3/5/2015

3/5/2015: (A World without Hope)

End: 3:51pm

In season 4, episode 19 of the X-Files titled “Synchrony,” Jason, Lisa, and Dr. Yonechi discovered time travel, or should I say, will discover time travel.  It sounds awesome, right?  Many times, humankind doesn’t anticipate the consequences of technology.  Such is the theme of this episode.  The elder Jason, the one from the future, tried to destroy his work.  He told the younger Jason that this invention makes it “a world without history, without hope, where anyone can know everything that will ever happen.  I’ve seen that world.”

Let me speculate this for a bit.  What does he mean that he has seen that world, a hopeless world?  If I know my future, if we all know our futures, then its predestination.  If I know I will eventually be a math teacher or a social worker and my future child will go into computer science, then great!  But let’s add socioeconomic status here.  What if a disadvantaged person, someone from the lower or underclass were to be able to see his or her future?  What will their future be like or their children?  Most likely, using statistics, many of them will have a bleak future.  Many of them will continue to be in a cycle of poverty.  What would you do if you are in their situation?  What would you do if you know that three years from now, you will be homeless and in six years you will be gunned down on the street?  And three of your children will be dead in seven years.  Many of them will probably choose to die.  Why live knowing that your future is bleak? 

And if they choose to end the cycle of poverty by death, it will affect everybody else.  The example I gave doesn’t have to be that severe.  What if people know that they will live the remainder of their lives as a wage slave?  This will be a world without hope.  Once the lower classes extinguish themselves, the upper classes will start to collapse, too, since they need the services and labor from the lower classes to maintain their status.  People need hope to live.

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This scenario assumes that time can only go forward, not back.  If time travel can go backwards as well, then many people may want to redo their lives and not make the same mistakes again.  I would like to do the same.  :p  But this possibility then opens up a much bigger reality.  If everyone were to go back in time to correct their mistakes, there may be parallel universes.  Somewhere, I may be a general Steven, a scientist Steven, a pilgrim Steven, or even a hacker Steven.  Ok, it’s getting too confusing.  Time travel is probably not ever going to be feasible.        

If there is a God (of the Bible), and I believe so, then it won’t be feasible because a man reaps what he sows (Gal. 6:7).  What give us hope; what gives me hope is the hope of eternal life, that as long as we try to love and follow Him, we will have a great future.