of Bears fans out there.

However, I’m more interested in the possibility of time travel. Stop looking at me like that.

Mainstream science acknowledges that forward time travel, in all likelihood, is at least theoretically possible, and it is unwilling to rule out the possibility of reverse time travel. Does a time machine exist in the present day? Almost certainly not, but humanity has the remainder of its history to figure it out, and if backward time travel is indeed possible, we may be able to harness it at some point.

Before I continue, I must stress that we cannot allow ourselves to sink into any sort of smoke-and-mirrors nonsense. A time machine, if such a thing can even exist, is not a “magic wand.” If agents were to travel back in time with the intent of securing a playoff spot for the Chicago Bears, they would need to subtly alter factors behind the scenes. Perhaps this means installing one’s self as a football coach at a given school, in, say, 1980. The time traveler would identify a player that possessed an acute understanding of the game of football and encourage him to consider pursuing a coaching job in the future. Twenty years later, a second time traveler, who has labored to install himself or someone else as an agent, coach, or administrative official, would recommend that this young man, who is now a seasoned coach, be considered for a coaching spot with the Bears. His impact on the Bears’ 2008 season may be minimal, but even a handful of important plays throughout the season would be enough to engineer the Bears into a playoff team, since they only really need one more victory.

Now, let’s take a step back. Once again, is time travel actually possible? We can glean a surprising level of understanding using only common logic without having to delve into scientific properties. Two “thought experiments” immediately present themselves.

The first is the “grandfather paradox.” In short: what if you were to travel back in time and murder your own grandfather? By simple logic, you would never have been born, so you could not have possibly traveled through time to murder him. This paradox suggests that backward time travel may not be possible, though this is countered by a popular supposition: that if one travels through time and alters history, he, in effect, creates a new universe and a new history through which a completely separate set of circumstances occur.

The second “thought experiment” is presented by famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking: if backward time travel is possible, why don’t we see “time tourists” all the time? Why don’t we see some person from the future screwing around and showing off his Playstation 13 to people? I am almost certainly not the first to parse out the theories here, but these are the possible explanations I can come up with.

1. There is, indeed, no such thing as backward time travel.
2. Backward time travel is possible, but humanity never figures it out, either because we’re not as smart as we think we are, or we die out before we figure it out. (This is actually kind of a drag, but further discourse on this matter is beyond the scope of this post. This post is about the Chicago Bears!)
3. Backward time travel is possible and has been used by future civilizations, but the time travelers are really, really careful about it, and it’s never abused. I find this rather unlikely, given humanity’s propensity toward screwing around.

I think that at this point, I can reach a conclusion of sorts. To project that the Bears will reach the playoffs through means of time travel requires a staggering degree of idealism, but is not altogether foolhardy. There are elements at work in our universe that we do not yet understand. As such, I humbly request that PlayoffStatus.com revises the Bears’ playoff percentage from 0% to <1%.

Disclaimer: despite the well-considered and logically grounded nature of my argument, I realize that it is vulnerable to the “BEARS SUCK” counter-argument. I hope to one day construct a rebuttal.