A couple of years ago, I had three students in my Speech class who started an argument with me. That argument is still going on, better than two years later, but I have decided to take the high road, to be the bigger person, to act like a role model, and do the right thing: I will concede. Gentlemen, you are right: time travel is possible, and I am confident that one day soon, one or more of you will build a functioning time machine and come back to visit me from the future.
And when you do, I'd like to hitch a ride, maybe even borrow the keys for a little while.
Because I realized something. I realized the true value of the ability to go back into the past. The best use of time travel isn't for scientific or historic study -- though I'd still like to go back 10,000 years, land on Earth, and then leave a message for strict Young Earth Creationists (something poignant and witty, like, "10,000 years back, baby! What now, Genesis? Darwin 4tw!") -- nor is it to make one's self rich by depositing a penny in the bank and collecting a couple hundred years of interest. The best use of a time machine is to give advice.
We all know that hindsight is 20/20, that knowing, beyond the smallest scrap or shadow of a doubt, what will be the consequences of a certain action is guaranteed to help us make the right choice 99% of the time. How many times have we wailed, If I had only known . . . ? How many times have we said, "If I knew then what I know now, I would have . . . " Too many to count. Think of all of the heartache, the suffering, and perhaps most valuable, the wasted time that could be saved if we knew for sure what was coming. Why, nobody would have wasted money on Betamax! We'd all know whether to buy Plasma or LCD, HDDVD or Blu-Ray. Nobody would have bought A Million Little Pieces or The Education of Little Tree -- or at least, nobody would have taken them for anything more than fiction. In our regular lives, all we can do is try to learn from our own mistakes (We can try to learn from the mistakes of others, but nobody ever does. This is why parenting is effectively impossible, as we think of it today.) and do better in the future. But if we could take evidence of future events back into the past, and show them to people -- we could let people know now what will happen tomorrow, and that means we could help people to fix their mistakes before they make them. That is the true value of a time machine: to tell people absolutely what the consequences of a certain choice would be, so those people can make the right choice. With a time machine, hindsight would be more than 20/20: it would be 20/Infinity.
Just think of the scandals that could be (could have been? Man, writing about time travel really messes with your verb tenses.) prevented, if I had a time machine. I could go back and tell Howard Cosell, Marge Schott, and Jimmy the Greek to keep their mouths shut -- and I could punch Jim Gray in the nose before he even started talking to Pete Rose. I could cut off the microphones of Don Imus and Michael Richards, maybe even sign them up for a racial awareness seminar. I could tell Alex Baldwin and David Hasselhoff to just hang up the phone and sleep it off. I could pull Bill Clinton aside and say, "You know, maybe you should wait until after you're out of office before you start picking up on 21-year-olds." I could tell Senator Craig to keep his hands inside the stall at all times.
I don't think it would be possible to change the big things. I don't believe that a time machine would prevent World War II; I could go back and tell all of the people of 1930's Germany to stay away from the National Socialist party, but I couldn't make them listen -- not all of them. Maybe I could do what uncounted comic books and science fiction stories have speculated and kill Hitler before he rose to power, but I believe that Hitler -- like Stalin, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, like every monster who has risen to power to the sorrow of a nation, a people, or the world -- was an inevitable result of the time and place. Post-WWI Germany made Adolph Hitler, not the other way around; if Hitler had vanished from the scene, the Nazi party would have found a replacement, and very little would have changed. The course of a single life is easy to shift, but when millions of lives are moving together as a group, it becomes a river that will flood any dam, even one built with the awesome power of time travel. That is the river of world history, and as the Mississippi River has been trying to teach us for generations, human beings cannot move a river unless it wants to be moved.
But still, if I had a time machine, I could go back and tell my friend Jim not to marry that girl; maybe I could save him the heartbreak of that divorce. I could tell Alan not to join the army, since it gave him nothing but a bum knee and a bitter outlook. I could tell my brother to pick a different major in college, that maybe music composition is not the most practical field of study. I won't even start on what I could tell the hundreds of high school students who have passed through my class over the last eight years. Even those three clever young men who I am counting on to give me the chance to make all of these changes: I could tell them, with more force and better explanations, that they really should do their homework.
Perhaps, if I give enough advice to people who are on the brink of making mistakes, perhaps I can shift enough single lives out of dead-end or destructive paths that the entire river will get out of its bed and choose a new way. I'm hoping that's true.
So to that end, I'm going to start keeping a list. The list will include all of the people I'd like to give advice to, using the benefit of my hindsight as a person living in the world of 2007, soon to be 2008. I'm going to put this list into the public domain so that other people can send me suggestions for when my three former students bring me their time machine, and also just because I hope people will enjoy reading it. And maybe, just maybe, someone will hear the advice that I would give to someone in the past, and that person will recognize that he himself is about to make a similar mistake. And maybe, just maybe, that person in the present will not make that mistake, and the future me will not have to come back to give that person advice.
And if that doesn't happen, what the hey. I can still go back and tell Francis Ford Coppola that maybe he should stop after Godfather II.
