Andy Young: Ahead to the future or back to the past?

By Andy Young

When someone asked me not long ago if I would rather visit with my great-great grandparents or meet my great-great grandchildren, my initial reaction was, “What an utterly random question!”

Both are intriguing possibilities though, even if neither seems likely to occur anytime soon. Barring changes in the space-time continuum, there’s no chance I’ll ever meet my grandparents’ grandparents. As for seeing my grandchildren’s grandchildren, since I’m currently both grandchild-less and eligible for Medicare, it’s hard to imagine I’ll live long enough to see three additional generations of Youngs.

That established, there are reasons to desire both of these theoretical scenarios. For me oral history is far more fascinating and relevant than opening a textbook to read someone’s biased version of past events.

Hearing recollections from people who genuinely experienced history is the closest thing to actually being there. And while any eyewitness account of the past can bring history to life, hearing one from actual ancestors would make those particular memories even more vivid.

There would be some challenges involved with meeting my ancestral great-greats, since some of them probably spoke English with difficult-to-understand accents, and others didn’t speak it at all. But where there’s a will there’s a way, and I’ll bet if I were to somehow find myself face-to-face with a great-great grandmother or great-great grandfather, we’d be able to figure out some effective way to communicate.

However, checking in with my great-great grandchildren would be tempting, too. There are multiple upsides to meeting one’s four-generations-ahead descendants.

Given the current state of humanity, the future is even more unknowable than the past. It’d be thrilling to meet my great-great grandkids, although the prospect of lasting long enough to do so seems unlikely. Still, while it’s easy to imagine what the future might look like, wouldn’t it be great to find out for certain how accurate our conception of it actually is?

After thoughtfully considering this conundrum, and in the process squandering many hours that could have been better utilized for trifles like working, eating, and sleeping, I’ve come to what I consider the only logical conclusion.

First of all, for either of these scenarios to occur, time travel would be required. Assuming mankind obtains this ability sometime in the next two decades or so, I’m going to buy myself a time machine, which I will use to travel back to meet with my great-great-grandparents. That journey won’t just be through time, though. It’ll also be geographical, since I know for a fact that I’ve got progenitors from both Ireland and Hungary, and perhaps from parts of North America as well.

Once time travel has been normalized there’ll be plenty of vehicles to choose from, and with that in mind I’m going to opt for a really big one. That’s because what I plan to do after briefly experiencing what life in their world was like is to transport all 16 of my great-greats back to the present, where I can update them on what life is like here in the first quarter of the 21st century.

I’ve got nothing against any of my forebears, but I suspect that after getting a taste of what life in the middle of the 1800s entailed, I’ll be ready to return to a world with electricity and indoor plumbing, to name just two amenities I’d prefer not to go without for long.

Another reason that going back in time makes more sense than journeying ahead: suppose I travel forward four generations, only to arrive and subsequently find out that I don’t have any great-great grandkids?

Or, even worse, that nobody does. <