Time travel

As much as I reject deterministic doctrines, it was perhaps inevitable that I would eventually sign up for a free trial month of Netflix in order to watch the second season of Star Trek Discovery.

Avoiding giving away any spoilers, it had me thinking again about the long-term future of humanity, Fermi’s paradox and all those other things as I made my morning coffee. One thought in particular occurred to me. Either time travel to the past is indeed impossible or someone is actively ensuring the integrity of the timeline further down in history. With regard to Fermi, the latter would be a rather reassuring prospect, unless of course civilizations emerge all the time but wipe themselves out as soon as they become technologically capable. In that case our own existence in the present would not necessarily be an indication of that humanity will make it safely through the Great Filter.

Taking in these grander perspectives on comparative evolution at least makes me smile a bit about the academic research people are doing on “resilience” and “sustainability”. But the flipside of that coin is that it is perhaps good that most people do not seem to fully recognize the fragility of the human enterprise or how close we could be to achieving technological maturity. It would be foolish to suggest that all of this will be determined within my own lifetime or something but, over the course of the 21st century, I think we will have a fairly good sense of where we are ultimately heading. I guess we are all in for surprises.