July 29, 2009 Richard Faulk
Certainly, time travel is theoretically possible. And whatever physicists are allowed to do, they seem eventually to get around to doing. But every technique so far conjectured for manipulating time requires at least one, shall we say, outré condition — such as the harnessing of a black hole, which risks engulfing the earth and crushing it into oblivion; or the accelerating of a wormhole to near light speed, which could consume nearly all the energy in the universe; or the encasing of our would-be chrononaut in a sort of minivan with the space–time-bending density of Jupiter, which is just crazy talk.
My mother’s afraid to pump gas, and she won’t drive on the freeway. One day she’s going to be surfing time on the back of a black hole? Call me a defeatist, but I don’t see it happening.
But let us shed no tears for the time machine. In fact — if I may continue to be utterly candid with you — in my view, these yet-to-be-invented gimmicks of some infinitely distant future are already passé. An embarrassment. An albatross around the neck, like that Friendster account that’s still garnering sporadic e-mails from Brandi69, who says she’s seen your profile pic and likes to party with older men.
Yes: To Hell with the time machine, I say. For I have seen the history of innovation, and I know where this story ends.
Humanity is gifted with a marvelous capacity for adaptation and innovation. But the flipside of the bargain is a staggering propensity for complacency. We’re restless and self-satisfied at the same time. We crave novelties and conveniences, which we immediately take for granted, noticing them only through the indignation we feel when the NPR stream keeps overloading the router, so you have to reach across the desk and turn on the tinny-sounding, god-damned clock-radio instead. For instance.
And so it always has been, from cell phones and cable TV, to indoor plumbing and the wheel. Yesterday’s miracle of innovation becomes today’s high-end convenience and tomorrow’s mundanity.
Doubtlessly, any real-life time machine would debut amid a welter of messianic promises. But what would we actually do with one?
Would we go back and preserve papyruses from the library at Alexandria? Would we try to warn Moctezuma that Cortés was not in fact a god, but a very bad man? Or would we even just go back to see if it’s Cleopatra or Lillie Langtry who rates as the hottest woman of all time?
Consider this, you who would unlock history’s secrets: It is humiliating and exhausting enough to travel around present-day Europe with a phrase book and a distant memory of sophomore French. Now imagine that Europe had never seen a TV. Would you really have anything to say to each other? Would you even have enough cultural common ground to be intelligible at all? Rather than appearing as omniscient demigods among superstitious children, we visitors from the future would more likely be regarded as stammering imbeciles. Our pleas not to vote Hitler ’33 would be dismissed as lunatic ravings.
Thus, I suspect that any initial vogue for hard-core time travel would pass quickly. As we adjusted to our new role as consumers of temporal displacement technologies, it’s the time machine that would be domesticated to serve the tyranny of daily life, and not our lives that would be expanded and enriched by the miracle of time travel.
Eager children, for example, would nudge Christmas closer. College students could get that extra day to finish a term paper, and then jump directly from a sober afternoon to an evening of legless drunkenness, without the intervening tedium of half a dozen Red Bull and vodkas. Parents would visit the future grandchildren they’ve given up demanding in the here-and-now. And Republican stalwarts could bask in the sunshine of Reagan’s Morning in America, eternally prolonged.
Of course, there would be those individuals who’d go ride the Oregon Trail or march with Alexander on Persepolis — they’re the same people who today climb K2 or canoe the Amazon. The fact is, any one of us could fly to Nepal and explore the Himalayas if we wanted to, right now. It’s just the case that most of don’t — not when we can opt for putting granite countertops in the kitchen.
And once it got to that point, once the time machine became the Travertine tile of its day, the inevitable backlash would set in.
Just as the skips and scratches and staticky pops of vinyl were rendered charming in the face of the MP3’s frigid clarity, temporal connoisseurs in the age of time travel will extol previously unrecognized virtues of living in the present. They would savor time’s very slowness, marvel at the exquisite unfolding of causality, and boggle at the subtle profundity in what you and I today call “boredom.”
For indeed, is there not something Philistine about jumping time, willy-nilly? Forever cutting to the chase, voyeuristically peering into the future, or reliving past glories on an endless loop. Isn’t that almost the definition pornography, to rush directly and capriciously to history’s climaxes, unearned and excised from any context or consequences?
Which brings us back to the point where we started — to a point that we, in fact, have never left through the course of these lengthy reflections — the inauspicious present. Life isn’t an orgy of experience. Our triumphs are small and seldom, punctuated by long periods of routine. But without the overlooked mid-tones, highlights and shadows lose their definition. Our lives would become a meaningless muddle of gray.
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