Of course, I would love to time travel. I love time travel books. Some of my favorites were written by Connie Willis. She wrote The Doomsday Book, which is about a grad student in 2048 who (as part of the university history department) gets to time travel to an English village in the 14th century. Now wouldn’t that be an interesting way to study? Anyway, the student arrives mistakenly on the eve of the onset of the Black Plague (but luckily, she’s been inoculated for diseases in that century.) The book won Hugo and Nebula Awards — it “draws upon Willis’ understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering and the indomitable will of the human spirit.”
All of us should time travel.
I say this because we form our opinions within the time frame in which we live. Our perspectives are heavily influenced by what is happening in our little town, our country, and the world, as reported by friends, family, the Internet, and more. We see the world through our eyes now, and we make conclusions about the past and present, and future based on our perspectives.
But because people did not understand everything in the past (the world is not flat), it is likely we do not understand all things in the present. We have yet to uncover all that our biological and chemical lives entail. We are just now mapping genes. Only recently did the courts acknowledge that psychological damage is a real thing. I discovered this while listening to a podcast about the 1976 Chowchilla school bus kidnapping. Though the kidnappers received life sentences, they were released early because it was determined that the children did not suffer physical harm. Forget about the psychological damage they suffered being buried alive for 16 hours.
Germ theory was non-existent not long ago. People blamed diseases on bad air:
The miasma theory held that diseases—such as cholera, chlamydia, or the Black Death—were caused by a miasma (μίασμα, Ancient Greek for ‘pollution’), a noxious form of “bad air” also known as night air.
People believed that polio was caused by poor living conditions. That was until the upper classes started to get polio.
So we have to be careful to cast judgment on people and things today that we may not understand. The more I read, the more I realize I don’t know much. It’s like I’m trapped in a small room. To paraphrase Hugh Nibley (I hope I am recalling this correctly) — we have too little space and time to study and become experts at anything. We are limited by our time here and the space we occupy.
I’m still interested in time travel; after all, who didn’t love Doc Brown and Marty McFly?
