By Swathy K
This was
going to be an article about how I would go way back in time, wipe the idea of
cultivation and agriculture out of the heads of men who got it first and save
the earth of the identity crises it has been having for a while.
How? It is
quite obvious that agriculture led to settlement, expansion of settlements, and
then man got time to think because he wasn’t always hunting or drawing on
walls. His brain grew and he invented the wheel (ta-daa, such a genius).
Everything rolled downhill from there in my opinion. He just wanted everything
to be “better”; meaning “easier”; meaning “bad news mother nature”. I’m not
going to tell you about all those civilizations and revolutions that followed.
Please refer your history textbooks for a thorough read. So, if that one idea
didn’t crop up, man would be living in harmony with nature, as some would put
it, the way it was meant to be. I also wanted to put in a word about how
Superman should’ve done exactly that, instead of spinning the earth backwards
and turning back time to save his girlfriend.
Then I got
thinking about all the physics, practicality of time travel,
space-time-dynamics mumbo-jumbo that I could get my head around, which is very
little, because as I said its mumbo-jumbo.
If I did go
back and change history, there’s a great possibility that I wouldn’t be born
because of the alteration, which would lead to me not having changed history,
and the earth being the same terribly battered thing it is now. Then again, if
history doesn’t change, I would exist and I’d go back and try to change
it...some loopy loop that would be.
Another
definite possibility would be that if I just stop a few people, there would be
a number of others like them in distant lands who would get the same idea about
growing crops. Then whole point of the exercise is lost, because I can’t do it
twice, since I wouldn’t exist the second time. Or, I would require some
thought-scanning and teleporting powers for efficiency.
Or, my doing
that may split the universe in to two parallel universes. One where the change
didn’t occur and the earth lived on and is what it is now. The second, an
alternate universe, which I generated by poking around. I’d invariably be stuck
in the past, alternatively, cease to exist.
There’s
another OR. It could have been one of those “meant-to-be” events where I travel
back and nothing happens as planned but I affect a change that leads to the
present state of being. How guilty would that make me? :S
So, what
finally dawned on me was that if I did travel back, I’d rather just go to be a
silent spectator. Also, I can’t really ask evolution to retire; he is on the
run to becoming the best employee in existence.
Maybe I’d
watch a couple of dinosaurs, watch the pyramids being built, listen to some
brilliant musicians live, watch great artists at work or as one of my friends
wished she could, document Indian history better.
Time travel
is no longer a myth. Although 99.9% of the big brains think it is impossible,
the rest are absolutely optimistic about it. Maybe there will come a day when
time machines will be introduced into the market like the newest PlayStation or
android app, with consequences unimaginable. The universe does have billions
and billions of years ahead of it.
Superman
wasn’t all that dumb after all.
