What Should We Do if We Find E.T.?

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The idea of progress — technological and moral — is inescapably familiar to us. For anyone born after the invention of the steam engine in the early 1700s, a steady series of mechanical and social changes (from the train and telegraph to the American and French revolutions) imbued each person with a sense of inexorable advancement. And it is these kinds of changes, James Gleick argues in his new book Time Travel: A History, that gave us the idea that we could literally travel to the future.

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JAMES GLEICK

James Gleick was born in New York City in 1954. He graduated from Harvard College in 1976 and helped found Metropolis, an alternative weekly newspaper in Minneapolis. Then he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter for The New York Times.

His first book, Chaos, was a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist and a national bestseller. He collaborated with the photographer Eliot Porter on Nature’s Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software. His next books include the best-selling biographies, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton, both shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, as well as Faster and What Just Happened. They have been translated into twenty-five languages.

In 1989-90 he was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University. For some years he wrote the Fast Forward column in the New York Times Magazine.

With Uday Ivatury, he founded The Pipeline, a pioneering New York City-based Internet service in 1993, and was its chairman and chief executive officer until 1995. He was the first editor of the Best American Science Writing series. He is active on the boards of the Authors Guild and the Key West Literary Seminar.

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TRANSCRIPT:

James Gleick: If there was one startling fact that got me going on this book it was realizing that time travel is a new idea. We're so familiar with it. We grow up with time travel. We have time travel in cartoons. We know all of the jokes. We know the paradoxes. It's like part of the fabric of our culture. And it was really a surprise to me to discover that before H.G. Wells there was almost no conception of time travel. Nobody put the two words together. Time Machine, his 1895 book is really the first time people thought there could be such a thing as a time machine and that just struck me as weird.

Because your first impulse is you want to argue with that. Probably. I mean a lot of people well that can't possibly be true, what about this? What about this Greek legend? What about stories told by the ancient Japanese? And there are things where, for example, a fisherman falls asleep and wakes up many generations later and everybody he knows is dead. And that's like the Rip van Winkle story. And Rip van Winkle was before H.G. Wells, of course.

They're not that much more before. And because we have such an expansive sense of time travel ourselves and we're imaginative people we can immediately see that for, example, when the Greeks imagined going down to the land of the dead, going to Hades and crossing the river Styx and meeting their dead ancestors that's a kind of time travel we might say.

Anyway, if you're a sci-fi geek you might be thinking of racking your brain trying to think of predecessors. And there are things, there are sort of weird things that if you're a geek you can find. But it's the truth that before the late Victorian era it was practically impossible for people to conceive of time travel. And I say it was impossible because they didn't.

So it raises two questions, two mirror image questions: Why not before? What was it that made this not a natural way to think about things? And then the other question is why now? Was there something that is H.G. Wells just an oddball, a one in a millennium quirk or was there something in the culture? Was there something about the times that made time travel an interesting or natural or plausible idea? And, of course, I think it's the second of thing. And the point of my book is to investigate these questions, or at least I should say the starting point of the book is to investigate these questions. One sort of basic thing to say about why it wasn't a natural idea is imagine yourself in the 16th century, you're a farmer let's say and somebody asks you, "So what do you think life is going to be like for your grandchildren? " You would say, what do you mean? T...

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