Time Travelers of the Future:
Questions about how we shape this present moment
“When a species reaches a certain development in point of view, the ability to travel back and forth in time is a simple as entering a subway car in your world.”
(P. 83: From the Arcturian Anthology by Judy Sion and Tom Kenyon)
Machines and Memory
We tend to thing of time travel as something that requires a vehicle that transport us to the past: a time traveling machine ( HG Wells) space ship ( Star Trek’s enterprise) a slick sports ca:r Delorean ( Back to the Future).
Memory, imagination and our ability to empathize — to feel our way into another person way of perceiving — is innate. We remain present in our body and in our time when we remember.
When we remember, we reconstruct a version of ourselves by the story we tell, usually the story we are telling ourselves at present.
Perhaps a machine is an objective vehicle — a guarantee that the traveler, any traveler will arrive at the same past.
But even the act of remembering changes us. Telling a story about the past leaves the teller and the listeners in a different place than where they started off.
Change and the ripple effect in action
A key aspect of time traveling in the future is changing the past so as to update the present.
In science fiction this is always looked down upon — change one thing in the past and you change the future in ways that make it impossible for any time travel to return to the same reality. There is no guarantee the traveler who departs will be able to return at all. Which makes time travel risky.
When time travels in the future get on the subway to visit the past, how do they find the way back when in that other time, no subways existed, and if they did the routes are likely to have been entirely rearranged by every traveler, with new routes appearing and disappearing as you study the map.
Knowing how much any one person can affect the present by traveling back in time, would there be rules about how much or in what ways you are allowed to change your past, given that it will have an immediate ripple effect on everything?
That ripple effect is happening in every moment, not just the past. A turn of the head, a kind word, a shift in perspective can reshape the lives of others — and ourselves.
Perhaps we imagine time machines as vehicles because they can contain us, keep the travelers more or less in tact, guarantee we will return to a time and place and the loved ones who recognize us.
How much can we adjust, learn, or repair without unravelling the connections that hold us together?
Public Access and Collective transformation
I like this idea of public transportation time travel. We look at the map to determine where we want to go and we are transported there in groups Strangers all going to the same place to visit someone they know, for reasons, and motivations of their own.
Perhaps, future travelers will organize themselves into groups: historians who want answers, writers who want a feel for the times, family members who want to find lost relatives, or where a certain traumas began.
If we could all access the past and change it and if groups could return with a shared agenda, would we need rules about what kind of change and how much travelers are allowed to make.
I like to envision a future where, travelers to the past must collaborate: historians, artists, healers, seekers, all sharing insights and intentions. It’s a powerful metaphor for how we might solve modern problems by working together across disciplines, perspectives, and even generations.
Two Questions about how you shape your future
If you could revisit a moment in your own past, not to change it but to observe it with the knowledge you have now, what would you hope to learn or understand differently?
If you knew your actions today would ripple out into the lives of future generations — altering their version of the “map” — what would you do differently?
