The Bad Idea That Is Time Travel

I think you can point to several moments in your life you wish you could relive or redo. A detail or fact you wish you could see again, correct, or undo in the past, to manipulate the present toward a more self-serving result. Or you're curious about what lies ahead, you go forward in time set on by a question of how your life or society at large will turn out. Given the opportunity to view our lives as well as world history from an outside perspective, knowing you were capable of jumping into any point in time, breathing the era's air, eating their food, or drinking whatever was put in front of you, the temptation to tamper with events would be too hard to ignore, and you'd pay a terrible price for leaving all the things you're familiar with. Perhaps every work of fiction that's covered the theory of time travel tells a certain truth in that messing with nature, always has a generally negative consequence more than just the individual.

Whether or not time travel is or will remain a fiction based idea is debatable. And since the very server you're reading this on can take you to any website speculating, or even offering 'proof' that time travel's possible, for now there no real way of knowing. But even if it is, it's still a horrible idea. We all have an idealized version of historical timeframes, but it is only an idea. To go back as you are now, accustomed to instant communication, running water, and food you don't have to raise or farm yourself, if you're unwilling to give that up you'd be a fish out of water.

Unless you blended in well somehow and were willing to go without modern thoughts and resources, you'd likely be a public menace to the past whether you wanted to or not. Diseases you've been immunized against would likely devastate entire communities of whatever timeframe you leapt into, and you'll likely catch whatever they had floating around in their air, with your modern immune system being wrecked. Food and drink would have a much different effect than what we're used to with un-distilled and stronger alcohol, less than clean water, and less than sanitary food storage. Bathrooms as you know them might be an outhouse or a hole in the ground, travel would be slower and more treacherous, and you're less equipped to handle harsh elements. Not to mention, depending on who you were, a lot of people would try and kill you.

Jumping back in the past would also shatter your perception of it in good and bad ways. You would see that perhaps things were not as bad as you made them out to be, or as good. Meeting a historical figure would expose you to their humanity, with flaws and aspects of their character you didn't think they had in them. And with your 21st century mode of thought and beliefs, who's to say you're gonna have much in common with them? And quite honestly, were the 'good ole days' really good?

Imagine you could change a fact or detail about yourself that happened to you in the past, would you still be you anymore? Could you and this alternate version of yourself really occupy the same life without something bad happening? I think not. I think if you changed ANYTHING about your past, all the lessons you've learned and the growth which resulted would cease to exist, along with you. And sure, you might have prevented something happening, someone dying, and some big major event would happen as a result and you got what you wanted, but at what cost?

Going back to the past means in a lot of ways you're stuck in your own. Unable to go back or move forward because of something in your past, through avoiding it, misremembering it, and not admitting to it. Not knowing how much you're ruining your present, and maybe even the future. The deeds you do in the present are the seeds of the future, and whatever you did or didn't do foreshadows certain results. Being stuck in the past often means there won't be any change in the present, and just like how we feed off the crops of the seeds sown into us from the past, the future will feed off the things we're planting today.

So perhaps instead of letting curiosity cause you to travel time and potentially ruin things on a cosmic scale, try and craft a present you can live with. Whatever you planted today is what you'll feed on tomorrow, and so on, so on, and on. You can't change or sometime justify things of the past, and if you could you would loose the lessons and repeat the same mistakes all over. The best and only thing any of us can do NOW is to focus on making a good and happy present for mutual advantage, and a bright future we can actually be excited about.