Week 141:- Edition 3
Time Travel
If you had the opportunity, would you be able to go back in time to stop a historical event from happening? It could be a tragedy which sent your country on the path it currently is on today. However, you have no idea how much will be affected by what you change. You could make things better. Or you could make them worse.
If there is anything I have learned from every single science fiction movie involving time travel abilities, it is that traveling back in time to alter any past event is almost never a good idea. Series like The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow predicated upon the idea of time travel have multiple examples of people rashly making decisions to change the past and ending up regretting the decision grossly due to its aftermath.
We have discussed science fiction a bit, now let us talk about real life. Theoretically, theoretical physicists have worked out the math and determined that it would be theoretically possible to time travel into the future if an entity were able to attain the speed of light, which is the speed limit of the universe. However, all the equations, innovations, and formulas possible have been flung towards the problem of time travelling into the past, all to no avail, even theoretically.
So therefore, so far, we know that it is theoretically possible to time travel into the future, but it is practically impossible, even theoretically, to time travel into the past. And every single time travel movie ever written generally paints as a bad idea due to the often ugly and random aftermaths that succeed such an act of defiance against nature.
Considering all these then, doesn't it seem like the universe is trying to scream something into our consciousness?
Let me spell the 'something' out for you just in case all I've said above still hasn't registered by now, which it should have.
IT IS A GENERALLY BAD IDEA TO TRAVEL INTO THE PAST IN ORDER TO ALTER A PAST EVENT. LET BYGONES BE BYGONES.
Despite this very fundamental universal reality that we cannot change the past, and the idea that even if we could, it would be a colossally bad idea to do so, so many people still get hung up on the past. Therefore, I'll be approaching the rest of this write-up from a philosophical and psychological perspective in the hope that it might help a random person out there curate their thoughts better.
There is a psychological phenomenon which states that people often find 'the other option' more appealing after they have made a choice for themselves. This feeling is not always rooted in reality.
We only get to live one life. This presents a peculiar problem. If we could live multiple lives at the same time, we could compare and contrast and observe which choices result in better outcomes. But that feature is not available to us because we only get to live once.
Hence, to make up for that deficit, we try to compare our lives to that of other people, forgetting the fact that no other person has your exact temperaments, personalities, difficulties, and opportunities. In science terms, no other person is a great control experiment for you but yourself.
Events have ripple effects. This is something that a lot of people struggle to fathom, but it's true. It's so easy for me to say I wish I'd never applied to study medicine. It's stressed the hell out of me But if I'd never entered university for medicine, perhaps I wouldn't have started to play guitar which I started learning in school and intend to play professionally. Perhaps, I wouldn't have learned swimming and won awards for it. Perhaps, I wouldn't have learned to write much better because I joined a writing club in 400 level. People want to change an event and keep all or most of the outcomes of that event that favor them. Sadly, it doesn't work that way.
Due to the three reasons above, this often leads to want to go back in time, falsely believing that making a different choice will result in better outcomes. Of course, there are grey areas to this that I do not have the time to discuss right now.
Marcus Aurelius wrote in his journal, Every man's life lies within the present; for the past is spent and done with, and the future is uncertain.
Of what utility is the past then if it can't be changed and it's pointless regretting anything. Dr. Jordan Peterson says the purpose of memory is to take from the past, lessons to to structure the future.
I find it hard to fully distill my thoughts into this one article without making it ridiculously long and probably boring for a number of readers, but I would like to believe that I have conveyed some wisdom in this article, however little.
Thanks for reading, and goodbye for now.
