Timeless Part One: Eating The Dinosaur
Where would you go if you had a time machine? Would you go back in time? Forward in time? Across a different dimension in time (that one’s for all you Lost fans out there)?
Let me ask you a more specific question: If you could place a phone call to the past and talk to yourself from 5 years ago, what would you say to yourself? What type of advice would you give to the past version of you?
Most people would probably advise themselves to avoid a major mistake, to not go out with a certain heartbreaker, or maybe to invest in some Apple stock. All of these are great ideas, but it really doesn’t matter what we would say to ourselves. No matter what advice we gave to ourselves in the past, it’s clear that our call would not matter. The past version of us obviously didn’t change anything, because we sit here today in the future having made all of those mistakes.
In his hilarious and surprisingly thought-provoking book “Eating The Dinosaur” (definitely a PG-13 book), author Chuck Klosterman details the inherent inadequacies of time travel.
As he puts it, traveling backwards in time is pointless because obviously it doesn’t really allow you to change anything. Traveling forward in time is pointless in its own way because whatever we see happening, whatever we try to change was obviously destined to happen anyway. And even if there were alternate universes that we could travel in between, we have no idea what our changes to those universes may mean. We may be able to make a small change that is beneficial in the short term, but remember the butterfly effect? Our small changes could be potentially disastrous. As Klosterman puts it, the only good that could ever come from time travel would be from eating a dinosaur.
Time travel is the dream of men who refuse to take responsibility. It’s the dream of men who see something wrong with their lives and refuse to take the blame for it, instead wanting to fix various variables in the past or future rather than themselves. People who dream of time travel are people who want a shortcut in life. Of course, there are no shortcuts in life. And there’s a lot of people less fortunate than you or I who wish there were.
Not Subject To Change
Are you anybody’s favorite person? Are you the favorite person of anybody? Think about it for a moment. Does anybody think you are the most special person in the world? (more…)
