Travelling Through Time

Have you thought about travelling through time? There have been those who have exercised their minds, dreaming of the capacity to travel to the future, returning to tell tales of what the future looked like. So many of us try to imagine what that would be like. Many of the tales told fail to anticipate how rapidly the present surpasses what we can imagine.

Some of us dream of what it could be like to be able to pop into the future, find out what the winning lottery ticket could be, then pop into the present to take advantage of such foreknowledge. What gains we could make with such a capacity if we were knowledgeable about events in the stock market! So far, we have to rely on prognosticators who are wrong as often as they are right.

What has been occupying my mind is how we actually can travel through time, only backward, exploring the past events of our lives. In this we can see where we have done things right, and done things wrong. And, I suppose, there are valuable lessons we can learn, potentially, about alternative behaviors we could follow to improve our track records in the future. Aren’t we trying to do that all the time in matters of public policy?

Actually, I sometimes use my travels through time to alter some of the things I have written. When I study those historical texts of mine, I sometimes alter the things I have written to make them more pertinent, more incisive, more relevant. Indeed, they can result in stories which can be more useful to readers in the newer version. Is that cheating, overcoming some of the limitations we face on our ability to travel through time?

So many things are happening in our current environment, technology is advancing so rapidly, our capacity to understand what is happening in the world around us is advancing so quickly, that just keeping abreast of these developments can give us an invaluable peek into the future.

There is such a flood of news every moment of the day, some of it incredibly specialized, requiring a wealth of technical knowledge, that most of us, limited in the breadth of understanding we have been able to absorb, inevitably fail to appreciate its import as the information whistles past our ears. We just don’t have access to those who might translate all that gobbledygook into something that might be intelligible to us.

Nevertheless, I personally, wish that I was capable of riding astride some hypothetical vehicle that would enable me to ride that crest of that wave of knowledge thrusting us forward to a dimly viewed future. Driverless cars, personal flying machines, rocket flight in the atmosphere, that’s nothing! Let’s take a flying jump into the future!

If quantum mechanics proves (in spite of Einstein,) that an object can actually be in two places at the same time, can’t this mean that someday we can transport matter from one place to another like they did in Star Trek?

How about some practical stuff in our own screwed-up world? Universal basic income for every individual displaced by technology, world government eliminating nationalist competition so we don’t self-destruct, publically financed entertainment centers to busy idle hands, necessary industry taking place in space so we can extend the humans race’s time on this planet by eliminating the danger of overheating our atmosphere.

What would hyper speed mass transit do to change our world?  How about free health care and costless food around the world through advanced technology? We probably have the capacity now to deliver cheap protein to the masses if that was a world goal. Steak can already be made from vegetable protein. No more cattle, no more chicken!

Are we going to do something real about robots to permit such benefits to be universal? Is that how we free humans from work for pay to create some of what we are speculating about? Mechanization in agriculture drove people from farming to the cities, providing cheap labor to create our industrial system. If we carry that to the ultimate will work as we know it disappear? How do we get from here to there?

What would our economic systems and government look like? What would be our mechanism for educating and choosing those who service the masses with all the necessary skills to ensure things work? What would that look like in that kind of future? How would we reward people for their efforts if we didn’t need money to meet our needs? We would have to build a whole new system of values, wouldn’t we? What would our cities look like? Would we still have them?

Would these things have to be imposed by a world dictatorship? It might mean abandoning the capitalist system and instituting world governance to ensure advancing the benefits of technology to all as a human right. What would personal freedoms look like under such a regime? Would we have to re-invent Orwell’s world?

Travel through time with me and imagine the unimaginable!