The answer is simple: time-travel technology is never developed, because human society implodes within a few decades and humans go extinct, or at best, revert to a more primitive existence and then evolution makes them progressively less intelligent (Kurt Vonnegut wrote a book about this, I think it was "Player Piano"). Personally, I think human society will look much like "The Walking Dead" within 10 years.
The other possibility is that reverse time travel is physically impossible, and the best we can do is peer into the future with wormholes (as in Arthur C. Clarke's book "Light of Other Days"), but unable to actually affect the events of the past.
That's not what Player Piano was about at all. Player Piano, his first novel, was actually a remarkably prescient story about a future dealing with the crisis of total mechanical automation, except with the utopian-in-retrospect idea that postwar America would continue its New Deal-meets-General Electric policies so that the biggest problem for people with low socioeconomic status who lose out from automation is societal alienation and loss of the dignity of work, rather than the actual reality of increasing wage peonage and poverty.
I agree. Every major human civilizations in history that has arisen has eventually collapsed, usually due to resource exhaustion. It's arrogant to think that ours won't. It's just going to be on a much much bigger, global scale this time. It will take ~200 years from now to bring the average surface temperature of the earth up to a boiling point.
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The answer is simple: time-travel technology is never developed, because human society implodes within a few decades and humans go extinct, or at best, revert to a more primitive existence and then evolution makes them progressively less intelligent (Kurt Vonnegut wrote a book about this, I think it was "Player Piano"). Personally, I think human society will look much like "The Walking Dead" within 10 years.
The other possibility is that reverse time travel is physically impossible, and the best we can do is peer into the future with wormholes (as in Arthur C. Clarke's book "Light of Other Days"), but unable to actually affect the events of the past.
That's not what Player Piano was about at all. Player Piano, his first novel, was actually a remarkably prescient story about a future dealing with the crisis of total mechanical automation, except with the utopian-in-retrospect idea that postwar America would continue its New Deal-meets-General Electric policies so that the biggest problem for people with low socioeconomic status who lose out from automation is societal alienation and loss of the dignity of work, rather than the actual reality of increasing wage peonage and poverty.
I think you might be talking about Galapagos.
Whoops, you're right. I was thinking about the end of Galapagos. It's been a long time since I read those books.
I agree. Every major human civilizations in history that has arisen has eventually collapsed, usually due to resource exhaustion. It's arrogant to think that ours won't. It's just going to be on a much much bigger, global scale this time. It will take ~200 years from now to bring the average surface temperature of the earth up to a boiling point.
I'm willing to bet we won't be like The Walking Dead in 10 years.