This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge, hosted by Long and Short Reviews. Check out other bloggers at this week’s post.
What things I’ve read about over the years do I wish were real?
Time travel.
I suppose it sounds kind of cliché, but that’s really what I’d want.
And I don’t necessarily want the ability to try to affect the past. We’ve tried that already. That piece was intended as humor, but the whole “no Hitler means no Third Reich, no World War II, no rocketry programs, no electronics, no computers” thing is just one example of how things could go wrong. See “A Sound of Thunder” (I kind of want to see the movie) and “A Gun for Dinosaur” for others.
No, I’d much rather be able to go back and just watch stuff happen, because history and story, right? Those are big parts of who I am, remember?
Can you imagine traveling back 8,600 years and seeing Ancient One being buried along the Columbia River? Learning about his tribe? Seeing his family? Finding out how he came to be buried where he was?
When Would I Go?
I’d make multiple trips to Germany, France, Russia, and Switzerland to track down parts of my family. At least five distant cousins died in service to Germany. It’s ridiculously difficult to find records for someone named “Benz” when I don’t even have a date of birth. One died in Russia, and another as a POW in France.
I’d probably try to track my great-grandparents from New York to Texas. I suspect I’m otherwise never going to figure out they made that trip. Gods know I’ve speculated enough about the idea, though.
Then I’d do some historical traveling.
Ford’s Theater in April 1865. Picture it. You could likely smell the tension in the air because you know what’s coming.
Dallas. 1963.
Philadelphia, summer 1787.
Safety
You’ve got to think about this aspect of time travel.
Michael Crichton wrote the incredible Timeline, about time travel.
There’s a scene where someone gets sent back to 1348 without the means to return to the present. That was the heart of the Black Death, and he immediately gets sneezed on. (He deserved it, though.)
There’s a whole sequence where time travelers are “sterilized” by removing anything connected to the modern era. It’s something of a Chekov’s Gun, to be honest. The whole reason they’re going back in time is to rescue someone who got their attention by leaving their modern eyeglass lens in a 650-year-old archeological dig. There’s a Chekov’s hand grenade in the mix, too.
But those are just a couple of examples of safety issues you’ve got to worry about. The 21st Century is pretty safe, at least in the US, and I think we’ve gotten far too comfortable with that safety. We think traveling by boat is safe, but the Great Lakes alone have seen anywhere from 6,000 to 25,000 shipwrecks and hundreds of others have been lost along US rivers. I’d like to see the conditions my relatives traveled in from Europe to the US, but what kind of risks am I willing to take?
The same holds true for my cousins in World War II. Yeah, I want to see what happened to them but combat back then was just as violent as it is today. Conditions in WW2 POW camps were likely better than in the American Civil War, but they were probably still pretty rough.
What about disease? Sure, we’ve got vaccines for all three versions of the plague, and for smallpox, measles, polio, and a whole bunch of other diseases. It would be relatively simple to vaccinate a modern person against any diseases they might encounter. Painful, probably, but technically simple enough.
But what about the microbes the modern person might carry back in time with them?
And on that note, be sure to check back next week to see what fictional things I’m glad aren’t real.
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