Pretend that you had a time machine and could travel way into the future or to the past. Where would you go? What do you think life would be like?
Last time I got so jazzed about this prompt I had to split it into two parts. We discussed backward time travel already, so this week we need put the rest on to boil: time travel to the future.
I might love this week even more BECAUSE FUTURE TIME TRAVEL IS POSSIBLE. I mean, it at least works within the laws of physics. Our pal Einstein figured out that time moves slower the closer you get to the speed of light and/or the closer you are to a gravitational source.
I have been assured by assorted podcasts and Cumberbatch-narrated properties that this sort of time bendiness is measurable. Astronauts on the space station, floating some distance from the gravity of the Earth’s core, have to periodically realign their clocks with terrestrial clocks because theirs are fast.
For REALS.
It’s even measurable at high enough altitudes on Earth. A clock on Pike’s Peak will run faster than a clock at the Indianapolis Children’s Museum. Even better, the cells in our bodies deteriorate at the rate at which this measured time is passing. So a person living on a mountaintop will age a bit faster than someone who lives at sea level, which is why Hoosiers like myself are the best-looking people on the planet.
Soooooo, if we could find a way to survive the extreme conditions at the edge of, say, a black hole, where gravity is so strong even light gets sucked inside it, we could experience a significant slowing of time.
An hour at the edge of a black hole would be many decades outside of it. After a few cups of tea at the event horizon, your un-aged body could return to Earth and find the years had moved on without you. Yes, your dog would be dead and your favorite Scottish actors would be in their 90s, but you’d get to see what life is like in 2073 without all that pesky waiting.
You just wouldn’t be able to go back again.
That’s good, though. We don’t need to deal with the temporal paradoxes you’d create by coming back and shifting things around. Plus you’d likely want to warn people about all the plagues and sentient robots you’d seen, and anyone who’s taken Greek Mythology knows how soothsaying ends.
You’ll gouge your own eyes out, kid.
That’s it for the physics. We have one more constraint from the prompt itself, however, and that’s the word way. I have to travel way into the future.
This is good, too, since my mental health is held together by a delicate framework of meditation, therapy, and daydreaming about the apocalypse. All possible apocalypses, actually. I feel better the more ways I can think of human civilization ending. It helps me remember that I am in control of nothing—not my ultimate demise, not whether the person in front of me is paying in loose change, not what that barista thinks of me for ordering a decaf latte at 8:00 AM.
All of that would fall apart, though, if I thought I could prevent said apocalypse. The whole point is to bask in my own glorious ignorance. So I can’t be traveling 100 years into the future and risk finding half the Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand.
The further into the future the better, then. Beyond the scope of my or my children’s or their children’s lifetimes. Beyond when I could still find bits of national monuments or failed vials of antidote lying around. Beyond a psychotic break.
With all that considered, if I could travel into the future, WAY into the future… I suppose I could be talked into seeing what type of creatures humans evolve into.
Say 100,000, maybe 200,000 years ahead? If the oceans rise and we’re forced to compete for limited fresh water, probably we’re going to need to adapt back into sea-dwellers, right?
In that case, I’ve got my money on octopi.
Optimistically, I’d like to believe we hominids could evolve into some sort of octopus-human hybrid, but realistically I know they don’t need us. Octopi are wily, you know. They regularly escape their zoo enclosures. They can eat entire sharks. The majority of their neurons are in their arms. Oh, and they have three hearts.
Time Lords, for your reference, have two.
Maybe we could rule together. Yeah, maybe! Or maybe we’ll be forced into subjugation as a two-armed servant species, equipped with artificial gills and palm fronds, and the pureblood octopi will assume custody of our ocean planet until the sun explodes.
I think I could handle seeing all of this. In answering the two halves of this prompt, however, I’ve learned that I’m not really sure why I’d want to.
It doesn’t seem good for us, time travel. I suspect that’s why most wellness practices, including the mystic branches of all major religions, are trying to help you stay here. In the present.
After all, humans are perfectly capable of mental time travel. We shift backward by ruminating on the past—with those white-hot moments of shame being our absolute FAVES—and we travel forward by worrying. As Sharon Salsberg puts it, we’re good at living the same trauma twice.
We’re the only animals that can make these kinds of temporal shifts. I suppose that’s why we run the place, but it’s probably also why we have antidepressants and capybaras don’t. A little planning is great. Quick trips to reflection town are helpful. But loitering outside of the present moment is universally destructive, and I’ve been doing that pretty well for 39 years without any machines at all, thank you very much.
So I have decided that I shall decline to utilize your time machine services. If we are to see the rise of the cephalopods, let us do it in our own time, within our natural lifespans, and await their benevolent rule. It’s what Eckhart Tolle would do.
Unless you’re the Fourteenth Doctor, in which case I’m available as a second sassy redheaded companion and you can disregard everything I just said.
I loved this, Lisa!