Topic for Feb. 27. ( Thur)

[Alex !]

Would you rather go to the future or the past?

Somebody locks you in a time-machine and you have to go forward (the future) or backward (the past). You will never come back to “now”.

You can go any length of time, one day, a thousand years, a million years… Which would you choose? Future or past?

And why?

This is a question that I am sure has been asked multiple times at some point in time. Perhaps casually, like in this thread, or perhaps in a more serious environment, like during a job interview.

But the interesting thing about it is that whatever your answer is, it's still the correct one - provided that you have sound reasoning to back it up. 

Would you rather travel to Tomorrow or Yesterday?

I would obviously love to go to the past because the future is scary and given that we all are aware of what happened in the past and what is going to happen in the future (that is the present), using all this data, I can bet correctly on all the right horses and stocks and make a decent living for myself.

I would also do something good for the world but mostly focus on myself here. Going to the future with a few million dollars would still make sense, as I could at least do something of myself and make a living, but think how superior you will be if you visit the past and have the knowledge of the present.

You may obviously have a different set of opinions about this question and that is why I have written this thread for you. You all can go ahead and vote if you would like to travel to the past or the future, and please don't forget to let us know why in the comments below.

Just remember that we are talking about a hypothetical question (until someone actually invents the time machine), so you all can have some fun reasoning as well depending on what you want.

Personally, I would make a trip to the future to the year 2035. Not too far away, but long enough to see what my generation has become and what technology is like. It’s a hit or miss on whether we’ve completely destroyed the planet (ahem Planet of the Apes), but I’m hopeful.

It turns out that we are not the only one to wonder about the best direction to travel in time. This question was actually put forth to a group of several hundred research participants in a paper. The authors were simply curious which direction people would choose, and how their answers would map on to other aspects of their lives.

In an analysis like this, there are really an endless number of factors that such a variable (that is, time travel preference) could map on to. But the authors chose to look at a specific few: age, risk attitudes, and conservatism/liberalism. How might each map onto preference for time travel?

Age. As newer technology proliferates, it becomes harder and harder to keep up with the latest advances. Traveling to the future might be even more taxing on cognitive abilities, and so older people (relative to their younger counterparts) could be hesitant to travel to the future because it could simply be too overwhelming.

On the other hand, the opposite might be true. Ettlin and Hertwig suggest that, “aware of their limited time and spurred by the desire to transcend the invevitable biological barriers to experiencing the future, older people [might be] more likely to want to travel to the future than younger people.”

Risk. There’s a fundamental asymmetry between the past and the future: the past represents a collection of definitive events, while the future is unpredictable, unknown, and not fixed. The authors reasoned that people who are more actively seek out risk in their daily lives would also be more likely to want to travel to the “less known and predictable future, relative to the more familiar and more predictable past.”

Conservatism/Liberalism. In previous research, conservatism has been linked to an acceptance of inequality as well as a fear of change. Liberalism, by contrast, has been associated with an endorsement of social change and egalitarian attitudes. By this logic, conservative people—compared to those scoring low on conservatism—might prefer to travel back to the past, to the “good old days.”