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Poking The Past


By Swathy K 

This was going to be an article about how I would go way back in time, wipe the idea of cultivation and agriculture out of the heads of men who got it first and save the earth of the identity crises it has been having for a while.
How? It is quite obvious that agriculture led to settlement, expansion of settlements, and then man got time to think because he wasn’t always hunting or drawing on walls. His brain grew and he invented the wheel (ta-daa, such a genius). Everything rolled downhill from there in my opinion. He just wanted everything to be “better”; meaning “easier”; meaning “bad news mother nature”. I’m not going to tell you about all those civilizations and revolutions that followed. Please refer your history textbooks for a thorough read. So, if that one idea didn’t crop up, man would be living in harmony with nature, as some would put it, the way it was meant to be. I also wanted to put in a word about how Superman should’ve done exactly that, instead of spinning the earth backwards and turning back time to save his girlfriend.
Then I got thinking about all the physics, practicality of time travel, space-time-dynamics mumbo-jumbo that I could get my head around, which is very little, because as I said its mumbo-jumbo.
If I did go back and change history, there’s a great possibility that I wouldn’t be born because of the alteration, which would lead to me not having changed history, and the earth being the same terribly battered thing it is now. Then again, if history doesn’t change, I would exist and I’d go back and try to change it...some loopy loop that would be.
Another definite possibility would be that if I just stop a few people, there would be a number of others like them in distant lands who would get the same idea about growing crops. Then whole point of the exercise is lost, because I can’t do it twice, since I wouldn’t exist the second time. Or, I would require some thought-scanning and teleporting powers for efficiency.
Or, my doing that may split the universe in to two parallel universes. One where the change didn’t occur and the earth lived on and is what it is now. The second, an alternate universe, which I generated by poking around. I’d invariably be stuck in the past, alternatively, cease to exist.
There’s another OR. It could have been one of those “meant-to-be” events where I travel back and nothing happens as planned but I affect a change that leads to the present state of being. How guilty would that make me? :S
So, what finally dawned on me was that if I did travel back, I’d rather just go to be a silent spectator. Also, I can’t really ask evolution to retire; he is on the run to becoming the best employee in existence.
Maybe I’d watch a couple of dinosaurs, watch the pyramids being built, listen to some brilliant musicians live, watch great artists at work or as one of my friends wished she could, document Indian history better.
Time travel is no longer a myth. Although 99.9% of the big brains think it is impossible, the rest are absolutely optimistic about it. Maybe there will come a day when time machines will be introduced into the market like the newest PlayStation or android app, with consequences unimaginable. The universe does have billions and billions of years ahead of it.
Superman wasn’t all that dumb after all.


 

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