Inevitable past
When I was a child, I fantasied about a time machine, just like any other child. Nowadays Internet is the closest thing to the time machine that the humans have invented so far.
Type a name of an animation movie you liked as a kid on YouTube and I am sure some kind soul has uploaded it for you. This way I once stumbled upon fragments of a television series I breathlessly watched when I was thirteen years old. Me, and my whole generation. Its principal character, a girl with a non-Russian name Alice, was our superstar. Viewing the old images I was overcome by emotion, just as other viewers who have left the comments on the video. I was transported in Moscow of my thirteen’s year. Nowadays it is not only a madeleine that does this for you.
I once heard a scientist, whose name unfortunately I don’t remember and could not find, tell that in the course of the next centuries the future generation of humans will be able to reconstruct the past generations, literally clone their ancestors. They will have enough biotechnology to do that just from the scarce DNA fragments found in our graves. The scientist furthemore claimed that this scenario was not a mere possibility, but an inevitability. First, because nothing would stop the exponential growth of our technology, except maybe a mass destruction. Second, because the humans of the future - or the cyborgs, or some other kind of species evolved beyond our imagination - will be, like us, curious. And like us, apparently, eager to see what was.
The television series that was such a hit in my Soviet childhood, was called ‘The guest from the future’. The girl named Alice was a visitor from a technologically evolved and peaceful generation. Like this fragment shows, the fantasies about the future always look touching when you see them many years later. And of course, these fantasies are wrong. The future generations will not need a time machine. They will not come to us. They will make us come to them.
(If you know the name of the scientist, please let me know.)