Time Travel Parlour Talk

Chris at Letter never sent asks: "If you could travel back or forward in time where would you go?"

It's embarrassing to realize how often I preoccupy my mental energies with this question. Like Chris notes, the past is much more attractive, partly because it's more or less known, but it's also unknown. I often fantasize about visiting certain historical events, particularly those of the contreversial or dubious kind, like those recorded in the Bible. I want to know not only what happened, but more mundane matters, like, what was it like? How did it smell? How many different angles could you view it from? Should I bring a camera or a camcorder? What would make a good souvenir, but one that won't pose those "disrupt the thread of time" problems bad sci-fi (and some good) likes to dwell on?

Yet such tourism poses some tricky logisitical problems—that is, beyond the time travel part, which we'll just take as a given. For instance, say you want to witness the Crucifixion. Well, which one? How would you recognize it? Could you pick out Jesus Christ from all the other victims of this barbaric but popular form of punishment? And how would you time it? That is, how would you know that you have arrived on the right day, in the right town? Sure, biblical scholarship poses some answers, and certainly you'd want to bring some scholars along. (And whom would you choose? Once word got out that you had a form of time travel and wanted to check out the Crucifixion, your phone would never stop ringing. You'd get great funding, tho.) But even the most expert among them have only best guesstimates about the specifics of time and place.

Then there's what to wear. You can't walk down the streets of Jerusalem in your Tivas, Levi's and Old Navy hoody. And what about money? The merchants of the Jerusalem marketplace may still not take debit cards now, let alone two thousand years ago. Granted, the potential for playing a little historical mind fuck is tempting: In a different setting, how fun it could be to walk down the streets of Puritan Salem, MA with a boombox on one's shoulder, blasting Black Sabbath at full volume. Fun, yes—and probably dangerous.

Oh, and of course, language. Your scholar buddies might help out, but I bet their conversational aramaic is pretty rusty. I'd bring along Mel Gibson. Not cuz he'd speak it, but because there is a good chance he'd piss somebody off, get into trouble and maybe find his dreams of martyrdom fulfilled in a most literal way.