Post Punk Kitchen Forum

If you were given the proper machine and equipment, would you choose to travel forward or backward in time?
Choose wisely.

I want a hover-car! They'd better have those in the future.

Depends on the consequences.

I could never time travel. Simply because I could never decide where to go.

blue valentine-era tom waits, here i come!

Backward - no question. Provided I had my return ticket firmly in hand, I would visit 16th and 17th century England (think how invaluable this would be for my dissertation!), and if I still had time, the 15th and 14th centuries as well...of course, I'd make sure my vaccinations were all up to date before departure!

Ooh, that makes me think another poll is in order... A 'would you time travel if it was a one time, one way trip'?

Backward! But I have no idea to what time; there's so many good ones. I definitely know I don't want to see into the future, since I'm pretty sure it's going to really suck. Hey, I'm just being a realist.

NO THERE'S GOING TO BE ROBOTS AND ALIEN RACES AND WE'LL ALL BE FRIENDS.

Whatever you say. I'm just trying not to catch the bubonic plague over here.

Backward, obviously: there are dinosaurs back there.

Forward. I want to know how things turn out.

Do all you backwards-goers reread books?

I was assuming it was a one-time, one-way trip, since I had to choose one or the other!

I'd travel forward until someone gets around to inventing a time machine which goes both ways.

I would travel forward. I don't want to deal with the conservatives. Not the morally stunted idiots who live in the past, the chrono-conservatives who claim you shouldn't change anything, because they're just sooooo attached to their preferred, reified version of history.

Also, we already know things about the past. The whole world is cluttered with stuff from the past. Basically everything there is existed in the past! I mean, sure, maybe you have specific questions about the past that can't currently be answered, but that is true of basically every question about the future. Compare Back to the Future's version of 1955--mostly accurate, if somewhat romanticized--with Back to the Future II's version of the future. I mean, they didn't even predict cell phones, and they had cell phones.

So I guess I'm going to the year ELEVENTY BILLION and then going to a library. A future library. Where I will read eleventy billion years worth of history. Or I'll just be immediately scrapped for parts by the final-state intelligence that will have incorporated all matter in the universe into its structure by then. Whaddevs.

What if you went forward and there was NOTHING....Just an empty planet overgrown and no human life left. You would be stuck on Earth all alone with no way to leave and no way to survive. Forward is scary! At least if you go back you kind of pretty much have an idea of what you are getting into.

I'd just wait for other time travelers to show up and then kill and eat them.

That still sounds better to me than dying of scarlet fever or purple gout or the amber palsies. No, I like my chances in the future. The general trend of history is that the past is a fetid shithole and the future is awesome right up until it becomes the present, and then it's just ok. I mean, think about this logically: they didn't even have the internet in the past. Life was pretty much not worth living until the 1990s. Just long periods of boredom punctuated by being punched in the face or having one of your favorite organs burst from a disease that could be easily prevented by not being constantly immersed in your own filth.

Gettin' down with the amber palsies.

Maybe I'd go back to April 10, 1982 and do it all over again! But only if my life would be better. It could suck a whole lot worse than it already does. And that goes back to my what are the consequences question.

I think I'd rather not fork with time travelling. I'm way to everything happens for a reason kind of person. But if I could go back in time just for fun to see what other periods were like, I might do that.

Forward. It's more exciting!

I think I'm in love.

Both! Both both both. There would be so much to seeeee!

what if you went forward and there was jeremy irons as some kind of albino goth vampire ruling over a race of murderous, tunneling sand apes? i will take my chances in a predictable past any day. or maybe i'd just go back to this morning and make mumbles some waffles, 'cause it seems like he's having a rough day.

The past, obviously. If I went to the future, mumbles might kill me and eat me.

Oh, and I'm totally bringing antibiotics with me.