Time Travel?

I really like movies and stories about time travel.  It would be quite the adventure to go back into the past or into the future.  If given a choice, I will pick the movie that has time travel in the plot 9 times out of 10!  

Movies like Back to the Future fuel my daydreams of what it would be like to try to make it in a different time.  Would I be able to survive, profit, change things for the better, for worse?

There are people who claim that time travel is impossible.  Or that time travel paradoxes prove it is impossible.  For example the grandfather paradox:

Say you travel back in time and kill your grandfather when he was a kid.  How could you exist since he never had your dad, or your dad had you, so YOU never existed, and could not go back in time in the first place?  Or if you meet yourself you will assplode the universe if you touch!!1!  Or disappear if you do something to change the fabric of time..
I think if you traveled back and kilt ur grandpa, it would not make a difference, because he had already got granny pregnant, or he wasnt really ur grandpa, because someone took your granfathers idenity later on, or some such nonsense..

I think time travel is possible.  BUT, if you could go back, you really couldn’t change anything.   I believe in free will, but I also believe that everything is set, past and future will happen how they happened already. 

When I was 20, I chose to enlist in the US Navy.  I am now 49.  I can look back 29 years and remember the decisions I made that led to me serving my country for 6 years.  20 yo me couldn’t have decided not to join the Navy because I did.  I will be able to make my future choices, like the route I will drive into work tomorrow, but that does not mean that my future will be different if I take Route A verses Route B.  My future will be what it already is when looked at from a future future like the day after tomorrow.

Whatever decisions any of us make in the future will happen the way they will happen.  This does not take away your choice though.  That being said, I think any time traveler would have some real problems if they somehow were transported back to the past or into the future.

Cultural attitudes are a big part of us.  I saw the movie The Help and was amazed that a lot of the crap that happened in that movie happened when I was alive!  Watching MadMen is a trip.  My GF about choked in rage when in one scene where a father told a kid to get his mother to clean up a mess the kid made.  I know minorities are not treated equally, but I had thought that a lot of the 'bad stuff' happened regularly way before I was born.   It would be very hard to say nothing about the treatment of minorities and women.  It would be hard to hide my revulsion.  So hard to fit in, when it would be almost impossible to know the million little things that make society 'normal' at that specific time.  I remember being a kid and having my grandparents complain about saladbars and all you can eat buffets.  'Why should I pay to serve my own food?' they would say.

Granted  The Help and MadMen was 50 years ago but there so many changes from year to year its hard to really remember what life was like even a few years ago.  We get so used to our toys.  We scan out own damn groceries in lots of stores.  Back in the early part of last century you didnt even get stuff off the shelf in the grocery store, you gave someone a list and they filled the order.  It was beneath the dignity of the customer to gather their own crap.  Now we pump our own gas!

We are sissies and could not survive another times diseases and living conditions.  Sure most of us can go camping and can 'rough it' in the woods, but SO much has been done to our world.  Our water  is purified, food processed so our delicate digestive systems can handle it.  Heck, drinking the water in Mexico is enough to make most ill for three days.    We are used to the diseases from our time and area that would kill large chunks of another times or areas society.   Simple things would kill us.  An infected bug bite or scrape?  Curtains.  
Heck, I went for a walk last weekend, it was hot, I got sweaty, moist clothes rubbed against my tender body and I got a sore.  I showered, had a change of clothes, some moisturizer and it was easily treated.  in another time I might not have had these options and things could have gotten bad real quick!


Well, these are just my opinions, right or wrong.  Nothing more to see here..  Move along.