Guest Column: Warnings from the future; time travel is a concept
(Ilya Schurov/CC-SA)
Time travel is a concept that for ages has eluded the grasp of human achievements. Whether it is used to witness the future evolution of man and technology, or to journey into the past in an attempt to change our old mistakes and failures, some people believe it can be achieved. Some people may believe that it already has been accomplished. What if time travel has previously been conquered and people from the future are already here visiting us, warning us, trying to survive in this day and age? What would you think if you realized you have come across people from the future, living among us, and you simply didn’t recognize them?
Recently, while traveling home via the glorious, cheap Orange County public transit system (until they decided to raise the bus fares again), I happened to encounter a man who claimed that he woke up one day, sometime during 2008, with most of his memory erased and only fragments of knowledge from his future world. At first, I simply ignored him and began a couple of doodles, but the man was so dedicated to gaining my interest, I decided to listen. His story sounded like something out of the novel 1984 as he tried telling me the English language is slowly being erased and the media is controlling our actions so as to reduce rational and logical thinking, in an attempt to ultimately prevent a future uprising or progression from our inner-selves. I honestly thought the man was crazy until he started to tell me that he had traveled back in time on a mission to try and help and preserve advanced linguistics and individuality. He told me that there were people’s lives being erased by a secret organization that monitors telecommunications, internet, and all aspects of our daily lives. It sounded eerily similar to the Patriot act, but he made it sound something more like the Thought Police.
Compelled by his mystical train of thought, I decided to ask why he thinks that our nation is engaged in a technological and rational decline. He responded, “Look around you, simply look around you. You see, as a human race, we are in the year 2009, but in reality, places like Japan and the United Kingdom are already caught up to the year 2035 and 2075 with their advanced social and technological infrastructure. We truly don’t know the real year because we don’t control it.” Questioning him about historical documents, the invention of the calendar, and the year my cell phone displayed, I disagreed with him again. He simply said, “The past can be altered anyway with the people who control the history books. You believe in the past because that is what you learned, you simply accept it.”
So was the man was telling the truth or not? His claims about being in a hospital for weeks, under various treatments to forget the future seemed hardly logical, right? At my old job at Sears Essentials, there was a man who would come in and test exercise equipment, claiming to be from the future, carrying around a huge ball of wires and making various predictions and statements which made no sense; but nobody could prove or disprove his credibility. Could collecting wires, crystals, and working out get him back from the future? I couldn’t conclusively judge his actions because I have never visited the future, right? A handful of homeless people today claim they come from the future, but their brains were fried in the process of time traveling. The scary thing is that with some of our homeless comrades, there are no legitimate records of birth or evidence from where they come; sometimes they randomly appear and sometimes they randomly disappear. In the end, most of us don’t care.
In my opinion, we are slowly becoming less intelligent with our modern day rationality. Don’t believe me? Just turn on the TV; you’ll see that we are demoralizing ourselves with the increase of sexual glorification and the desire of more wealth and materials. As humans, we simply allow this to go on because it seems that we can’t yet appreciate harmony in our everyday lives. The world, as big as it is, is getting smaller as we become more connected to each other through technology. Through the invention of the Bluetooth or the internet, anyone can find out what we are doing at anytime. There is that sense of self that we are slowly losing, but as we try to hold on to in it in darkness, there is still a light that shines through.
Perhaps time traveling does have a purpose, even though there is a high chance of getting your brain fried from molecular disarrangement; its existence would prove that at least we do have a future. What we must do as humans is protect our rational and logical decision-making capability, and not let the television or any other “big brother” take it from us. Knowledge is power, and if we take that part out of our lives, then we will be like a penny on a train track; we will be simply flattened and thrown into the rocks and gravel only to be forgotten by time. What you must to do prevent this from happening is to stand and feel your worth! In reality, we cannot change the past, because the past will always exist in our memories no matter how many people come from the future to try and change it. Always remember, we cannot change the past, but we can determine the future.