As the new year begins, many of us begin to wonder what the future will bring. MacWorld is just around the corner and rumors are flying about what new toys Apple will announce. I could do a column on just these rumors alone, but I’ve decided to take a slightly different approach to making a prediction. Please join me on a flight of imagination!

The inspiration for this foresight comes from the new backup tool called Time Machine in Mac OS X Leopard. As you are already aware, Time Machine is a revolutionary new way to view your backed up files and folders. One gets the illusion of flying or zooming backwards in time to fetch your data. While the visual is stunning and the concept is groundbreaking, I think it could be even more awesome.

Imagine if you will a Time Machine that captures not your data, but the world around it. Open the interface and see a current, real-time representation of the planet Earth, complete with cloud formations. Zoom into a selected area, and get detailed information on weather, traffic, links to live web cams, etc.

What happens if you want to see what the world was like a week ago? Or a month, year, or decade ago? Well, in Time Machine Plus, you could! You’d set the date to your anniversary, wedding day, or the day of your birth and see all of the known data for that place in time. You could flip on the virtual radio, and hear songs that were popular then (along with links to purchase them in iTunes, of course!). Perhaps you could view or print out newspaper articles from that time and place. Pick yet another date and zoom out to watch the planet spin backwards before setting back down, or choose to stay put as time changes and watch the sun and moon zoom in the sky above you.

As technology advances and computers become even more powerful, one could also imagine a detailed three-dimensional world you could virtually travel around in, like Google Earth, Second Life and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine on steroids. Researchers have already found ways to take multiple photographs and reconstruct them into 3D renderings. With photo sharing sites like Flickr hosting thousands of new images per day, it would be interesting to see what could be accomplished if the geographical information could be accurately calculated. Many photos are already geotagged and time/date stamped, so this idea is not as far-fetched as you might imagine.

Over time and as the data available to Time Machine Plus grows, it could be used by researchers to study the world in high detail. Do a global temporal search for a deadly virus, for example, and observe the reported cases represented visually over time. If airline’s historical flight information were also tied in, it would be much easier to trace possible virus transmission routes. Just think of the massive amounts of data currently available on the Internet, all in one easy-to use virtual interface. It sounds complicated, but if anyone has experience in making the complex seem simple, it’s Apple.

I’m looking forward to the day when I can put on a pair of Apple iVR wireless temporal goggles and soar to a nice sandy beach somewhere in time. Id’ just watch the clouds go by as the tide rises and falls. Darn, is that a hurricane? I guess I should have read my horoscope for that day!