Asklemmy

44135 readers

1086 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

A time traveller comes back from 50 years in the future. You have 3 hours with them. What do you do? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 11 months ago by Danterious@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

60 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Rules:

The time traveller is able to travel backward and forward through time (max forward is 2074) and they can only transport things that can fit in a small backpack.
You can choose when the 3 hours begin but it has to be in 2024 and once it has begun the timer can't be reset or stopped.
They will answer to the best of their ability but imagine this is a random person from 2074.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Saigonauticon@voltage.vn 5 points 11 months ago

The one thing we learn from history, is that we do not learn from history.

I guess that's why we dream of time travel -- so we can just go back and do those small things, instead of picking up a pile of history books and reading about what the Romans or Chinese (or whoever) wrote about what they wish they had done (and then maybe doing it). It's a technology that lets us pretend to be wise and have made the right choices all along -- a device that lets us escape regret.

To be fair though, reading some small fraction of those history books is quite a time investment for most people, and we seem to need those lessons (and be wise enough to take them to heart) at the exact time in our lives when we don't have any free time to learn them. I'm feeling this personally a lot right now. It's like we all learn why our reach exceeds our grasp just barely too late to really do much about it, except maybe read the stories of how that happened to everyone else, and know we are in good company.