Time Travel

I don’t really like most episodes of the twilight zone. It’s not that I have anything against Rod Serling per se, it’s just that I think many of his viewpoints are depressing. In one particular episode, a scientist despairing at the state of the world builds a time machine and attempts to change three major events in the history of the world; warning the Japanese about the bombing of Hiroshima, attempting to assassinate Hitler, and trying to stop the torpedoing of the Lusitania. In each time period, he is unable to change the course of events, because history, in Mr. Serling’s view is static; that is events are predetermined, and one cannot change anything in the world.

I choose to disagree because if that is so, then there really is no free will at all. If all our actions are merely parts being played in a vast cosmic play, then what is the purpose of any of the decisions we make. Armed with foresight about the world, Serling’s protagonist attempts to escape to a Midwestern town in the 1800s, the epitome of the small town ideal. In this time, he is unable to prevent the fire that took the lives of several school children, and in the process of attempting to change the event ends up causing it himself.

I believe that history can be changed. Pick an apple in old England and Newton may never have considered gravity.

The subject reminds me that there is currently a researcher attempting to make a time machine at UConn. Current scientific consensus is that if the time machine does in fact work, you could only conceivably take is back to the point at which it was invented. Barring all technological or physical obstacles, I can think of a few places I’d like to time travel to:

First, I would like to go to the “beginning” of human history and observe the first Homo sapiens. There are many hypothesis out there about when humanity first began to exhibit modern behavior and I think it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to go back and see it. Assuming changes were reversible—and I think I’m more in the territory of a “what-if” machine by now—I’d love to see what would have happened had evolution taken another path; what if we were the descendants of another hominin like Paranthropus bosiei or even if another genus had developed in our place (hyper intelligent ants? Birds? Elephants?)

Second, I’d like to take an afternoon and visit some of the greatest pioneers of science; Einstein, Edison, Tesla, Newton, Galileo, and see what they would make of our world today.

Third, I would visit some of the greatest cities in the Ancient world in their prime: Pompeii, Rome, Tenochtitlan, Babylon, Jericho, see the pyramids being built. I’d sit in Athens and hear the lyre music that has been completely lost to modern ears. On the other side, I’d love to see Manhattan island the way it was before Hudson “discovered” it. I’d like to feel the absolute wonder you must have gotten looking out on a forest and knowing it goes for hundreds of hundreds of miles.

In some ways, because I was born in the nineties, and have seen so many technological advances in my short 22 years, it feels like the future can’t be to foreign. Serling’s scientist never went to the future—at least in that episode—and I think it was a mistake. His fundamentally pessimistic viewpoint precluded the potential bright future that might lay ahead.

I think I would have gone ahead to see what we accomplish in ten, a hundred, or a thousand years. Unlike most people, it seems, I’m confident that we’ll find the solutions to disease, to global warming, and to war. Sterling may have been stuck on the evils we as a society have perpetrated in the past, but I’d rather look ahead. That future, it seems I can change, whatever Mr. Serling may have believed.

He might have been right. But since I don’t know what will happen, and time travel—at least for now—isn’t real, I’d prefer to go on thinking that what I do has a drastic effect on how the future plays out, because while my actions may not make a difference to the world, they make a world of difference to me.