Zhaorong Tu, Week 11: The Practical Superpower
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If you had the opportunity to choose a superpower, what would you choose? Speed, strength, flight, and maybe invisibility are just a few that immediately come to mind. While we may have dreamed about the more fantastical powers when we were younger, what powers would be most practical if we didn’t want to dedicate our entire lives to fighting crime? Personally, I would choose time travel.
Now I’m sure everyone’s heard stories about the nightmare situations that irresponsible time travel can create. And of course, creating a time paradox because you misused your power wouldn’t exactly be ideal either. However, while it may just be to my arrogant shortsightedness, I feel that any horrible consequences of time travel can easily be avoided, especially if you simply undid your mistakes.
After all, most people probably wouldn’t even use time travel to make changes that would have major implications on the timeline. I know I certainly wouldn’t. The usefulness of time travel would be its ability to just improve so many aspects of your life by small margins. The ability to remove embarrassing mistakes or make slightly better decisions (or even give yourself a little more time for deadlines) would be something that I’m sure I and many others would love.
Using time travel to improve the little things in life is actually the premise of the 2013 movie About Time. The protagonist of the movie finds love and satisfaction by reliving the small mess-ups he had throughout his life and correcting them. With the ability to travel through time he’s able to find an almost complete sense of contentedness with himself and his choices, and that’s something that I’m sure everybody would welcome.
Hi Zhaorong! If I could have any super power, I would choose teleportation. I believe that people waste way too much time getting from one place to another and more of life can be enjoyed without having to deal with the hassles of transportation. I could wake up at 8:20 everyday for school and make it to class in time instead of waking up at 7:15. Over the weekend, or even just after school, I can go to the beach in Hawaii or any other country. It might even be useful for business to be able to instantly travel between countries and transport documents or materials. I think time travel is too messy to deal with but that might be because I've watched too many movies where the plot becomes insanely convoluted due to time travel, making the movie less entertaining.
ReplyDeleteHi Zhaorong! I found your blog very fascinating on the first read, especially because it closely resembles my last blog post where I mentioned the fanatical mindsets we all possess when we are young about superpowers such as flight and speed. Although I never mentioned time travel in my last post, I think that is actually one that I would pick for my favorite superpower because it allows you to go back in time and correct your mistakes, and let you use your power for an ideal cause. The consequences of what had happened in the past, if happened to be bad, could easily be undid by fixing the mistakes that you might have made all this time. You could improve on multiple aspects of your life by possibly preaching to God about your mistakes if you are religious; however, if a time travel machine exists you will be able to easily purchase it and see the effect it has. Being able to quickly travel between countries for business trips or for vacations can be a breeze as you can also expect what will occur in the near future, meaning you have the ability to prevent anything bad from happening.
ReplyDeleteHello Zhaorang, reading your blog post made me realize the benefits of being able to time travel. People who can time travel can change so many situations. They can not only change the future, but they can also change the present by moving to past. Lakshmi's response to this blog post made me think about what would happen if you went all the way back to birth of Jesus Christ, and prevented him from spreading his knowledge. I wonder what the world would look like today.
ReplyDeleteHI Zhaorang, if I had to choose a super power, I definitely would choose super speed. If the power is anything similar to the power displayed in the Flash, then super speed would include time travel as well. There are so many times in life when I wish I could just go back and change one thing, but to be honest, I'm glad that humans don't have that power, because I think there are important lessons we can learn from our past mistakes. But, I definitely do see the point you make in your post, and I look forward to reading more from you!
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ReplyDeleteHi Zhaorong, I really enjoyed your blog post that gave me a chance to explore time travel. Your argument that small changes to the timeline could be made without any effect on the future reminded me of the theory of the butterfly effect. Essentially, this theory suggests that even a really small change can cause a chain reaction that could have large and unpredictable impacts. I kind of agree with this theory because of how impactful a single action can be in our unpredictable world. For instance, maybe someone was failing a class, so he went back in time to give himself more time to study for a test. This extra studying time might lead to a higher test score, but that might not be the only impact. The higher test score could result in this time traveler’s parents buying him a PS5 as a reward. He could then get addicted to this new game, which could lead to his other grades falling, forcing him to attend summer school. This is basically the basis of the butterfly effect: one thing leads to another which leads to another. I definitely think that time travel is complicated and unpredictable, but I also think that this uncertainty is what makes time traveling so fascinating, and I definitely agree that it would be nice to be able to change past mistakes. Perhaps one day, time travel will truly be a reality, and if that's the case, hopefully we are wise enough to use this ability responsibly.
ReplyDeleteHello Zhaorong, I would like to agree with the ability to go back in time. The amount of tests I could make up, the amount of things I could easily cheat on, from the lottery ticket selection to the AP test, would make life much easier. Unfountenlty, this is based on the idea of there being a separate reality for whatever my actions cause, meaning that no matter what I do life will go on as if I did not rewind time and mess with my future. This would mean that I could have no limitations on what I did, nor make any major changes to the future. It would just be a small change in how I reach the future, but my future no matter what is predestined. If the butterfly effect is real, I would not take time travel.
ReplyDeleteHey Zhaorong, I found the end message of About Time very interesting, as the main character goes through several arcs of using his ability to better his own life and reach whatever he wanted to do. However, following advice from his father, he doesn't even use the ability anymore, instead living each day to the absolute max and seeing happiness in the little aspects of life. Personally, this construction of time travel seems very convenient and I would definitely appreciate the ability to just close my eyes and warp before certain things like tests or events. However, I think personally I'd pick a more basic power like flight or telekinesis, simply for the sake of convenience and overall it seeming like it would make my life easier and more fun.
ReplyDeleteHi Zhaorong! Time travel has always been very fascinating to me. It's such a prevalent theme in so many movies and TV shows. I remember watching Avengers: Endgame for the first time where they take a new approach to time travel that is lampshaded by one of the characters who points out how different it was from other popular movies about time travel such as Back to the Future. The idea of the ripple effect and the butterfly effect are truly scary thinking about how one seemingly inconsequential event could have such a huge impact on people. Though if this wasn't a problem, time travel and solving problems with it would be overly convenient. I hope they don't discover time travel in my lifetime. That would cause a lot of problems.
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