Where To?

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 My wife asked me an interesting question the other day.  If I could time travel to any time period, which would it be?  I thought about different periods in the history of the world.  I thought maybe meeting Jesus would be interesting.  But then I thought about the future.  How far forward would I want to go?  My brother-in-law said he'd like to visit about 30 years into the future.  I don't know if I want to visit the future.  History we kind of know, but the future might be a very strange place.

Think of how much our world has changed in just 25 years.  I can live in the past in some ways, but then it might be interesting to see how much our world changes in just another 25 years especially in the fields of robotics and AI.  How much will these change?  I'm not sure I am emotionally prepared for the changes that are coming.  And I'm not sure as to how much wars will change the political landscape.  I'm like so many who live with doubts about the future of this world.  

I'm just not sure I want to know what's coming.  The only thing about visiting the past is the grandfather paradox.  Can you alter your very existence?  Since we don't know the future we become a part of it.  But in visiting the past, as one might say, that if we can time travel to the past we have already been there.  The past was written with those who have visited from the future.  Therefore we can't alter what we already did.  Time travel then is an endless tunnel that takes us wherever we want to go because history has been written with the time traveler in it already.  

Let's say we have time travel capabilities.  We want to go back and prevent the assassination of Lincoln.  If we could prevent that from happening, history has already recorded us as having been there.  How?  It was already known we'd be there.  This is the grandfather paradox because we actually have been there.  We weren't able to alter history or did what we could do, because we were already there.  

A fascinating Twi-light Zone episode was written about this very subject.  I won't give the plot twist at the end but the time traveler did alter the future.  When he came back the future, which is now his present, was altered.   I'm saying the past was recorded as us, the time travelers, having been there already.  Try as we might, no time traveler is able to alter the future, because that time traveler was there when it happened already.  Time travel becomes an endless loop, in my thinking.  

But what happens to the future if one travels backward?  Is there an alternative future only the time traveler will know?  These are just hypothetical questions that have no real answers.  We simply don't know.  I'm raising ethical questions as much as I'm raising practical ones.  Time travel could be an endless loop.  Or we COULD change world history and maybe not for the better.  It's simply a fascinating question that has been debated for centuries, raising all kinds of "what if" questions.  Thank you for your time and Peace to each one of you.

Dave 

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