I already time travel, exclusively in the forward direction, at a rate of one day at a time. Still, given the choice of one time travel trip anywhere, I would pick the future regardless of whether the trip was a round trip or a one way. It could be cool to go back to events in human history, like the first people on the moon or what it was actually like to live in a pre-agriculture society (spoiler alert- it was probably hard). Or I would hang out with my grandparents again.
The question does not specify, but if we visit the past via time travel, a science fiction writer has a choice – can you access other outcomes or not? I actually don’t even care to go to the past if you can access other outcomes, the option that I find more interesting, because for all the outcomes one can image for a different decision long ago, you can make different decisions starting today and have a huge possibility space in front of you. I just finished reading The Midnight Library, which allows the borrower to “check out” all her other lives.
I will admit that possibility space gets smaller as one ages, as there is less time remaining. So I can imagine the benefit of time traveling back to being a kid and doing things differently. However, things were not guaranteed to work out as well as they did, and you probably already did your best the first time. Although after writing this paragraph, I’m thinking about a million small things that I could have done differently in life and wondering where they might have led.
It is unlikely that ruminating on my personal past will make me happier. The future still has all that possibility and potential. So, where would I go? First, I would commit to taking care of my body so that it can continue to serve me in my old fashioned mode of time travel.
For my magic time travel, I would travel to the near-ish future that I don’t expect to see myself, like 2121, because I’m curious how the threads we are currently in turn out. What are my grandkids and great grandkids like? Does climate change become like the hole in the ozone layer (oh yeah, I remember hearing about that problem before we took care of it) or is it a hugely destructive force? How fast is the internet? Did humans create a generalized AI? Or, more specifically, are we aware of generalized AI operating among us? What do people eat? Do bananas still exist? Did cultivated meat become a thing? If so, how many cows and chickens are there in the world? What are governments like? Did we find something better than democracy, did we hold onto it, or did we fall into the allure of authoritarianism? What is a thing then that is not even on our radars now? It is difficult for me not to get excited when thinking about the future.
