The Future or the Past poll

[Harry]

If you were able to travel through time would go into the future or return to the past. These are the rules:

1) Your stay would be temporary not permanent, but you must stay any 1 year period
2) You cannot change or influence any person or situation, only observe

[Tina-Kate]

I think it would be much more interesting to go into the past. Also, you would know what you would be dealing with. In the future, you may have too many surprises...like say everyone was immune to something or immunized against it except you...you could end up getting sick, etc. But to be able to go into the past & observe would be extremely interesting.

[joe]

The past, for sure. I'd like to go back to Egypt during the time of the building of the pyramids and find out how it was really done. I'd also like to go back to mid 19th century America, too.

[mbhenty]

Yes Harry: The Past for sure..... You can't return from the future!!!!


Nope, the past looks good for me.

[stuartwsa]

The past, definitely. In fact, there are so many times and places I'd like to visit that I hope that I get some kind of discount on tickets!

[Nadzieja]

I would go into the past, to certain times I have found interesting in history. I would not just stay here in America, but would also tour parts of Europe. Of course if I was going to go I'd want to go first class, and have money. HA HA HA

[Kat]

So far, 10 out of 10 want to go to the past- including Moi!

But what if we brought a disease with us, TK?

[mbhenty]

Yes Harry: Ahhhhhh, what the heck. Here's what I really wrote above and deleted.

If there is a future, in say a hundred years from now, you would find tremendous advances..........., but, just as promising as it may be, One is sure to find other changes poignant and most disappointing. Perhaps the future is not a good place to visit.

I would be scared as a dickens for what I would discover in the future. What good it may offer may only be evenhanded by gloom.

At the 1960s New York World's Fair they had a huge counter displaying the U.S population every second. I remember the population counter changing from 199 999 999 to 200 million. 40 years later the population is at 300 million. What will it be in 100, 200, 300 years? What will be the rights of the individual, restrictions, the impact on our natural world , the limitations and stresses by which this planet can withhold and survive the hoards of humanity. Would you really want to visit the future?

Let us say you have planned a holiday in the future. You set the "VACATION TIME METER" forward 100 years. You arrive and materialize at your destination; say Time Square in New York, December 31, 2109, 10 minutes before mid-night. Instead of a crowd you find the city an overgrown field, a forest. Humanity is no longer here? Skeletal remains litter Broadway. You are now stuck here for a year.

Being a sleuth you try and find out what happened. Of course most of the animals have returned to the wild and occupy the planet. But something is just not right about them. Many look freaky, odd.

December 31, 2110 arives and you finally return to your own time period.

Soon, to your horror, you discover you are ill. You are losing your hair and your skin is peeling like over-cooked potatoes. Your doctor, trying not to stand to close, asks where you went on your vactaion. He informs you that you have very high and severe radiation poisoning. He briefs you and you have a short 6 weeks to live.

Do you really want to visit the future?

[Tina-Kate]

MB---You can write SciFi too.

All this reminds me of several years ago I had insomnia & tuned into the Coast to Coast late-night radio show. It deals with all kinds of weird phenomena & is interesting---but you could probably make yourself paranoid if you listened to it too often.

Anyway, on this particular show, a guy called in & said he couldn't reveal who he was, but he was from the not-to-distant future. He said he was with the US military, & they had discovered the secret to time travel. Apparently, certain privileged people could take vacations into the past. However, the trips were for a finite period of time & the visitor was subject to strict codes of behavior, etc.

He said his father had died while he was only a child & he was able to go back into the past (our time) & see his father. He said the way it worked, he was also able to observe his own self as a child. However, he was not allowed to reveal who he was to his father, or anyone else. He was calling from "our time" & scheduled to return shortly.

The host asked him all kinds of questions about the future. He said he was only allowed to reveal certain things. All of these things sounded completely plausible & interesting.

A friend later told me, however, that people with certain mental illnesses can totally believe certain delusional things & make themselves sound completely legit to others...so who knows?

It was a very interesting show, however.

As for us taking back diseases...I suppose one of the possible stipulations for anyone doing this would be a clean bill of health. It would also depend on what time one was travelling back to. I'd think the Victorian era would be pretty safe for us to go back to, if we had a clean bill of health. However, going back to say North America before the Europeans came over...that might cause damage. After all, the natives didn't have the common cold & the Europeans wiped out thousands in bringing over such diseases. As long as we were healthy, chances are we've been immunized against Victorian diseases & not much harm would come to anyone. Tho, I suppose we may all be carriers of stuff we don't even know about... Still, the Victorian era is only a few generations ahead of us & would probably be perfectly OK.

[Kat]

MB, I'm reading I Am Legend right now. It was written in the 1950's to take place in the future of 1976! The world as he knew it was dead. This guy is barricaded in his house at night due to a widespread bacteria causing vampirism!
He, so far, is the only person still alive!

I can't see Harry opting for the future. I think he'd love the past- but I don't speak for him of course!

[Nadzieja]

Tina Kate, your post reminds me of some books I read back in the 70's. I think they were written in the late 50's and 60's by the author Robert Heinlein. He had a character by the name of Lazarus Long who went back in time and saw his father and he also saw himself as a child. He couldn't stand himself as a child. The rule was he couldn't change anything that was going to happen because it would change his future. I have to say the character showed up in a few of his books. They were really quite interesting. I thought of going back and the health concerns. I wonder if there would be a chance that we could also catch something from the time period we went back to, such as TB or the plaque. Seeing they didn't have antibiotics I wonder what would happen if we took sick and how that would effect the future.

[Tina-Kate]

I was interupted while doing that other post & forgot something---

A particularly weird thing this guy said is that he had a kind of deja vu. He had got to know his father & was invited to pay a visit to his childhood home, where he saw himself as a child. The weird thing was, he later realized he had a distinct memory of being a kid, & of having seen himself as an adult visiting the house---however, he just thought it was a stranger his father had brought home.

Chicken & the egg thing. All very interesting.

[mbhenty]

Wow Kat:

Where did you find a photo of Oscar's brother, Harry Wilde?

[mbhenty]

Yes, Thanks Tina:

I was trying to make a point about the world population in the future. No one seems to figure out that much of the problems today have to do with population explosion. Back in the 70s there was much talk about the danger of population explosion, but today no one talks much about it.


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I remember having parties in my small apartment on South Main Street.

Late into the night there were so many people in my small apartment that I could fit no more. A 10 x 12 room with 30 to 40 people in it is not good.

Newcomers had to hang around outside on the porch. Even strangers would show up for free beer and cake. The bedroom was full, and gong to a bathroom full of guests you had to hang on to your drink or someone would bump into you and spill it.........(it was the 70s)

Everyone called their friends about the great give-a-way, more people showed up-----after a while the beer ran out the cake was long gone, broken martini glasses along with olives and bottle tops cluttered the floor---- one guy accused another of stealing his beer, another blamed the new party busters, the strangers, someone threw a fist, someone else a chair, a fight broke out and well, the place was wrecked and........well you can get the picture.


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I can only imagine the same happening to the world in the future. Even as we speak we see the new comer, an Asian Giant, arriving at the party demanding his cake and beer.

You can fit so many on the apple cart and no more. Strict regulations and sever restrictions on human rights and freedoms will not be avoided. This is to say nothing of the natural world and wild life. It is fiction if you don't think that sometime in the future (maybe the far future) birth will not be restricted. Nations will realize people can not continue to "double like a penny".


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Mr Kent, my 9th grade history teacher, taught us that war was necessary to trim population and that if wars ever end what's to come is even worst.
He was a bit of a nut case. Today he would have been dismissed from teaching for some of the things he taught, but I see what he meant; though in a warped way.

I know, I know, I sound like that lady on Saturday Night Live; the one that see's the negative in everything. (funny skit) But one must study every angle and possibility, not just the furry, soft and cuddly.

Look out for the sharp edges. Along with the marvelous advances the future will bring I am afraid of what the payment will be.

nope, nope, nope, the past for sure. Besides, I want to see a dodo bird...

Sorry HARRY, hope I am not ruining your FUN POST........

Opps, got to go. Someone is at my door, upset I did not cut my lawn today..........

[DJ]

Some of the discussion reminds me of that "Twilight Zone" episode with Gig Young (onetime husband of Liz Montgomery, to give this a less-than-six-degrees separation from LAB), wherein his car needs servicing, and he walks to his hometown, and into his past, where he meets up with his younger self and causes an accident.
As much as I would love to visit many points in The Past (my vote lands there), I suppose our "job" is to remain in The Present, and shape it for the best (and perhaps the future), as best we can.
I remember one of my grandmother's samplers: "Take care of the minutes, and the hours will take care of themselves."
Also, too, if we visited the past-- would we lose that time in the present? That year? It might have been the best year of our lives! Or, one in which we were vital to the lives of others!
As for the future: "The Time Machine" should be enough to scare anyone off that!
Also, our desire to visit the past and to answer questions concerning it will supposedly be satiated, once we "cross over," or so sayeth the psychics.
If we had the ability to visit the past, would we fritter away our lives in so doing, as with an unhealthy addiction? I know I would be sorely tempted.
It would be fun, say, to have thirty minutes during the day when the opportunity would be available. And, that we would go as unseen entities, unaffected by and unable to have an effect upon, our point of visitation.

[Tina-Kate]

Hehehehe...I just thought of something.

The guy who called into the radio claiming he was from the the future & worked for the US military & said certain people were allowed to take vacations into the past...

If they say gave you a 2 week time limit, they could count that as your vacation time. Then, say they turn the dial or whatever to have you return one minute later than when you left (as in the movie Back to the Future), companies could officially give you holidays without losing any actual employee work hours...as if you didn't have a holiday at all.

If corporations could do this, I bet they would!

[Constantine]

If they say gave you a 2 week time limit, they could count that as your vacation time. Then, say they turn the dial or whatever to have you return one minute later than when you left (as in the movie Back to the Future), companies could officially give you holidays without losing any actual employee work hours...as if you didn't have a holiday at all.

If corporations could do this, I bet they would!

Why would there be any need for a time limit if no matter how much time you take, you can return one minute later? If you leave at age 25 and come back at 60, there would be problems, but a couple of months wouldn't make any difference.

As you all noted, we know the past, but not the future. You can't even count on an overgrown field or forest: you might be in the middle of the ocean or inside a newly-erupting volcano.

The past would have its own problems, of course. You might say something that nobody would bat an eyelash at nowadays and get any reaction from raised eyebrows to ostracism to being burnt at the stake.

[DJ]

That's why I stressed going back as an unseen entity, unable to have an effect upon the proceedings, and protected from being affected by what's happening.
There's a short story about someone going back in the past and innocuously plucking a flower. That seemingly meaningless action winds up changing the course of history. (It's never explained how-- it just does.)
Anyone remember?
Nevertheless--
I enjoy well-done "correcting the past" scenarios-- such as that episode of "Star Trek" with Joan Collins as "the pacifist who must die."

[SteveS.]

I also voted for the past. It's interesting that everyone has voted the same way so far. I voted the past for the same reasons it seems everyone else did. It interests me immensely, and would be more controlled since we know the outcome. I agree the future would reveal some fantastic things but I am sure there would be things I wouldnt want to know and should'nt know and once you do know, how do you come back to the present time again and live your life?

[twinsrwe]

Definitely, the past. I think it would be extremely interesting to go back in the past and start my one year period of time with August 4, 1892, at 92 Second Street, the home of Andrew J. Borden. As an observer, I'd be like a fly on the wall - waiting, watching and taking it all in.

Harry, when our year period of time is up, and we must return, will we be able to remember everything we observed?

[DJ]

Going back-- the story is "A Sound of Thunder" (1952) by
Ray Bradbury, and it's a squished butterfly, not a plucked flower,
that changes the course of history.

[Constantine]

Two of my favorite time travel stories (both involving travel in both directions) are both by Robert A. Heinlein. The earlier is By His Bootstraps, in which a man has several encounters with himself, among other adventures. The second is All You Zombies, which is just plain wild and which I will not spoil for you. It's in a collection called The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag, containing a novella of that title (also marvelous) and several other stories (mostly marvelous).