The Tyler Hayes

Growing up, I was a sci-fi nut. Wait, I’m still growing up, aren’t I? And yep you guessed it, I’m still a sci-fi nut.

Two books above all else influenced me: Ender’s Game and The Light of Other Days. While both completely unrealistic and fictional in their own rights, 50% of the category is still “science” after all. Hence, the authors - Orson Scott Card and Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter, respectfully – play around in the “What if?” sandbox quite a bit. I’m going to talk about the latter book in this post.

You see, Light is very much a novel that breaks down conventions. Without ruining it too much, we discover wormhole technology and eventually a brilliant scientist (who else?) thinks “Hey, if we can breakdown the space-time continuum and travel through space via wormhole, maybe we can travel through time via wormhole as well.” Of course, he’s correct and the human race is never the same. The catch is: we can’t actually travel through the wormhole, but we can see through it.

And that’s where this ties back in to the scope of this blog. Like I said, the human race changes. Specifically, since they can see into the past, they can look at what anyone did at any time; “turning on the light” to everything ever has unbelievable privacy ramifications. Basically, privacy ceases to exist. People have sex in public. They don’t knock on doors. Walls are torn down, figuratively and literally.

My favorite quote of all time comes from Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose penchance for drama caused Karl Marx to call him a “systematic falsifier of history”:

“The measure of a man’s real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.”

Imagine if this actually happened at some point in the future. And, please, don’t convince yourself it isn’t possible. This certainly could happen (regardless of whether it’s via wormholes or not), though doubtfully within the next few hundred years as predicted in the novel. Would you change the way you live? Would you do more, or less in life? Would you work as hard, or would you spend more time with family?

Do you think we’re alone? I don’t just mean aliens or spirituality, but ourselves. Think this through with me: mathematicians have proven time isn’t linear, it just is; essentially, time has been, is, and always will be. It just seems linear because that’s how we perceive it. Then, if someday we develop a way to look into the past, that means that, technically, those people are already looking back at us.

This may be unsettling. But it’s what my mind gets stuck on, so I figured I’d share it with you. I’ll leave you with one more quote, to connect this back to how we deceive ourselves into thinking we’re alone. This comes from my high school theater teacher and director:

“No matter where you are on stage, always stay in character. Because with all those people out there, even if you’re not the center of attention, even if you don’t have one miserable line, at least one person is watching you. They’re observing you. And if you fall out of your role, then the whole damn illusion falls apart in that instant. And you’ve ruined it all.”

If, ever, we (or someone else in the Universe) creates time travel technology, then that means that every moment of your life is being recorded. Or, to mess up your head even more: it has already been recorded, which means that your choices have already been made. Or have they?

Either way, this is just another example of the illusion of privacy I like to talk about. I hope you enjoyed my brain dump.