Woke up this morning thinking about what it would be like to have a time machine. Wouldn't it be cool to go back and redo things, take the opportunities? How hard would it have been for me to pull out "Silent Night" for my boss at the Christmas party instead of letting a moment pass awkwardly frozen?
I'm pretty sure I would mostly use my time machine to cancel out mistakes. Like don't comment on someone's tailgating if there is no actual accident. I think eventually, given enough time, which I would have, I'd probably end up canceling it too far.
8 years ago
5 comments:
There's an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, that is appropo. Picard regrets a mistake he made as a cadet that caused him to be injured, and Q allows him to go back and undo it. But it changes his life totally in ways that were not at all good. The point -- we are the sum of our whole lives both the good decisions and the bad ones. You take away even small mistakes, and the entire fabric unravels.
Which is not to say, that I don't sometimes wish I could go back and change something. But after half a century, I'm beginning to understand that the best thing to do is learn from it, and do better in the future.
I would like to change my opinion now that I'm feeling better.
I think very likely I would use my time machine to attend rock concerts. Getting tickets would be the hard part.
I wanted to write a story about a time machine that took you back in time--but in real time. So everything would be backwards--speech, time, everything, but really sloooow. Just like real life, except backwards. The protagonist would have to learn how to speak in reverse, etc. Seemed a novel idea at the time.
But I got burned. I wrote to Paul Davies, author of "About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution" and he said a buddy of his had already come up with the same idea!
But dayam, maybe it's better to think about going to the future. You can't change what has already happened but you can surely change what is going to happen. That makes us all time travelers, right?
Nick
ChefNick, I think the story idea sounds cool. Since when has a story having already been done stopped anyone? : )
Traveling into the future, that's perfect. In real-time too. I will now practice speaking forwards!
Post a Comment