Time travel/Legends

The term time travel refers to travel from one point in time to another, analogous to travel from point to point in realspace or hyperspace. It does not generally refer to a body's natural experience of the flow of time along with the rest of the universe; rather, it refers to travel to the past against the natural flow of time, or travel to the future at a rate faster than that of the rest of the universe.

While time travel was an exceedingly rare phenomenon, a few cases have been partially documented. No record of deliberate, physical time travel is known&mdash;all known cases involved unusual hyperdrive malfunctions, the effects of the Force, or similar exotic events.

Darth Rivan and the Darkstaff
The Darkstaff was an artifact that was discovered by Darth Rivan. Rivan had strange dreams about being called by the artifact and tracked it down to Almas. Rivan believed that it was the Darkstaff that drew him to Almas and the Cularin system, hoping to use him as a way to leave the system. Further investigation led Rivan to believe that the Darkstaff was not intentionally created, but was rather the byproduct of another experiment.

Measuring a meter in length and four centimeters in diameter, the Darkstaff seemed to consume any light around it. It also consumed any Force energy around it, literally feeding on the Force. According to Rivan's dreams, the Darkstaff had already caused some ancient tragedy in the Cularin system, and had been hidden away to prevent any further catastrophe. Rivan believed that the destruction of the planet Oblis, which created the Cularin system asteroid belt and a nexus of dark side power, was the aftermath of this event. The Darkstaff wanted to be discovered by Rivan so that he could use it as a weapon against his enemies, so it invaded his dreams. Its release would allow the Darkstaff to gain power, both for itself and over Rivan, until it eventually consumed Rivan himself. Rivan, however, refused to go in search of the artifact, fearing that its release would cause great damage to the galaxy. Rivan later managed to harness the power of the Darkstaff to create a Force Storm that swept him through time and space to the planet Ruusan, during the battles between the Jedi Army of Light and the Sith Brotherhood of Darkness several centuries later. There, with his Force power drained by the Darkstaff, he was easily slain by a Force-sensitive warrior.

Centuries later, Darth Rivan's writings were discovered by the Jedi Knights who built the Almas Academy. Word of the Darkstaff reached the ears of Len Markus, who set out to search for it. Len Markus was observed removing something from the Cularin system's asteroid belt, an event which preceded the appearance of strange creatures hiding among the asteroids. Shortly after the Invasion of Naboo, the Cularin system disappeared for several years, before reappearing just as suddenly. Many believe that Markus found the Darkstaff, and that its release from captivity was the cause of the disappearance of the entire Cularin system.

Mace Windu and the Secret of Tet-Ami


In the last decades of the Galactic Republic, the Temple of Tet-Ami on Benja-Rihn was the subject of much speculation. Built some four thousand years earlier, the temple commemorated a great hero called Tet-Ami, the Time Guardian, who saved the armies of Carthas from a plague of insect-like beasts in an epic battle. The temple contained a statue of Tet-Ami, holding an artifact called "The Orb of Passage" which was said to control the flow of time. Sometime after its construction, the orb was secretly taken by the Jedi Order, and the temple was lost.

Just as the rediscovered temple was about to be excavated by an archaeological dig, the Jedi Council sent Mace Windu to secretly enter the temple. His mission was to place the orb into the outstretched hand of the statue of Tet-Ami before the archaeologists arrived. Windu had no trouble entering the cave without being seen, and easily fought off a few ancient battle droids who guarded the temple's inner sanctum. He was surprised, however, to find that Tet-Ami's statue resembled him.

Even more surprising was what happened when Windu placed the orb in the statue's hand. Windu was sent backwards in time, appearing on a battlefield just as the Carthasian armies were about to be attacked. Windu joined the fight, and turned the tide of battle. After spending four days in the past, he returned to his own time period, arriving just as the archaeologists entered the temple.

When he returned to Coruscant, Yoda revealed to Windu that the Jedi Council had long known the secrets of Tet-Ami, and were simply waiting for the orb's energies to recharge, and for a Jedi Knight named Mace Windu to join the order, take the Orb of Passage back to Carthas, and win the battle. Thus, the time paradox was neatly resolved. In Yoda's words, "Always must a Jedi start the job he finished!"

Bosbit Matarcher, the 225-year-old man


In 212 BBY, Bosbit Matarcher engaged the hyperdrive on his Delmedian starhopper, intending to take a short trip from his homeworld of Delemede. Due to faulty relativistic shielding, what he experienced as a two-hour trip took 190 years from the perspective of the rest of the galaxy. His experiences brought him brief notoriety when he arrived in 22 BBY, resulting in a HoloNet News interview. Matarcher took the experience in stride, as his run-down homeworld had become prosperous in the meantime. However, he decided to let someone else fly him home.

Matarcher's trip may not be strictly defined as time travel to the future, as he did not "skip over" any period of time. Instead, time merely passed in a distorted manner for him due to the well-known effects of time dilation.

Kinnin Vo-Shay's escape from the Tyus Cluster
Renowned gambler Kinnin Vo-Shay's experiences were similar to those of Bosbit Matarcher. Circa 50 BBY, Vo-Shay's ship, the Ashanda Ray, was caught in the Tyus Cluster, a mass of black holes. Vo-Shay would have died, crushed in a black hole with his ship like many travelers before him. However, one of the Tyus Cluster's previous victims was the Jedi Master Aryzah, who had managed to survive the destruction of her body as a Force ghost. She made contact with the slightly Force-sensitive Vo-Shay, and helped him fly the Ashanda Ray out of the cluster.

However, the high gravitational fields of the region had caused significant time dilation. In Vo-Shay's words, "at the center of that mass of ugly black holes, time was nonexistent." When Vo-Shay and Aryzah escaped the cluster, he found that some fifty years had passed for the rest of the Galaxy since Vo-Shay's disappearance.

C-3PO, R2-D2, and the Sooma/Alzar incident


While working as diplomatic couriers, the droids R2-D2 and C-3PO were assigned to escort the child Prince Plooz from Sooma to his home planet, Alzar. Along the way, their ship were attacked by the forces of General Sludd, a renegade from Alzar who was plotting to kill the prince in order to start a war which would allow him to conquer both planets. In an effort to escape, R2-D2 engaged the hyperdrive even though Prince Plooz, in an effort to "help", had damaged the anti-matter power systems. The droids and the prince jumped to hyperspace just as Sludd's electron torpedoes detonated. Whether because of the damage to the hyperdrive power systems, the explosion of the nearby electron torpedoes, or both, their ship came out of hyperspace in a starless void. Their only apparent exit was a rift which took them to the Endor system&mdash;but when they went through the rift, they discovered that they had not only traveled to another system, but to another time.

Plooz, believing himself to be in his home system, ran away from his caretakers in an escape pod which took him to the forest moon of Endor. After some adventures on Endor, where R2-D2 and C-3PO met the Ewoks of Bright Tree Village and rescued the royal toddler from a group of Duloks led by King Gorneesh, the droids and the prince returned to their ship and went back through the time rift. They arrived only minutes after they left, escaped Sludd's forces, and brought the prince back to Alzar safely.

The timing of this incident is unclear; while C-3PO and R2-D2's readings on arrival in the Endor system implied that they had traveled one hundred years into the future, the Ewoks and Duloks they met on Endor included such figures as Wicket W. Warrick and Chief Chirpa who participated in the Battle of Endor. At the time of their mission on Alzar, the two droids were traveling independently, which implies the incident took place while they were temporarily separated from their usual assignments on board the Tantive IV. This would mean that the incident involved a displacement of less than twenty years. When C-3PO returned to Endor in 4 ABY, he did not seem to recognize any of the Ewoks he had met previously, though memories of the golden droid's previous, seemingly supernatural appearance may have affected the Ewoks' worshipful attitude towards him.

The Eternity Crystal hoax


During the Galactic Civil War, Luke Skywalker came across an abandoned spacecraft of unknown origins while on a reconnaissance mission for the Rebel Alliance. A set of image tapes recovered from the derelict, once decoded, showed that the ship was an artifact of the extinct Jerni civilization. These tapes also talked about an artifact called the "Eternity Crystal", used by the long-lost Jerni civilization to control the flow of time. According to the tapes, this power was used to prevent conflicts and crises within their society by reversing their history and starting again on a different path. The tape also gave the location of the crystal, in a vault near Adony Station on the planet Jerne.

The Rebel leadership quickly realized that such power could be used to their advantage in the war&mdash;for that matter, it could be used to prevent the rise of the Galactic Empire and stop the war from even starting. Luke, together with his droid R2-D2 and Princess Leia Organa, was sent on a mission to Jerne to investigate.

As it turned out, the "Jerni" ship and the image tapes on board were fakes created by Imperial technicians under the orders of Darth Vader. The story of the Eternity Crystal was only the bait for a trap intended for Princess Leia, who Vader knew would want to change history to bring back her beloved Alderaan. As soon as they arrived on Jerne, the three Rebels were immediately met with opposition from the waiting Imperial garrison. They were forced to ask a group of local guerrillas and bandits led by Meeka Reen for assistance, but Reen betrayed them in an attempt to take the crystal for herself. Luckily for Skywalker and Organa, this meant Reen and her henchmen were killed by the Empire's traps, while the Rebels escaped Jerne unharmed by stealing Lord Vader's TIE shuttle.

Tilotny, Horliss-Horliss, Splendid Ap, Cold Danda Sine, and Princess Leia


At another time during the Galactic Civil War, Princess Leia Organa, fleeing from the Empire, crashed on an unknown planet. There, she discovered what seemed to be the remains of stormtroopers who had been dead for many thousands of years.

Before she could investigate further, however, she was chased by three stormtroopers and discovered a group of "spirits"&mdash;Tilotny, Horliss-Horliss, Splendid Ap, and Cold Danda Sine&mdash;who had immense powers, capable of shaping space and time. While the spirits were in the middle of a conversation, they noticed Leia and the stormtroopers who had been chasing her. The spirits decided to "play" with the four Humans, and managed to kill all of them in the process.

Once they were finished, though, Splendid Ap was tasked with returning the four beings to normal. Ap resurrected the three stormtroopers, but not having a concept of time, also transported them back 8,000 years in the past; these were the stormtroopers whose remains Leia had encountered when she crashed. Leia, however, escaped the stormtroopers' fate and was restored just as she had been previously in the correct time.

Sam Heggs's account


In 3 ABY, a spacer and hunter named Sam Heggs was traveling through Mos Eisley, where he told an odd story to a bounty hunter named Jeet Travis.

Heggs claimed that while on Nimba 5 hunting bemis, he came across a nest of grumph eggs. Soon afterwards, though it was the middle of Nimba 5's long winter, he found a lush jungle nearby. In the jungle, he came across a young man being chased by a grumph. Heggs was unable to affect anything in the jungle in order to help the young man, though he was able to communicate with him. However, he somehow discovered that he was viewing an incident in the past, but that changes he made in the present would go backwards in time. Apparently, the grumph was experiencing time in reverse, so destroying an egg in the present would cause it not to exist in the past. Heggs began destroying the grumph eggs, eventually destroying the egg which erased the grumph which menaced the young man. Heggs determined that the young man was himself in an earlier time period, since he recognized his initials on the young man's backpack.

Other than Heggs's story and the sack of grumph eggs he brought with him to Mos Eisley, no evidence of this incident exists. It may only have been a nonsensical story which Heggs used to separate Travis from his bottle of Vaschean rye.

Jacen Solo's flow-walking
The Jedi Jacen Solo learned a Force power called "flow-walking" from the Aing-Tii. This ability allowed him to not only view the past, but also leave an imprint of himself there, though it is unspecified whether or not he could actually interact with the past or alter history using this power. He used this power in 35 ABY to witness the crash of the Tachyon Flier in 27 ABY, and leave an imprint of himself for his mother, Leia Organa Solo, to follow.

In 40 ABY, Jacen flow-walked again, this time to the Jedi Temple in 19 BBY, to observe the fall of his grandfather, Anakin Skywalker. On two separate occasions, he visited the Jedi Temple: Once during the Raid on the Temple, where it is possible he was seen by a clone trooper, and another time during a meeting of the Jedi Council, where he avoided detection by concealing himself with the Force. Nonetheless, it remains to be known whether or not the clone trooper or the Jedi could have seen or sensed him at all, since this power may only allow its user to see the past and not to actually exist in it.

Jacen Solo's use of flow-walking may be the only recorded deliberate use of time travel, and it is likely that flow-walking was used by Solo, and by the Aing-Tii, on other occasions. However, it is unclear whether or not this ability counts as actual traveling through time: It did not involve physical movement through time, and it is unknown whether or not someone using this ability actually goes back to the past or if they merely view it the way one would view a holo-recording.

Behind the scenes
Time travel was also a plot device used in Alien Exodus, a canceled and thus non-canonical novel. In Alien Exodus, the humans of the Star Wars galaxy are revealed to be the descendants of a group of refugees from Earth whose ship accidentally traveled through a wormhole. This wormhole took them not just to another galaxy, but to another time, billions of years in the past: in other words, they found themselves "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away."

Another non-canon story which links the Star Wars universe with Earth is Into the Great Unknown part of Star Wars Tales 19. In this story, a hyperspace accident leads Han Solo and Chewbacca to crash the Millennium Falcon on an unknown planet which is obviously Earth. 126 years later, the wreckage and Han Solo's body are discovered by Indiana Jones. Depending on how long ago "a long time ago" is assumed to be, the Falcon's trip in this story may also have involved time travel. In any case, since Han Solo dies in the story, Into the Great Unknown is non-canon.

Appearances

 * The Secret of Tet-Ami
 * Echoes of the Jedi
 * The Last Hand
 * Star Wars Droids 4: Lost in Time
 * Dark Knight's Devilry
 * Tilotny Throws a Shape
 * Ewoks 10: The Demons of Endor
 * Dark Nest I: The Joiner King
 * Bloodlines
 * Inferno
 * Invincible
 * Bloodlines
 * Inferno
 * Invincible