Tour of the Universe: My voyage to Jupiter in the year 2019

As a child, my family took a lot of trips. I credit my dad, who was a regional salesman and constantly afflicted with wanderlust. We drove across the country many times, went south to Florida and north to Canada, west to the Hoover Dam and east to Washington D.C.

But nothing tops our voyage to Jupiter.

On one of our trips to nearby Toronto, we visited the CN Tower (then the tallest structure in the world). My youthful nerdhunger was sufficiently sated by the futuristic design of the building and the glass floor of the observation deck.

But at the base of the tower, there was a small marquee advertising what was to be one of the coolest experiences of my life: The Tour of the Universe. My childhood memories of this experience are fuzzy due to the nature of quantum philosophy, but I’ll share what I recall with you.

“Trips to Jupiter?” you might scoff before giving me a wedgie. “Hogwash! There are no trips to Jupiter!” But I’m here to tell you that I lived it — the secret of it all lies in the convenient truth of time travel.

After walking into the basement of the CN Tower of 1986 and paying a not-small sum (hey, time travel is expensive), we were given our standing assignment in a time machine (which curiously resembled an elevator), which whisked us forward to the year 2019 by way of an LED readout.

The doors whooshed open, and we were in the future.

Our senses were assailed by everything the neon-and-black-lit future has to offer — fascinating games, gyroscopic rides, giant wall-size television displays and a million ways to separate our hard-earned 1980s-era money from us.

By way of the aforementioned wall screen, we were briefed on our surroundings. Evidently, by 2019, the space underneath the CN Tower has turned will be turned into a multinational spaceport, and shuttles will be launched up the spine of the CN tower like bullets from a giant gauss gun.

We were allowed to spend time in the spaceport, exploring our surroundings and generally being allowed to go anywhere our security encoded flight ticket would let us be.

Eventually, they called our flight and we proceeded through the exposed-steel-and-ironwork future to go through customs, where helmeted and jumpsuited security guards checked over our stuff. Before getting on the flight, we took a detour to medical, where we were shot with piercing laser beams to inoculate us against any diseases we may encounter on our trip. (To this day, my 10-year-old memories of the experience say I could feel those red beams, even though I know it isn’t true.)

We were loaded into our passenger module and hoisted vertically into place. A brief message from our captain appeared in our viewscreen, and, before I knew it, we were shot through the hollow center of the CN Tower and on our way to Jupiter. The shuttle’s engines rumbled beneath us, and the whole cargo pod (there were about 30 of us strapped in there) shook with the force of liftoff.

My memories of the trip are the fuzziest — no doubt due to some side effect of the time travel and time dilation experienced by moving so fast.

But I do recall a majestic flight past the space station of 2019 before our warp hyperdrive superfast engines kicked in. I dimly remember getting clipped by an asteroid as we moved through the belt. And I even more dimly remember seeing some of Jupiter’s majestic moons.

Before we knew it, our flight to the outer planets was over, and we began our brief return voyage to future Canada. After the flight, we stopped by the gift shop of the universe, where I distinctly remember my parents refusing to purchase anything else on this far-too-expensive voyage (no doubt due to price inflation of the future).

Somewhere, in a box in my garage, I still have the one souvenir I retained from my trip to the future: my flight pass, complete with my dot-matrixed name, blood type, security clearance and species on it. I run across it every few years, gingerly unfolding it so as not to tear the glossy paper.

To the people who worked there, it was a job, but to my childhood brain, it was a voyage into the future that was flawless in its execution. And the ride time machine has long since closed down and most information has been scrubbed from the Internet, most likely due to the Canadian Science Foundation’s belief that time travel is impossible. But I still have proof of its existence in the form of that ticket.

I wonder if it’ll still be good for a flight when it matures in 10 years.

Below: The 1986 commercial for the Tour of the Universe voyage: