• Question: Would you rather go back in time or forward?

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      Asked by Jazz.Au to John, Laura, Luke, Ruth on 22 Jun 2016.
      • Photo: Laura Finney

        Laura Finney answered on 22 Jun 2016:

        Although I think going forward in time would be really cool, I think going back in time and being able to stop some horrible things happening would also be really good. I’d love to be able tog o back and try and change things like the impact that humans have had on the world and warn people of what will happen in the future if they carry on.
        Maybe then the time we live in would be better. Also we could tell them our knowledge so that we develop quicker and maybe today would be more like the future 😀 So when I came back I could experience that too!

      • Photo: Ruth Patchett

        Ruth Patchett answered on 22 Jun 2016:

        If I can then come back to present day I’d go forward, not too far though, maybe just a few years beyond my lifetime, the world has changed so much in the last 20 years, I think even just 80 years from now it will be a vastly different place. If I had to go and stay there I would go back…just to be on the safe side!

      • Photo: Luke Williams

        Luke Williams answered on 22 Jun 2016:

        Oooh, I like this one.

        I often spend my time in the future, so I probably should go to the past and have a look round there, particularly if I can come back.

        Now, as was only recently pointed out to me – technically speaking if you went forward in time you are likely to die, whereas it is much less likely to happen if you went backwards in time (though still possible). Due to co-evolutionary pressures, any bacteria that cause infection we would be more or less resistant too if we went a little back in time. The further back in time the less likely we would still have resistance.

        Forward in time, as soon as something new evolved, we wouldn’t currently have immunity to it, and would therefore get ill. On a largescale and with a great deal of travel (like today with planes and what have you) there is a high risk of something nasty getting you.

        There is also the whole paradox thing – if you go back in time and kill your grandfather when he was young, he could never have your mother/father, and therefore you couldn’t be born, so you couldn’t go back in time, so you couldn’t kill your grandfather…

        Complicating this further is the Butterfly Effect, part of Chaos Theory, which states that any small effect can potentially have major unexpected side effects. Thus by going back in time, say 1000 years, and killing a single insect, you could cause entire countries to fall over the next hundreds of years through some incredibly long list of cascading events. Going forward in time should stop all that.

        So yeah, sorry to throw all this cold water everywhere, but hey, science!

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