An intuition pump to appreciate what lies ahead

I've got a big family, one that grows over time. Almost all of us were recently on a train bound north along the Mediterranean coast of Spain, my rugby team. We were coming back from three days sharing the oval, the field under the southern sky, our clothes or shoes when necessary, the night, our bodies, being kids. As long as we are still in our twenties...

...those kind of conversations turn up. The world is a rush and tomorrow, that undiscovered country. We work hard, though we waste ourselves pretty much too. Our steps; little, scarce steps. If a path becomes by trumping, then ours can barely be sustained, hardly be called a path. We head nowhere.

But we were bound north that night, and we needed an answer. And there it was my little intuition pump. I had developed it years ago, though I didn't know of intuition pumps at the time. Only later I realized that's precisely what my mindfuck does: to stretch our minds. It goes more or less like this: "Pick up one of those genius that populated history: Ada Lovelace, Roberto Bolaño, Marie Curie, ... your call. Learn their work by heart, because when you die, you'll discover that space-time is more fucked up than Einstein though (did you choose good old Albert?). It turns out that when we die we get a chance to go to the past and tell the person we've chosen all we remember about their works. Indeed, humankind progresses because of a few such successful regressions. If you've chosen Richard Feynman or Mary Shelley you better do your part well enough -- we will collapse otherwise! Those people where never real genius; they were just visited by you, who told them how to reach their future achievements."

What a burden!! Centuries of continuous space-time coherence depending just on you! At that moment the train derailed a little bit, but it didn't and it kept going. I swear! I noticed that bump, our wagon packing us like sardines, the sweat, our dirty socks, the life contained. All of it derailed a little bit and was lost forever because someone failed to complete one of those time regressions -- a hero vanished forever, luckily not Alan Turing...

...just a minor one, I guess, since we weren't dead for so long. Back on our tracks, the old train grumbling... because the world is a sphere, I'm convinced that it is more difficult to go north. It takes more energy, I mean, going upwards... and so the train groans with the effort. Back there stayed our southern brothers, the ones we made our rugby against -- our rugby with.

"But it gets uglier," the intuition pump follows, "indeed, you don't get to choose. You are assigned a person. You can go mad trying to figure out who (s)he is. Read as much as you can, watch as many movies, apprehend Lynn Margulis's or Ilya Prigogine's ideas about the ascent of life. Do whatever you wanna do, you won't see it coming. If it wasn't responsibility big enough to convey the works of one genius after rehearsing for a whole life... now it's like an exam in which any question is possible. And yet even worst: you have been assigned yourself; and whatever it is that you will do, no one has made it before. There is no time travel, for you have been assigned yourself at the beginning of your life. There is no cheating, no millenarianist savior but your own being; and if you don't make your part, a continuous of human-space-time will be compromised; and somewhere, sometime, a train full of girls and full of boys, full of joy and rugby and life, sometime, somewhere, it will derail and kill us all. Don't let that happen."



[Spoiler alert: What follows is not so much related to the text above, so stop here if you haven't seen the Star Trek 2009 movie!!]



I think that a situation similar to the one just described happens in that movie when Spock (the original Spock played by Leonard Nimoy, who came to a parallel universe through a black hole and is older than the new Spock) tells Montgomery Scott the equation for transporting onto a ship at warp speeds. In the alternate universe, Scott discovered this equation. He was (supposedly) bound to discover it in this universe as well. But Spock spoils it somehow... in a way similar to ours after the time travel. But: what does this mean really? Is Scott the actual discoverer of that equation, or has he been displaced forever by Spock?]