Time Shock

Consider if you will, the possibility that you could wake up tomorrow having travelled back in time whilst you slept.  Now imagine you awake in a world some 14,000 years ago.  How much impact on the course of human history could you have?  Would you be able to revolutionize the endeavours of mankind thousands of years before it would have come to those discoveries on its own?  You would possess all the knowledge that you do now, but when you stop and think about it, how deep is your understanding of the world?  You know of most of the technology we use day to day and how it has improved our lives, or degraded them depending on your point of view, but do you actually understand how any of it works?  Would you be able to recreate any of it?

Would you even be able to survive if you awoke in a world with nothing where you must start from scratch?  It's a far cry from playing Minecraft in survival mode and starting with nothing compared to the real world and starting with nothing.  Consider if you will the very basis of human social interaction - speech - would you even be able to communicate with anyone you met?  Most modern languages are incredibly young in terms of how long they have existed, go back a few hundred years and even those people who are our not too distant ancestors would struggle to have a conversation with us, never mind talking to those who do not speak a language that still exists today.

Go beyond this still and you come to one of the perplexing questions often asked by those who contemplate time travel and its implications - would anyone believe anything you say?  In the modern world even with our understanding of the Universe and our scientific background, if an individual claims to be a time traveller the claim would be met with immediate scepticism.  It might interest you to know this isn't a hypothetical scenario, there have been many individuals who have claimed to be time travellers, one of the most high profile cases is that of John Titor an individual who communicated only through the Internet, who surfaced around the year 2000 and made many claims, some of which came true and others which did not, yet bare a strikingly close correlation to world events as they are now progressing.

The question of whether or not you would be believed ultimately relies on how much detail you can go into, however the more detail you go into the more likely you would be to alter the course of human history, perhaps preventing many of the future events you had knowledge of from ever happening, in which case you lose the advantage of having foresight and simply become another resident of that time period.  In the case of John Titor, he went into details that gave specific dates, which came and went without the events occurring that he predicted, even though some of those events have now happened at later dates and the potential for the rest to occur remains, the fact his predictions were not correct to a T dismissed any credibility thereof.

That leads to one final perplexing question held by those who contemplate time travel - are events fixed or not?  Would a new timeline be created with every interaction we have, or would events proceed the same way regardless of our actions?  This opens up the debate on Multiverse theory amongst others, which all attempt to explain what might happen - the operative word being "might" in that we don't actually know because to our knowledge nobody has ever actually managed to do it.