Last week I wrote that the two greatest super powers of all time are immortality and time travel, with teleportation coming in a possible, albeit distant third.
I’d like to offer a corollary on this:
1. If you’re not interested in living forever, then I am willing to acknowledge that immortality might not be the greatest super power for you. But you must also be willing to admit that until you actually face death, you might be wrong about your distaste for immortality.
As someone who has faced death three times (and actually died twice), I can assure you that immortality is appealing.
2. Time travel is better than teleportation or any other super power because of the ability to see into the future and warn humanity about (and perhaps even prevent) certain natural disasters and other calamities.
- Alert authorities about the September 11 attacks in order to stop the terrorists and save lives.
- Issue evacuation warnings ahead of earthquakes, tidal waves and other natural disasters.
- Stop George Lucas from creating Jar Jar Binks.
It would be an enormous burden on the person with this super power, but morally and ethically speaking, how could you not acknowledge that this power is better than the ability to pop in and out of New York City without having to deal with traffic?
3. There was some concern over the dangers of traveling into the past and catastrophically altering the future in which the time traveler lives (and possibly threatening his or her very existence in the process). There were also concerns over the potential for paradoxes.
While traveling into the past would be appealing, concern over these issues could be mitigated by simply traveling into the future only, and only traveling for observational purposes. A time traveler need only to travel to a library and spend some time reading newspapers or history books in order to find the information he or she needs while risking almost nothing in terms of unintentionally changing the course of human events
If you’re not convinced now, I don’t know what to do.
