:surprised:
You CI folks show an appalling lack of curiosity! I'm talking especially to those whose job it is to spend all day and night on this and other forums.
:drillsergeant:
Since nobody asked, I'll ask! Why would I want to return to 1347 to sink a ship before it reached the Genoa harbour?
Frances, you don't know what you ask!
If I had time, I'd write you a nice dystopian novel about what the year 2013 is like if the Black Death had never happened. It boggles the imagination.
Notice I said Dystopia. That's an alternate, "messed up" world. We puny-minded mortals have NO IDEA what Europe, the Church, and the world would look like if so many hadn't perished in the Black Death.
Let's just say that if I had a time machine, the first and only thing I'd do is smash it to little pieces and do everything in my power to make sure the plans for the machine got destroyed as well.
No Hitler assassination, no rescue of books from the Babylonian library before it was destroyed, no telegrams to Abraham Lincoln, no phone calls to JFK.
Heck, I wouldn't even want to tweak my
own life, however tempting it might be. Undoing even "bad experiences" can remove the learning that went with them. Then I might learn a more painful lesson later. This is treated in the movie "The Butterfly Effect":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butterfly_EffectIt's not a Catholic movie and I don't recommend that you watch it (typical Hollywood trash), but I think the premise is interesting. A boy has the ability to change things in his past, but each time he does, he messes more things up.
Not that I'd ever have to worry about any of that, because manipulating time would be a truly God-like power, despite how common it is in sci-fi movies.
As Fr. Wolfgang Goettler (SSPX) once taught us, "Time travel is the denial of being a creature."
He's right -- fundamentally, part of being a creature is being a slave to time, not the master of it. We are stuck IN time, totally passive to it.