Everyone in this world, more or less, knows how their life is going to play out. You might pursue this career over that, you might marry a brunette instead of a blonde, you might die of cancer instead of old age…but at the end of the day, life is so damn predictable. You don’t wake up everyday and wonder whether frogs are going to fall from the sky, or if aliens are going to land and share this amazing technology with us. Instead, some days we get excited about little things such as some weird creature we hadn’t seen before , or if we’re lucky once in a blue moon there is good progress towards some exciting future developments. However, at the end of the day none of these developments are LIFE CHANGING.
Until now…News in recent months have hinted at a very exciting possibility: time travel. Now, THAT is what I’m talking about when I say “Life Changing”. Yes, the odds are that its not going to happen in our life time or our grandson’s grandsons lifetime, if ever. However, just the possibility of it happenening is something truely exciting. It’s difficult to understand what this would exactly mean for us, because wild science-fiction movies are usually the only instances where such possibilities are played out for our entertainment, but even these science-fiction novels and movies never really analyze the implications to every-day lives that these discoveries will create. Given that scientifically there is a chance of this actually happening, I think it would be wise to get prepared of how different life could be. It never hurts to “Be Prepared” as the Boy Scout motto goes, and to prepare you for when that time comes, here is how life would be if indeed time travel occured.
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The way the current technology works, is that there is a chance of a ‘time door’ opening, allowing visitors from the future (assuming they have sufficiently advanced technology) to visit our planet. As this would be the first ‘door’ to open in the history of mankind, it would mark the furthest point back in time people of any time could visit. So, unless mankind becomes extinct at some point, or some terrible disaster wipes all documentation of such a ‘door’ opening in 2008 or future research suggests time travel would lead to terrible catastrophes, then essentially people from the year 390124 could and should visit us. You would have to think that thousands and who knows even millions of years later, mankind could develop some truely mindboggling inventions and why shouldn’t a time machine be one of them. So all that requires from us is that this ‘door’ we open in 2008, is enough of a opening for future smart people from the year 1958309753 to work with to establish contact with us.
Now lets get down to what this will mean. A person visiting from essentially the latest point in time could bring with him infinite news/developments/technology. We can in this way, jump thousands of years in progress. Imagine for a second if we were to go back to caveman days and showed them cars, televisions, airplanes etc. That is similar to the impact people from the future visiting us would have. So one day your checking the news and reading about the Microsoft/Yahoo acquisition talks, and then as you surf abit more in the tech section you read about some breaking news that has just transpired. Headline reads: “People from the future have arrived, they have offered the cure to all illnesses, little pills that givc us immortality and removes the necessity to eat or drink anything.” In a few minutes, the whole world that took thousands of years of steady progress and calculated achievements to develop – will have completely been uphauled.
The question then becomes: if the future does solve all our problems, then what will be left for us to do? We will have everything we want, nothing to worry about – life will be…perfect? At the beginning this is what it will seem like. Sick and poor people will no longer be sick and poor, the concept of poverty will cease to exist, and people will no longer have to ‘work’. This last point could create major issues. Fine, we won’t need any more companies producing anything because it is assumed that millions of years from now, there will be cheap machines that can create whatever you want with some simple inputs. But even with infinite resources, our world still needs some hard labour. Even if that problem is solved with robots, there will still need to be some ‘people’ that work (right?)- world leaders, police forces, scientists that produce this future technology, everyone in the entertainment industry, shops and stores of some sorts, babysitters etc – how would you motivate these people to work, remember people don’t need money anymore with high-tech advancements solving all problems (is this perhaps why the supreme being created our world with limited resources?).
There certainly will still be crime and terrorism, because poverty is not always the reason for such things. Of course, more and more technology can be brought from the future to combat all these problems.. Like drugs that remove the anger from psychopaths, and police intelligence so smart it prevents bad things from ever happening ala “Minority Report”. But perhaps you can see a dark pattern developping here, and it is similar to those science fiction movies where ultimately technology fails us. Utopia simply can’t happen when everything in the world is unnatural.
Furthermore, even if the implementation of future technology solves all our problems – what reason would we have to live? We have infinity to live, but yet there is nothing that hasn’t been done or needs to be done. Life perhaps would be sweet for the first 5 or 10 years where everyone in the world is on holiday and enjoying everything and anything with no worry in the world. But then that all too familiar feeling would start to kick in. You know the feeling you got towards the end of the summer holidays in school where you are getting bored of having nothing but free time.. There would be no progress because all progress has been made, there would be no change because all change has been implemented. So what would be the purpose of anything? There would be a million of entertainment sources, and things to do but at the end of day when you’re going to bed and cExercise/”>Lose your eyes…there will be that realization that it all kinda feels empty without the mystery, without the wondering of the unknown, about all the imagination and possibilities in your head about the future. It would be like watching the most amazing movie/sports match ever possible..but you already know how its going to end. That kind of realization would ultimately crush the human spirit. Alot of what drives us in this world is that in some small, perhaps almost insignificant way we are changing the world and responsible for its progress. Like imagine the guy who invented the paper clip, he might not be the most famous or important person in the world, but I’m sure that his life was great knowing that he had just singlehandedly set a legacy and changed the world.
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All in all, while there would be amazing short term benefits, in the long run time travel would be a terrible thing for humankind. Just like it is incredibly stupid to take a drug that gives you short term pleasure at the cost of life long repercussions – time travel should similarly be kept away from. The way towards a utopia is through sustained development: education, smart economic systems, and politics that is communist in ideal but capitalist in approach (commitalism?).
Hopefully, people thousands of years from now read this, and never enter that portal that would land them in our untouched and perfectly legit world. Then truely, I would will have saved mankind!
PS: Large Hadron Collider time travel readers are also banned.
