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The other way around, then. I know we are all moving forward whether we like it or not. You who felt compelled to point it out, seek help. Available.
After all, we already know that we will never break the time traveler before committing collective suicide as a species. If we ever did that, the streets would already be filled with hordes of future tourists.
Why should one call it future tourists, even if people go back in time? It’s called “American tourists” when they come here.
They would wander the sidewalks with their hands, or whatever they wear, covered in mysterious manicures. There would be a whole industry of souvenirs that would produce nostalgic holograms of dusty old quantum computers and Twitter threads difficult to interpret for the true connoisseur, who read ancient languages.
By the way, that would not be enough. The future tourism of our present time could hardly last a week before money hunger took hold. People would start backing up and playing the stock market and handing out full-fledged lottery tickets. The economy would collapse and all the lottery winnings would be shared among so many it was only a penny.
If we ever knew how to time travel, in other words, we would already be.
None of that has happened. Which proves that there will never be time travel. Or possibly that people in the future do not care about money, but of course it is even more irrational than time travel. And even if it was, people in the future, if they are to be called human, must be just as curious, clumsy, and limitless as we are.
Someone would definitely have the bright idea to go as far back in time as possible, without everything turning into a swamp and stupid cave-bite heads. Then, on the spot, they would “invent” the time machine and thus be the first to invent, even before it existed. Just because it can be done.
If we ever knew how to time travel, in other words, we would already be. And we don’t.
OR…
There is another possible explanation. It sneaks into endless crown times. It flows from the culture and debate pages of newspapers like overcooked molasses. It ticks softly on the eardrums like an insane woodpecker, as soon as a minister talks about nuclear waste or high school law. It roars as hordes of flat feet invade the Capitol.
Perhaps we live in the time equivalent to Kyrgyzstan. A mindless mountainous landscape filled with clans with even more mindless conflicts. A place that certainly exists, but how many do you know who want to go there? How many people talk about how fun it would be to finally see Kyrgyzstan?
Ultimately, it may be that we live in the most boring times. That nobody is interested in visiting us, not even our ancestors. Future tourism is open, but there is no market for sending people here. Not even the disaster tourists of the future are interested in our pathetic failures. No future subculture is subculture enough to care for.
The more I think about it, the more bribery it sounds. The only thing I’m not sure about is whether it’s uplifting or depressing. Should one be glad that the future is something in the way of the horse, or resent being trapped in the present? Is the glass half empty or half full?
I’d probably shit on that, as long as there’s something strong in crystal hell.
