July Question Meme: Day 11

[rogueslayer452]

Asked by erychan86:

If you could travel through time, but could just go in one direction, would you visit the past or the future?

This is something I actually think about a lot, because who hasn't thought about or daydreamed the possibility of traveling through time?

If we're talking about going in only one direction though, it really depends on the nature of this particular ability. Am I going to be able to interact with anything or am I just a mere observer, wherein my presence disturbs nothing? Are we talking traveling in time only once, or actually having the ability to time travel wherever and whenever I wanted to at will? These are the kinds of questions and scenarios that strongly determine my answer here.

Traveling into the future is fascinating in and of itself because I would be able to see hundreds and thousands of years of the progression of humanity. I would want to see how far we've gotten as a species and whether things have drastically changed or if we've remained the same, what the popular culture is like, the kind of music, and especially whether or not our present day is retold accurately. And it'll be intriguing to see whether our depictions of the future have actually been accurate themselves or entirely farfetched in science fiction (similar how people thought the 2000s would be like The Jetsons). At the same time however, with the good also comes the bad. I would also end up witnessing the horrible state of things as well, and I know for a fact that it would be too much for me to handle that kind of knowledge because I would be too obsessed with wanting to change the path of that particular future, but it would be futile regardless. It would be like knowing how and when exactly the world/universe will end, and only you possess that information, and there's nothing that can be done. I don't think I would want to burden myself with that. So, traveling into the future would be a one time deal for me.

However, with traveling into the past, it would be like filling in the blanks of things we already knew happened. Like stepping into a history book and witnessing firsthand the events that occurred, and seeing how these people really lived and what really happened, not to mention rediscovering lost history and things that have never been recorded. We all know that history often gets altered a lot and things get misinterpreted or forgotten, and I've always been fascinated with wanting to go further and further back in time to better understand what actually happened versus what we learned what happened. Imagine the kind of knowledge I could gather and rediscover, and with the scenario of not interrupting history and just being a mere observer, like a ghost, I could actually take pictures from my phone/camera and come back to the present and show historians the truth about what happened, etc. If I had that power, that would be like a legit and fantastic career path to have, albeit one that would be deeply classified, but still.

So, my answer: if this is a one time deal, then I would travel into the future. If this ability was infinite, I would definitely travel into the past. Out of both, the latter would be the most probable one I would pick most of all. Both scenarios I would be a mere observer.

Comments

[rogueslayer452.livejournal.com]

It's such an intriguing kind of scenario, since we all have this curious temptation of wanting to know what the future is going to be like, where we are headed, what things we're striving towards and the ongoing question of whether or not we can fix things. Science fiction depicts this concept all the time, and shows us the kinds of possible futures we may be heading. But in all honesty, you wouldn't just want to go in only one direction, but rather want to have the option of going both forwards and backwards, since it'll be very educational to see where we've been, where we currently are and where we'll end up.