(no subject)

[the_rck]

You have a one way trip in a time machine. Forward or backwards in time. When do you choose to go live? (for zhelana)

I am assuming, for this, that for some reason I absolutely have to take the trip, no options. I'm not sure that, otherwise, I'd travel to a different time.

I think I'd gamble on the future. There are medications I take every day that I wouldn't do very well without, and if I went back, I'd be pretty sure not to have access to them once whatever supply I'd brought with me ran out. I'm not entirely sanguine about the future, but I know the past is a place I wouldn't survive particularly well. I'm also attached to clean water and indoor plumbing, and I like being able to vote and own property and all that. I'm not sure how far in the future I'd go, though. Even a decade would leave me hopelessly out of my depth technologically given how fast things are changing.

There's also the question of Scott and Cordelia-- Could I take them with me? If I couldn't, I'd want the shortest possible trip into the future just because it would break me to lose them.

My answer might change if it were possible for me to change the past and if it were possible for me to take a lot of things back with me. I could see going back a century or so and trying to alter our current world's dependence on fossil fuels. I'd want to do a heck of a lot of research first. I'm woefully ignorant about a lot of more or less recent history. I'm not even sure where the potential points are for changes. And who knows? Perhaps more research would suggest some other change that I'd consider more important.

Comments

[transposable_element]

Yes, I'm a type 1 diabetic, so I couldn't go back earlier than 1922, when insulin was first isolated. And frankly, I wouldn't want to have to deal with the diabetes treatment and monitoring technologies that existed before about 1980. I'd be a little scared to find out what we're in for in the future, but I'd have to go forward, not back.

Have you read "Great Work of Time," by John Crowley? Lovely novella about time travel and tampering with history.

[the_rck]

I have not read "Great Work of Time." I'll put it on my list of things to look for.

Modern medicine is a wonderful thing. If only it were regulated so as to keep costs contained. What we get should not be nearly as expensive as it is.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Could you go back 35 years, move 120 miles west, and become the world's most helpful and sympathetic small-town librarian? I know that's a lot more selfish than many time-travel stories. But it seems a lot easier for one person with your skills to "change the past" on the scale of making one kid into a happier adult than on the scale of making the world less dependent on fossil fuels.

It wouldn't solve the problem of missing Scott and Cordelia, though.

[the_rck]

I think the biggest barrier to going back that far would be that I'm not sure when Singulair came on the market. Without it, I'm prone to bouts of asthmatic bronchitis that last weeks or even months and during which I can't function. My GERD medications are fairly recent, too. I could possibly get by without my psychiatric meds (I'm not sure how much they actually do), and Claritin is largely a matter of comfort rather than of necessity. I'd miss my anti-migraine medication, too. I know that's fairly recent.

The only good thing, medication wise, would be that I could get an Alupent inhaler again. They stopped manufacturing those about ten years ago, so the only inhalers on the market use variants of Albuterol which does nasty things to me.