Every since I was young, I’ve always wanted to do certain things. Things like travel to a far away country, drive an electric car, make it with a pretty girl, travel through time, travel to distant stars, and have superpowers. Well so far, I’ve managed to achieve the first 3 things on my list. As to the last three, I am pretty sure I won’t ever get to achieve those things in this lifetime. Perhaps in the afterlife, we’ll just have to wait and see.
However, I have spent a lot of time thinking about such things and I’ve come to some great realizations that might be worth sharing with other minds like my own. A lot of it simply has to do with perception. It is possible to travel forward and backwards through time using your mind and a bit of changing perceptions. After all, in order to have the experience of moving to another era in time what do you need? You need to be able to open your eyes and see what is around you and compare how it is different from what you are used to in the era you came from.
So for the first and easiest exercise, lets imagine traveling forward in time. Well, truth be told, we know a lot about the past. So it isn’t too difficult to imagine what life would be like 100 or 1,000 years ago. If you’ve ever spent any time studying ancient civilizations then it shouldn’t be that difficult. So all you need to do in order to travel forward in time is to stop whatever you are doing, close your eyes, and spend some time imagining you some other person living in the past. Try to imagine every detail. Then open your eyes and look around you. Try to see your world from that person’s perspective. What you’ll find is that nearly every detail of your life and surroundings would be fascinating to that person even though it is very mundane to you.
Now the next exercise is more difficult because we don’t know exactly what the future will be. But I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about it and I think I’ve come up with a reasonably good idea of where we are going as a species. I know a lot of Christians believe we are in the “end times” and therefor thinking far off into the future tends to get you into religious arguments. However, I’ve come to realize that as humans, we are still in the very beginning. I recently saw where Carl Sagan showed the time line of the entire universe condensed down to fit inside one of our year-long calendars. Human beings have only been in existence for the last 10 seconds of December 31st on that calendar. The universe is still going to be around for quite a long time and I firmly believe the universe will be our home, not just the Earth. As 21st century humans, we already possess the technology to travel to other planets in our solar system and most likely could even reach other planets around nearby stars within our lifetime. Unfortunately, we don’t yet know which stars have habitable planets and there are serious problems funding such endeavors.
I also believe the next step in human evolution will not be from natural selection or from God. Instead, it will be humans eventually finding and fixing the problems in our own DNA. Which will mean humans that live hundreds or thousands of years as well as fewer genetic diseases. Things like obesity, bad vision, diabetes, asthma, and even arthritis would be a thing of the past. With proper genetic screening, even positive mental and personality traits could be brought out so that every child was brilliant, kind, and hard working. These things sound like science fiction but much of it is already possible if we really wanted to go there, but so many people currently feel like it is immoral it may take several more generations for people to start realizing it is a good idea.
So with longer lifespans and better health, humans will be able to set out on voyages to distant planets around distant stars and colonize them. After a few hundred years, that planet will be developed enough to send out humans even further into space, until one day there are hundreds or thousands of inhabited planets. Interplanetary travel will probably not be that common since it would still take a long time to reach other planets, but I’m sure the planets would maintain communications with each other and we’d be able to watch movies from other worlds, read books, share scientific developments, and listen to music.
So the distant future is looking pretty good. And guess what? All of these people all over the universe are going to read in their history books (or history files on their computers) that it all began on the planet Earth. But there is going to be a lot of human history to know, and most likely very little of Earth’s history will be taught. After all, they are going to have to learn history of their own planet and the planets before them. So if you condensed all of Earth’s history down to a single chapter in a history book, what would it contain? Well, the exciting thing is that most likely there will be several paragraphs on the 20th centuary. Why? Because that is essentially when the technological explosion happened. There will probably be a picture of Neil Armstrong on the moon, and pictures of 20th century computer equipment. And sure, for those people interested in learning more about Earth, I’m sure they could look in the “wikipedia” of there time and find out whatever they wanted to know.
Okay, so now we have a picture of the future. And guess what, of those people living in the distant future, if they had a time machine (which they probably won’t since it is most likely impossible) they would probably wish to travel back to 20th century Earth because that is where it all started. Granted, we live in the 21st century, but it isn’t all that different. So all we need to do is close our eyes and imagine we are from another world where maybe the sky is red or greenish. Then open our eyes to be standing on 21st century earth and look around. See the culture around you, the sounds, the smells, the cars we drive. You can be a time traveler and experience our own world from a different perspective. And just think, you are getting to do something that people in the past and people in the future could only dream about, because you are really here.
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