Time Travel With Jasper

 At the dawn of the next century, in 76 years, my oldest grandson will be 81. If our species’ better impulses outweigh the darker ones, and if good sense and luck hold out, Jasper will arrive in a new century having seen and experienced things we can’t even imagine (literally: we can’t imagine them because the cultural and technological foundations from which we might make these leaps of imagination don’t exist yet).

 Speculation aside, the presumptive ‘future fact’ of Jasper in 2100 means that he will carry the memory of his grandfather into another century. As time travel goes, it’s not the stuff of H.G. Wells or Isaac Asimov, but it’s my time travel, and I’m happy with it, even as I meander along my own corporeal path in the first quarter of this century. Of course, the reality of time travel exists: we move into the future even while standing still, because the “arrow of time” always moves, and it always points one way. 

 Trying to imagine the future invites hubris. Plug ‘retro-futurism’ into any search engine and you’ll find hilarious projections of what the future might look like.

Still, because imagination isn’t bound by logic, I can imagine. And I can hope.

 I can hope that we will have moved beyond the tribalism that so restricts many of us now, the great Gordian Knot that impedes so much meaningful social progress.

 I can hope that we will have become more generous to our fellow human beings in the equitable distribution of global resources, personal security, happiness, and fulfillment. 

 I can hope that the world’s population will be a fraction what it is today, not through the attrition of war, climate degradation or plague (and stupidity), but because of a sense of stewardship of both the planet and the less-sentient creatures with whom we share the biosphere.

 The dangers are manifold, driven by our maddening short-sightedness and the reality of a fragile world (well, fragile for us: the physical earth will continue no matter what we do to every species on earth, including Homo Sapiens). The two big technological forces that will almost certainly shepherd our progress toward 2100 are Artificial Intelligence and biotechnology; both will need a measured hand to keep them from spinning out of our control. And if that sounds like so much science fiction, too late: the fiction is already fact.

 All of these things Jasper and little brother Dane will carry into the 22nd century. If my grandsons see this – in some form – 76 years from now, they will be getting a direct message from me to them, which would fulfill my dreams of time travel. It’s not ‘legacy’, but it will be part of the grand cycle of how we live and die.

 For the most part, our fertile minds do a good job of protecting us from spending too much time thinking about our “blink of existence”. Having my mother tell me that she was ‘ready to go’; having wondered if my father was aware of his own mortality in those last few heavily-drugged days as cancer overtook him at a gallop; you wonder about your own expectations. Despite my own dance with two different cancer diagnoses, what is more likely for me – and the rest of us – is a slide, gradually, over time. That ‘time’ may be longer or shorter, but it is still a slide, toward the inevitable horizon. 

 I can hope my grandsons will see me waving back at them from that horizon.

 Tom New/2023