If you could go back in time, would you?  How far back, and for how long?  Would you jump into Doc Brown’s DeLorean and rev it to 88 miles per hour to go back to high school?  I think a lot of us would.  But why?

Dreaming of time travel dates back to long before our grandparents, or even great grandparents were spinning a top or fishing with a cane pole.  The concept of time travel by a machine was prominently popularized by H.G. Wells’ 1895 story The Time Machine, but the thoughts of time travel itself came much earlier.

In Mark Twain’s 1889 novel, A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a Connecticut engineer gets a knock on the noggin and is transported to the court of the famed King Arthur.  There, he uses his knowledge of the future to attempt to modernize the past, eventually even rivaling the great Merlin himself, who appears to be a fraud.

But why is time travel so appealing?  It’s been romanticized about and warned of in stories, movies, and songs.  Admit it.  You’ve thought of going back to your younger days and fixing a few things with the knowledge you now have.  In the movie, Peggy Sue Got Married, Peggy Sue attends her 25th high school reunion on the verge of divorce from her high school sweetheart and faints while being crowned as the reunion queen.  When she wakes up, she has been transported back to her senior year where she quickly decides to correct a few mistakes.

Or would you decide to go into the future to see what’s new and exciting?  Maybe the cure for cancer is just around the corner.  Maybe war, poverty, and hunger have been solved.  Maybe the Starship Enterprise is giving vacation tours to the tropical (and passionate) planet, Risa.  That last one is for my Trekkies.

I could say that the past has no appeal to me, but I’d be lying.  I would have bet on Buster Douglas, bought Google, and NEVER asked out Kim in high school.  But that’s another story.