We are in the last week or so of my Sci-Fi class and today we finished watching the Star Trek episode City on the Edge of Forever, and read an article about Carl Sagan and his thoughts on time travel. In the episode, it shows us that some people are more pivotal than others because the man in the alley dies/vanishes and nothing in the future (that we know of) is changed; but, because the woman, Edith, didn't die she changed the future drastically. It relates to the short story I blogged about in my last blog, A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury. When they hunt dinos to shoot, they go back in time and pick the ones that are going to die anyway so that they don't disrupt the future. So, in the Star Trek episode when that random guy "vanishes" maybe he was going to get knifed later that night, so by him being gone didn't change anything. I do believe that some people do effect the future more drastic than others. It also shows that if we do some how mess up the future, what's to say we can't go back and fix it?
In the Carl Sagan article, I like how he is a true scientist, he has ideas about how things work but is open to be proven wrong. He also believes that just because something hasn't been proven yet doesn't mean it is impossible. For an example Stephen Hawking says that we can't go into the past because we haven't meet any time travelers yet, and they didn't come to his "Party". But what Carl is saying is: what if we haven't seen them because otherwise it would change the future, what if we haven't invented time travel yet, what if they have this technology that can cloak themselves? So we just don't know, and how can you say that something can be possible or impossible if you have no hard facts? Time travel is one of those mind-numbing, wonderful mysteries to explore.
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