And So It Begins Again

Honors Future I

"Welcome to honors future I. My name is Ms. Acceptio, and I'll be your instructor for this semester." She pauses and begins her usual warning she gives every year. "The problem these days with advancing technology is that you guys rarely bother to learn anything anymore. And why should you? With information at your fingertips, anything you want to know can be found in seconds, anything you want to remember recorded. But just because you can easily not listen to me and still pass this class, I want you to realize that that isn't going to do you any good. Simply knowing is not enough anymore. Understanding is what is needed."

Ms. Acceptio stops to look down at her notes and launches into the lecture. "When we're learning about the future, you must understand that this is all set in stone as surely as the past is. No matter what you do, none of it can be changed.

"Before Finn Journ discovered the journals that explained what later became known as the Circular Law of Time, Future, the field of study, never existed. Time travel had been around a few decades before that, but back then we could only visit the past.

"This brings us to our first topic: impending doom. Within those same journals Journ found were the details about the end of the universe. We know it happens, and there is nothing we can do to avoid it, so don't get any ideas. As most of you probably know, the Circular Law of Time states that time is circular and is in a never-ending loop. There is a moment when time resets to start the next cycle. This resetting is what many refer to as the end of the universe. No one has been able to pinpoint the exact time of when this will happen, though we know the location. This is known as a timeblank. A timeblank is a period of time that certain time travelers can't access. It is there as a naturally built in safeguard that time has. For example, you are not allowed to be seen by another version of you from a different time period. This means that you cannot talk to your six-year-old self. You also cannot try to see what you look like when you're 250-years-old. Those are timeblanks for you. There are other timeblanks that exist, but those are rarer. Often we don't know why they are timeblanks because, as you would imagine, it's not like we can go there and find out what happened, though there are theories. Right before and right after the reset are the most famous timeblanks.

"Because of time travel, we are currently at our most developed state of humanity. We have been to the future, studied their technology, and brought it back to our time. That's another safeguard time has. Our technology can't be brought to a time before time traveling to the future was a thing. It is impossible. Time is complex, but trust me, you won't be able to do it. People have died trying. You try to tell someone, and you'll trip and fall off a cliff that suddenly appears in the middle of the sidewalk before you get the chance. We know that it's not going to happen because, as I said before, time has already been set.

Before time travel was discovered, sci-fi writers dreamt of changing the past and future. We now know that it is impossible. But if you really think about it, it is good that we can't change anything. The uneducated might say, 'I would go back to the past and kill Hitler because then the Holocaust would have never happened.' But would that really work? Think about it: yes, the Holocaust was bad, and yes, many innocents were tortured and killed. But if if never happened, who knows what would have happened? Because of the mass genocide of Jews, the UN granted Israel to the Jews as their homeland. And because of that, there were many disputes over land between the Israelis and the Palestinians. And because of that...you get the idea. It's a huge snowball effect. The Holocaust taught us the importance of protecting the vulnerable, of not discriminating because of beliefs and the dangers of propaganda. This is how we know what we know today.

"And then you must dig a little deeper because of course you can't kill a man just because; there has to be a valid reason. Why did Hitler do what he did? He was trying to weed out the imperfect ones. The ones who were known as 'Jews'. The ones who didn't have the same beliefs as he did, who didn't worship the same texts as he did. So are we to blame religion for what Hitler did? How are we supposed to punish religion? Or are we to punish God, the core from which the two opposing religions stemmed from? But we can't exactly punish God because he's, well, God.

"So in conclusion, the one big takeaway from today is that you can't change time. Read over the syllabus by tomorrow's class. Class dismissed."