Time-Travel With Care

Time-travelling is one of the standard plot devices of our stories and films, from H.G. Well’s The Time Machine to Interstellar, Dr. Who, The Terminator, and hundreds more. It’s not hard to see the appeal—it’s interesting to imagine what it would be like to visit the world of the future or the past. It’s exciting to think of dipping into a different era, something totally unlike our normal everyday lives here and now. But it’s also easy to see the risks that this kind of time-travelling would bring with it. In the Back To The Future films, Doc Brown gives several stern warnings to Marty about the dangers and potential consequences of interfering with the past. He knows that time-travellers must be aware that even the smallest of actions can change the course of history in surprising ways—as we see in the films.

They are just stories, of course, but the logic holds. When you think about it, our lives today are built on a massive tangled mess of historical events, big and small, over the timeline of history. So many lives, so many lifetimes, so many choices over so much time—all of them have come together to bring us where we are today. Most of the events of the past that have shaped our lives are events that we know nothing about. Even at the time they happened, most of the daily events and actions of our ancestors must have seemed too small and insignificant to notice much. But noticed or not, they happened. And all together they led us to where we are today, for better or worse. So you can see why people in time-travelling stories would want to be careful with the past. When we look back, we see clearly that even the smallest actions can impact everything and everyone around us.

But if that’s true about the past, isn’t it also true about the present?

Our place in time doesn’t change the significance of our actions. We’re still making history with every action, every breath, every word. We are time-travellers, too. We may not be able to travel freely back and forth, but we are travelling nonetheless. We have one direction only: forward. The future is coming fast, and it is being shaped right now. Tomorrow will be built by the choices we make today, however big or small. While we tend to recognise this about the big choices, we can often overlook the significance of the small ones—but that won’t stop them from shaping the future. So as we pass through what will soon be the past, we should learn from time-travellers in the stories. We must watch the small actions. Mind the small decisions. The words thrown away. The things carelessly done. They all matter. They all make the future—and we’ll live there tomorrow.