Time Traveler

Time Traveler

A polio virus is a tiny microorganism. We encounter many of them every day. But only rarely, fortunately, does one of them infect one of us and cause this dread disease. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the thirty-second President of the United States, had polio.

Because the disease was crippling, it may have provided Roosevelt with a greater compassion for the underdog; or perhaps it improved his striving for success. If Roosevelt’s personality had been different, or if he had never had the ambition to be President of the United States, the great depression of the 1930’s, World War II and the development of nuclear weapons might just possibly have turned out differently. The future of the world might have been altered. But a virus is an insignificant thing, only a millionth of a centimeter across. It is hardly anything at all.

On the other hand, suppose our time traveler had persuades Queen Isabelle that Columbus’ geography was faulty, that from Eratosthenes’ estimate of the circumference of the Earth, Columbus could never reach Asia. Almost certainly some other Europeans would have come along within a few decades and sailed west to the New World. Improvements in navigation, the lure of the spice trade and competition among rival European powers made the discovery of America around 1500 more or less inevitable.

It is a lovely fantasy, to explore those world that never were. Image: © Elena

Of course, there would today be no nation of Colombia, or District of Columbia or Columbus, Ohio, or Columbia University in the Americas. But the overall course of history might have turned out more or less the same. In order to affect the future profoundly, a time traveler would probably have to intervene in a number of carefully chosen events, to change the weave of history.

By visiting the worlds that never were, we could truly understand how history works; history could become an experimental science. If an apparently pivotal person had never lived – Plato, say, or Paul, or Peter the Great – how different would the world be? What if scientific tradition of the ancient Ionian Greeks had survived and flourished? That would have required many of the social forces of the time to have been different – including the prevailing belief that slavery was natural and right. But what if that light that dawned in the eastern Mediterranean 2,500 years ago had not flickered out? What if science and the experimental method and the dignity of crafts and mechanical arts had been vigorously pursued 2,000 years before the Industrial Revolution? What if the power of this new mode of thought had been more generally appreciated? I sometimes think we might then have saved ten or twenty centuries. Perhaps the contributions of Leonardo da Vinci would have been made a thousand years ago and those of Albert Einstein five hundred years ago. In such an alternate Earth, Leonardo and Einstein would, of course, never have been born. Too many things would have been different.

In every ejaculation there are hundreds of millions of sperm cells, only one of which can fertilize an egg and produce a member of the next generation of human being. But which sperm succeeds in fertilizing an egg must depend on the most minor and insignificant of factors, both internal and external. If even a little thing had gone differently 2,500 years ago, none of us would be here today. There would be billions of others living in our place.

Time Traveler. Photograph by Elena