I’m always curious to hear people’s perspectives on whether they would prefer to go back in time or forward if given the opportunity. For myself, it’s always been forward. If I think about moving ahead by 100 years or so, it makes me think of all the things we didn’t have or know 100 years ago, such as refrigerators, microwaves, indoor plumbing, the internet, and medicine. Automobiles were scarce—it took nearly 50 years for them to unseat the horse and buggy as the preferred method of travel—and most people bought gas in cans from the local pharmacy. Films were not only black and white but silent. Women were still fighting for the right to vote (which became law in 1920). There were no federal laws on child labor, and we didn’t even have a national anthem yet!
As sweeping as these changes have all been, I’m even more interested in life 1,000 years from now. Will we have solved the world’s problems? Will discrimination no longer be an issue? What marvels of transportation will we have and how will we have evolved intellectually? What about countries? Will boundaries such as these even need to exist then? What will we know about the universe, and how much of it will we have seen for ourselves? These prospects fascinate me far more than living in a past that, while simpler in some ways, failed to meet basic human needs. Of course, the future would likely have its own unique problems that would be hard to even imagine at this point. It seems that good and bad have always gone hand in hand when it comes to progress.
You may not yet be able to travel through time, but you can control your future and have an impact on many others by the decisions you make today, just as decisions made in the past affect our present.
Mark Campbell
I did some research into the backward-or-forward question and found some interesting reasons people choose one over the other. Someone on the social media platform Reddit posed that question a while back and voting was relatively close: 3,600 people said they would rather go forward in time while 3,000 said they would go back, and the reasons given were quite varied.
For those saying they’d rather go back in time, the reasons ranged from wanting to fix mistakes they’d made to fearing a dystopian future to being unable to comprehend the future, much as someone from 1,000 years ago would have difficulty understanding life in the modern world. Some would want to spend time with departed loved ones, meet ancestors, or witness historic events (I mean, who wouldn’t want to go to Woodstock or see a live dinosaur?). Others wanted the opportunity to warn people about calamities, paradoxes aside.
For those choosing a future destination, many believed that everything would be better than it is now, especially those who still feel the pain of discrimination. One person stated they would love to be the “historian” of the future, providing value in much the same way someone from ancient Greece would if they suddenly sprang to life today. Most had an interest in seeing the development and accomplishments of humans.
You may not yet be able to travel through time, but you can control your future and have an impact on many others by the decisions you make today, just as decisions made in the past affect our present. The choices we all make help shape our world in ways we can’t even imagine. I, for one, want to protect that future in the hopes that 100 or even 1,000 years from now someone will benefit from something I did in the past.
So what would you do—go forward or back? I would love to hear your thoughts. Go to: form.jotform.com/prepho/forward-or-backward-in-time to respond.
Mark Campbell owns Prestige Photography in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Tags: creative
