Timing is everything for all of us

But not so much that we don’t wish there was some way to visit our favorite historical eras — hopefully the future will send back a time machine soon

Undoubtedly, one problem the campus is suffering from at this time of year is a lack of time. Bleary-eyed all-nighters to finish term papers, obscurely timed meetings for group projects, marathon study sessions turning Cameron library into a temporary youth hostel — you’re always either between places, or you’re on your way to somewhere vital, and there’s simply not enough time to go around.

Which is what got us, the writers of Gateway Opinion, thinking that it would be completely awesome would be to have a time machine. Of course, we realized very quickly that rather than using it responsibly to keep up on our studies, every single one of us would abuse our chronologic powers to visit eras and events that we regret having missed. So here’s a compilation of our top temporal destinations. Hope you can spare the time to read them.

The Moon Landing

Without going too far back, it’s a no-brainer that I wish I’d been born 25 years ahead of time to have witnessed the Apollo 11 moon landing. I can only imagine how it felt to have lived through such a large milestone in human evolution. It’s such an integral part of my personal history that I’m not even going to dignify any of the ridiculous conspiracy theories with a comment. I just want to know how it made humanity feel to have broken beyond the heavens and go somewhere completely foreign.

I want to know what it felt like to feel as though such a momentous adventure is only just beginning, that the moon is just a stepping stone, the beginning of some manifest destiny or what-have-you, and not just some pissing contest between ideological superpowers. I wish I knew how it felt to have such potential realized by so many people at once.

If I stay in this century, then the world as I see it now isn’t expanding — it’s internalizing and proliferating itself seemingly without direction. To me, the moon landing was a great expansion of our world. Not “world” as in the planet, but our whole direction as a people in places to go and explore and exist. With as many breakthroughs as we’ve made in the four decades since, nothing’s ever seemed as significant as Apollo 11. As much as I wish I’d been alive back then, I can’t trust whether it would make me more distraught at our current direction. An unfair trade-off? Maybe. Still, I shoot for the moon.

The Scientific Revolution

The glorious Scientific Revolution seems like it was a fantastic time to be alive, starchy tights and uncomfortable wigs aside. Real, honest-to-goodness breakthroughs were happening, with one man in particular giving scientific theory a mean shaping-up by revolutionizing the fields of mechanics, optics, calculus, and more. It was a little guy (though no littler than his rival, Robert Hooke) by the name of Isaac Newton.

Newton was never a sociable person — and rumour has it that he died a virgin — but I’m sure if I was alive I could have romanced him into a lifelong relationship of wave/particle duality arguments. Though that’s beside the point — it simply would’ve been darned cool to observe Newton in his element as scientific theories were unveiled, based on empirical evidence rather than the word of the Pope, for the first time in history. It was for his monumental developments on previous scientists’ work that we have and use Newton’s laws of motion and momentum even 300-some years after the fact, and to be a part of something constructive in history would have been awesome — much cooler than admitting, “Why yes, I’ve just performed the same experiment completed by 800 students in the past week alone. Applaud me!”

And the best part? Newton didn’t seem like an arrogant guy, despite the possibility that his most famous quotation may have been a jab at his hunchbacked contemporary, Hooke: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Whether he knew it then or not, he’s certainly a giant to us now.

V-J Day

Time travel can be dangerous if it’s abused too much, so I’d be pretty careful about what event I’d choose to witness were I given a time machine. Sure, it would be cool to sit in Marie Antoinette’s bathtub and eat all the cake, but I wouldn’t want to accidentally cause any butterfly-effect craziness. Not wanting to come back to a future where everyone speaks French and has three heads, I’d choose to peek in on a big event, something with a lot of people around to let me properly blend into the crowd. That’s why I’d be in Times Square for V-J Day, the day that WWII effectively ended.

Aside from it being the location of the famous Alfred Eisenstaedt photograph “V–J Day in Times Square” depicting the sailor kissing the nurse, you have to consider what a spectacle it would have been. It was a spontaneous celebration; no one was told “come to Times Square.” People were just so excited at the news of the war ending they just needed a place to go and show it. Citizens and uniforms alike just ready and raring to cause some hullabaloo. I’d imagine that kind of passion and merriment would be very contagious.

Plus people dressed really well back then, so not only was it a huge party it was a huge classy party. Top that. That’s right — you can’t.

The Discovery of Electricity

It was a dark and stormy night — or at least, it was at least a stormy night. Or rather, it was stormy and after four. This is the story of a man and his kite, and an historical event I am sad to have missed. If it was real. Mythbusters said it was real. They’re the foremost authority on this sort of thing, so I’m assuming it’s accurate.

The year is 1752, the day is June 15, and Benjamin Franklin is just a noted polymath with a kite and a key. By flying the kite through a storm cloud and touching a key with his finger, he was able to prove that lightning is electrical by nature, and not “electrical fluid,” as was previously thought.

This discovery heralded the beginning of the electric age and the foundation of our modern way of life. Now we have electrical can openers and even entirely electronic destinations to visit or buy property in. We have virtual pets that we play sports with, virtual families that we kill in adventurous ways, virtual jobs that we do when we get home from our real jobs. We have YouTube sensations and Huffington Post articles, Facebook accounts and a standard repository of all human knowledge called Wikipedia, not to mention tons and tons and flippin’ tons of pornography. And it’s all thanks to one man and his kite.

Though the sanitation of the 18th century certainly leaves much to be desired, to be there with that American founding father and his wacky experiments would truly be an electrifying experience.

The Outbreak of WWI

In recent times, the phrase “turn of the century” has come to mean that great rolling over of the millennium, averting the crises of Y2K and Latin pop music hits, and moving forward into a bright new future. Too bad the last 10 years have been, for the most part, pretty boring.

But prior to the year 2000, to speak of the turn of the century provoked imagery of expansion and progress — the Industrial Revolution had left its mark on the world, and from it, a multitude of empires grew and clashed, pushing ever forward into a new era.

Unlike today’s mundane unipolar political climate, the world stage of the early 1900s was full of political intrigue and gunboat diplomacy between several major world powers, all hungry for more power and territory. Complex alliances and agreements dominated the politics of King George V, Nicolas II, Wilhelm II, and Franz Joseph I, which culminated, of course, in the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

A monumental turning point in world history, the elaborate chain reaction of war declarations that ensued sucked in a substantial portion of the civilized world, and would signal the end of many old empires, along with the dawn of many new ones. Horrors of the battles aside, the politics of WWI are much more fascinating than any of the U.N.’s pitiful efforts in this century. As a spectator in 1914, watching the events unfold and just trying to keep up with it all must have been an experience far beyond anything today’s headlines can offer.