“I really don’t think my life would be better with time travel,” said no one ever.
Granted, I may have more of an interest-bordering-on-obsession with time travel than most people, given that I’ve written a short film and a television series on the topic, but that’s only because I believe in giving the people what they want. And I’m of the mind that everyone wants time travel. That’s not to say there are no downsides to it; there is always the chance that time travel will destroy me, the universe, and absolutely everything inside of it. But contrasted against the convenience and just plain coolness of it, I’d say the pros of time travel clearly outweigh the cons.
Just think about it. Someone, probably a government Man-in-Black in a nice suit and dark shades, steps forward and offers you the chance to go back in time and change something about your life. You wouldn’t take him up on that? I know I would, and I know precisely where I’d go. It’s nothing obvious. I don’t have to save my family from dying because my family’s all alive. Same goes for immediate friends. And I’m not killing Hitler. That’s cliché. Why would I spend a trip to the past killing Hitler? Plenty of people want to kill Hitler. I’m sure he’s got a veritable line of assassins waiting at his hospital bassinet. No, even if they offered me a million trips, there’s only one place I ever need to go. I’d go back to the 2011 NCFCA Regional Championship in Indianapolis, Indiana.
I write, resolved, that my life would be significantly improved if I had time travel. But of course, before I can get too deep into the real meat of my argument, I should go over some early definitions. Make sure we’re all on the same page here.
NCFCA: the National Christian Forensics and Communications Association, a speech and debate organization for Christian homeschoolers. Seems pretty niche, I know, but it’s more cutthroat than you’d anticipate a gathering of thousands of Christian homeschoolers to be. Picture nerdy high schoolers, dressed to the T in business-formal suits, ties, and shoes, debating the intricacies of Russian foreign policy before a panel of judges. Picture Cross-Examination, a three minute lightning round wherein one competitor gets to step up to the podium and drill the just-finished speaker with as many questions as he can muster: any fact without written evidence, any fact without a credible author, any fact older than 2008 – all invalid. And of course if you couldn’t answer the question, that just meant you ceded the argument to the other team. League legend had it that a particularly skilled interrogator devolved his sweat-drenched victims to sobs and surrender in those mere three minutes. But of course, remember to keep a smile and shake your competitor’s hand, just like Jesus would! This was my universe, and I was the heir apparent, the King of divine right, the wielder of words more powerful than Excalibur.
Franz: Good friend. Better partner. Debate’s a two-man team sport, so as good as I was, I needed a partner. Franz was a three-year debater, a big-boned, buzz cut freshman who could rock a suit like none other while using his Bill Clinton “aw, shucks” personality to win judge sympathy.
Microloans: Every team needed a case (a policy you’d try to argue into existence, while the other team tried to stop the idea from ever being born). Franz came up with ours: a touchy-feely plan to give microloans for impoverished Russians to start a small business. Just the right mixture of feed-the-poor Christian ethics and conservative economics to make the other team look like monsters for arguing against us. It was a work of staggering evil genius, to be honest.
Milwaukee Qualifying Tournament: The third of five qualifying tournaments in our region; winning teams went on to the exclusive Regional Competition. Franz and I had been dark horses for awhile, but at this tournament we became the very first team in our club to ever win a tournament. Suffice it to say, we were kind of a big deal.
IFR: The cause of all of our misery. Well, that’s not fair. Accurate, but not fair. After Milwaukee, teams around the league were starting to collaborate and find evidence to bring down our case. They started pointing out that Russia’s economy was different than our case studies, that our funding was insufficient, or that our plan was only a bandage on the larger wound. When we walked into rounds, our competitors were waiting with a bulging binder of anti-microloans evidence. When we lost, we lost hard. When we won, we won by the skin of our teeth. After getting knocked out in the first round of Octafinals at the fifth qualifying tournament, I was getting nervous and Franz had had enough. It was about a month before the Regional Tournament, and the top four teams of the Regional Tournament would go on from there to Nationals. Everyone else was going to be eliminated from contention. Based on our past performance, Franz proposed changing our plan and supplying science grants to the Russian government for alternative nuclear power; it was an experimental technology known as IFR. “Trust me. No one’s going to be ready for this case,” he told me. I was hesitant; familiarity with your case is everything. But I was also passive, and Franz seemed confident. So we switched.
And that brings us to the Indianapolis Regional Tournament, the site of my future time traveling expedition to the past. Why would I need to time travel? Because everything went wrong here. In debate, cases are only proposed because the status quo is utterly flawed. “Utterly flawed” seems like a pretty good representation of my Regionals experience. The problems with the status quo timeline, in order:
Harm 1: We were not prepared. Everyone else was.
I should qualify this by saying that no one was prepared for the first few rounds. Franz and I barely knew what we were talking about, but the other teams were even more confused. We picked up three wins in three rounds – one more win, and we were basically guaranteed a spot in the tournament outrounds. The hubris was starting to kick in. Then Round Four happened.
We knew Round 4 was going to be difficult. Of course it was, it was against ourselves. Josh and Alec were our parallel universe, evil doppelgangers (although Franz was the one with a goatee, so maybe we were their evil doppelgangers). They were a young, fresh team also composed of a charming future politician and a polite facts-based journalist. Outside of tournaments, Josh and Alec were our best friends; in a debate round, they were our arch nemeses. By sheer random happenstance, we’d fought each other in-round so many times that our rivalry became more heated than some NFL divisional rivalries. But Franz and I had a secret weapon: our brand-new IFR case. After my speech, Josh walked up to the podium with a folder of papers and stood beside me for Cross-Examination.
“Are the judge and timer ready?” Josh asked. A typical formality. Nods. “Then let’s begin.” To me: “You’re proposing IFR?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve never heard of it before.”
“It’s new.”
“So no one’s done it before?”
“I mean, I’m sure scientists have tested it out. It’s experimental is all I’m saying.”
“So it’s never been commercially implemented?”
“That’s not… yeah, sure.”
“It has or it hasn’t?”
“It hasn’t.”
“So how do you know it’ll work?”
“I… There’s tests.”
“How many tests?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I’m sure it will work.”
“Well, I’d love to take you on your word, but I’m afraid the evidence contradicts you.” He withdrew a sheet from his folder. “I have a piece of evidence here that says IFR does not work in the real world.”
“If you say so.”
“And the technology is largely untested.”
“Is that a question?” I asked pointedly, struggling to keep a smile on my face for the judge and Jesus.
“Were you aware that such evidence existed?”
“No…”
If I had a time machine then, and had time traveled back to the last Regional Tournament in 2010, I would have learned that there was an IFR case back then too. It was environmental science year and someone thought a new, vaguely nuclear power system would make a great policy. When I asked, Franz assured me that that was a completely different case. He knew, because it had been his old case, devised by his old partner. So the case was different in the way that siblings are different: no one’s going to think they’re identical, but it’s hard to not see the family resemblance. And all the other debaters had been lying in wait for this family reunion for a long time. With wins in their eyes, they started downloading their old files and evidence, more prepared for their match-up with us than we ever were.
Afterward, I told Franz I was worried, and “we should switch cases.”
Franz sighed impatiently, set a thick hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eyes, and said, “Hey, calm down. Breathe. Okay? Okay? We’re gonna be fine.”
Harm 2: We lost every round after that at Regionals.
I think this harm speaks for itself.
Harm 3: Our region was poorly represented at Nationals.
Because we weren’t there. Duh. Clearly the best team didn’t win.
Harm 4: Wasted potential and uncertainty.
The worst part about being a successful perfectionist is that even when you qualify to Nationals in four other speech categories, you still feel like a failure for not qualifying in debate. Maybe it was around that tournament that I first started thinking about time travel. After all, I gambled when I shouldn’t have. I made one bad choice, and if that one bad choice was changed, then maybe everything would be different. Natural talent wasn’t enough to make up for poor decisions. Me being the best me I could be? Not enough. What is enough: time travel.
So this is the part of the case where I set forward my plan, complete with point-by-point mandates. I propose:
Mandate 1: Give me a time machine. Please. If it’s not invented yet, invent one and then give it to me.
Mandate 2: Once I have the time machine, I would go back in time to the exact moment when Franz convinced me that IFR was how we were going to save ourselves. It wasn’t, and I sort of knew it then, but I had no reason to know that. I certainly didn’t have evidence printouts to prove it. But if I could time travel, then I’d walk right up to Franz, put my hand on his shoulder, and tell him “IFR’s not going to work. Stop living in the past,” and then without blinking I’d turn to my past self and say “You can win this tournament with microloans. I’m counting on you.”
And then I’d disappear in a cool flash of color or something. Because, really, the exit is the most important thing. If you just walk out of a room after time traveling, then no one’s going to believe you actually time traveled. They’ll find a more mundane explanation, waving away my appearance as just a long-lost twin brother with psychic future-seeing powers. But if I can spontaneously dematerialize, or turn the sun black and vanish into the darkness, or take off in a fiery, speeding DeLorean, then there’s no doubt what just happened: time travel. And when a time traveler tells you to do something, you do it.
Mandate 3: Everything is awesome because time travel solved all of our problems.
See? That’s a pretty simple three-step plan to fix problems. I believe very strongly that everything should have a three-step plan because, as we just saw, they always work.
Right about now is when I show you why everything is so “awesome” once I fix time. These are the Advantages and – spoiler alert – they’re pretty fantastic.
Advantage 1: We win. Obviously.
Microloans were a fantastic case topic. Franz and I would stick with those and then we’d win Regionals, simple as that. I can see it now, before me as if I really had changed my past with a time machine: Franz and I, hair coiffed, contacts in, and suits fitted, having gleaming gold medals draped around our necks. The LED flash of a million homeschool moms’ digital cameras, memories living forever through innumerable Facebook tags. Shaking the hand of the league president and our coach, both “so incredibly proud” of us. The acknowledgement that we were truthfully the best. That we had never needed to change our case: no matter how much other teams prepared, we were better.
I know we were. I just need a time machine to prove it.
Advantage 2: A better life for me.
I would be a better person because I won Regionals. This is a complicated logical argument, so I’ll break down the chain reaction here:
Winning Regionals means I’ll go to Nationals.
Going to Nationals means I’ll win. Clearly.
Winning Nationals makes me the best.
Being the best makes me perfect.
Being perfect makes me a better person.
It’s pretty simple when you think about it that way.
(Also, it’s worth noting this has additional impact benefits of other people acknowledging my perfection. They would all think I’m perfect – because I just won Nationals – and they would be right.)
Advantage 3: A better life for everyone else.
One of the most common arguments against time travel is that it could rip apart space-time and all of reality. After all, even the slightest thing has dramatic ripple effects. In effect, you’d be destroying the world, because you’d be replacing it with a new world. But that ignores the fact that the new world would be better, because I would be better and I’m an important part of that new world
It’s like me untypng this sentence because it has a typo.
And then I would replace it with this grammatically-correct sentence.
That’s a lot better, if you ask me.
Advantage 4: Untapped time travel potential.
Think about it. If I have a time travel machine, I don’t have to just stop at fixing debate issues. Debate is pretty important, don’t get me wrong, but there’s a ton of smaller, other things that I could solve. Maybe I could just straighten up loose ends at home. Get all my chores done in advance so that I never had to waste time on anything pointless. Or I could be in multiple places at once, like Hermione with her Time Twister: carrying on a social life while also having time to research while also having enough time to pray and give God my whole attention. I could warn myself that taking Introduction to Political Science over Winterim was going to be the course to break my three-semester straight-A streak, not to mention being terrible in and of itself. I could tell myself in May 2012 that I had an undiagnosed grass allergy and needed medication, so that I wouldn’t have to lay on my bed feeling like I was dying on the first beautiful day of spring. I could stop the barreling freight train of awkwardness that was middle school me by just warning myself that she didn’t like me the way I liked her. I could change the scheduling of a film shoot so that it wouldn’t fall on a day where all of my friends would bail on me without notice. I could stop my best friends from breaking up with each other; better, I could stop them from ever getting together in the first place. And I could even stop that one guy from drinking, so that he wouldn’t smash into my family’s car and send my sister to the hospital with twelve staples in her skull and a concussion.
And who knows? Maybe I’d kill Hitler too. I’ve got enough time.
Of course, this is all secondary to making sure Franz and I win Regionals. A man’s gotta have his priorities straight. And priority one is perfection, at all costs.
I’m sure there’s some sort of downside to all of this somewhere, but I can’t think of what it would be. Furthermore, I’m sure it can’t even compare to the upside. Think about that upside for a moment: with time travel, I could finally give myself the perfect life that I’ve always been striving for all these years. It could be whitewashed. Painless. Perfect.
Isn’t that a significant improvement over the status quo?
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