At
the end of everything, when all civilization has ceased and the Sun is soon to
burn out, you will stumble upon a mysterious and derelict underground base. In
this base you will find a strange computer. On this strange computer there will
be depicted a scene from your childhood. In the scene, your younger self will
be doing or saying something stupid and crazy. Below the computer there will be
a keyboard.
Realizing
the remarkable similarities between this situation and a scene from one of your
favorite webcomics, you will begin typing on the keyboard in the hopes that you
will be able to guide your younger self to a better future if it is real. You will
not see the harm in trying if it is just a dream.
This
will be a mistake. I will tell you that it will be a mistake. But you will not
listen to me. You never have.
You
will try to give your younger self helpful advice. He will not listen. He won’t
even understand what you are trying to tell him. If you fill his mind with too
much helpful advice, he will not know how to apply it and will just think that
he is wise and profound.
Eventually
you will turn on CAPS LOCK and start shouting into his mind as he sleeps,
hoping desperately that he’ll get it. But while one sleeps, so does their
capacity for reason. You could instead try shouting into his mind while he was
awake, but you will choose not to because doing so would get him hauled off to
the mental hospital.
He
will not understand your pleas for him to listen to you, to be reasonable, to
do what he must do to reach his future. He will be blind to all the obvious
solutions you try to offer to him. He will have an excuse in advance for why
they won’t work, and he will not even try them. And he will interpret your
anger and frustration at his stupidity and irrationality as his own low opinion
of himself. This will begin to tear his mind apart.
Finally,
you will realize that you are taking entirely the wrong approach here. You will
remember, guiltily, that when others have gotten angry and frustrated and
started shouting at your younger self for being so foolish it would only make
things worse. You will have made the same mistake that you promised yourself
that you would never make.
And
yet despite this promise, even your younger self castigated himself for his own
foolish thoughts and acts for many years after the fact and continued to do so
even as he continued to be foolish.
You
have been shouting at and beating yourself up inside all your life. The only
difference is that before you were mentally abusing yourself in person, but
here you will be doing so through a computer keyboard.
Once
you’ve managed to finally forgive yourself, you will begin to wonder about the
nature of this strange computer. How does it work? Why does it show you your
past in more visceral detail than you could possibly remember it? Perhaps, like
the universe of your favorite webcomic, you live in a simulated universe that
contains itself? Perhaps you could change the focus of the computer monitor to
view someone else’s past? Other people who you could subtly direct towards
helping your younger self?
After
trying that for a while, it occurs to you that maybe you could do this for
other people too. You will soon find that this strange computer allows you to
view anyone who has ever lived. You will wonder if perhaps you could try
viewing anything in the past rather than just people, for there is no true
distinction between living and nonliving material at the deepest “level” of
reality. Everything is just fundamental particles after all—or perhaps just a
computer program, just a mathematical object.
And
if you could view anything in the past, perhaps you could fast forward—see what
your future holds? Perhaps this computer stores the whole Universe, or perhaps
it is one of many servers storing part of the Universe on a network. But then,
if you could locate all the computers on the network, does that mean that you
could back-up the whole Universe onto external hard drives? That way you could
recover any lost or corrupted data.
You
will realize that it was foolish and irresponsible of you to randomly start
typing on the keyboard of a strange computer in a derelict underground base in
the middle of nowhere without actually knowing what you’re doing. You will be
very glad that you did not accidentally destroy the Universe.
You
will then decide that your first priority is to assemble a team of competent
and ethical computer programmers and other specialists. You will copy and paste
the mind of the computer programmer you most admire into a separate file on
your external hard drives, and he will advise you on what to do next, including
what other minds to copy and paste into external hard drives and in what order.
The
minds you copy and paste into your external hard drives will all be experts in
their fields who will work together and come up with plans for you to follow.
You will act as their hands, typing exactly what they tell you to type, and in
doing so you will prevent the heat death of the Universe and bring everyone
back to life.
And
all humankind will live happily ever after.
And
then you will wake up from the dream, remembering that real life isn’t that
easy or fair. There will never be a random computer terminal lying around that
would just happen to contain a perfect simulation of the Universe you live in.
In real life, lost data is not always recoverable. There are no second chances.
You cannot change the past. You have to get it right the first time, or not at
all.
