Fascinating also is the idea of a time-machine: what uses it could be put to, and what the effects would be on the individual travelling back in time. If I you went back to 1600, for example, would you still be you, or would you on arrival be a bit of every one of your n thousand ancestors and the animals and plants they had eaten?
Interesting.
As to the uses time travel could be put to, I am in no doubt as to what I would do (stepping into fantasy land here, but why not?).
Armed Rambo-like with fearsome knives and firearms, and carrying a large supply of nuclear weapons on my Good Timeship Rectifier, I would head first for 5th century B.C. Persia and nuke it. Periclean Athens would have been saved.
Babylon before the Jewish captivity - flat, black, and glowing in the dark, ditto Egypt of the Pharaohs, Rome in the days of its empire, the Anglo-Saxon homeland (keeping Britain Celtic) and the Vikings, who were a European plague and, as Normans, invaded Britain in 1066.
The Arabs would never have got to Spain, nor the Saracens to the Middle East. 18th Century Barbary pirates? Kaboom!
"Reformation"? Armed to the teeth, Rambo-footer would take care of Wycliffe, Luther, Huss, Henry VIII and succeeding Tudors.
Cromwell probably would have remained a nobody, but if not, Zapp - he's gone.
London and Liverpool nuked, probably several times to put and end to the slave trade, and Germany in 1800, so Napoleon could win and liberate Ireland, Scotland, and Poland.
Prussia nuked in 1869 (no Franco-Prussian war) and again in 1880 to get rid of the whole vile racist apparatus of Bismark and Falk.
Depending on the results of the previous actions, I might need to take out Marx, Engels, and a bunch of dingy fin-de-siecle anarchists.
Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, the Frankfurt School, Beria, and a few others whose names escape me, impaled on the Kremlin spires. No 1917 revolution. Hitler, or Germany, or both, rubbed out before they started killing anybody.
Have I missed anyone?
****************************
And on my return to Now, what would I find? Everyone speaking Gaelic, Greek, or Slavonic? No Latinate languages? No English? No Gothic architecture?
As I said, interesting.
And what would you do with your time-machine?
5 comments:
Without you warned Eve,boot it not who you nuked, satan could tempt the old adam in any great amongst us for the worse, and it'd come to much the same, like squeezing an end of long balloon, it's just goes and expands the other end?
But I agree it's a fascinating intellectual past time..
And we could have and CAN: the warnings of Fatima were against what would come from great errors of Russia, ie AVOIDABLE
Wow! I think I would go back to 17th Century Dahomey and do away with the Dutch slave traders, so the Us would never hae had those problems. Then I would go to Gettysburg with a few batteries of rapid fring 75s, and Save the South fromt he North, thuw preempting the rapacity of a Federal government that usurps the rights of the states and the people, without the problem of slavery to complicate the issue!
There is a deplorable absence of cristianity in Ursula K Leguin, yet much that is thoughtprovoking and makes for an enjoyable read for me , perhaps not for you: have you ever read her " lathe of Heaven"?
Not exactly time, but what-if speculation, of a similar ilk.
I discover two films have been made from it, and am far from sure I want to see them.
God bless!
Priestley plays with time in a number of his plays: not just Time and the Conways, but also Dangerous Corner, The Long Mirror, and, of course, An Inspector Calls.
If you don't know them, I guess you'll find them fascinating: tho' his project, of course, is very different from yours!
Mike - For years I've been intending to read Ursula Leguin, and now I've stopped full-time teaching, I shall. Thanks for the reminder.
Ben - Yes, Priestley was still read and performed when I was at school, and I dimly remember his plays.
They are now on my re-reading list.
Apologies to you both for the delay in replying. I'm busy with Other Work!
God bless!
Post a Comment