Steins Gate and Time Traveling
Time Traveling is the science fiction concept in which we can move backwards into the past or forwards into the future. This is an idea that many of us have come across, but what are the consequences of such discovery? In this paper we are going to look at the plot of an anime called Steins; Gate. Steins; Gate is an show that takes place in Japan with our main character Okabe Rintarou or Okarin for short. He is a self-proclaimed mad scientist who spends his days in an old building in Akihabara, Japan along with his two friends Daru and Shiina inventing what they call “future gadgets.” One day, they are messing with a machine they called a “Phone Microwave” which was mainly used to turn objects into green gel like substance. That is until they find out that the “phone microwave” has the capabilities to send text messages into the past, and ultimately altering the flow of history. With that discovery Okarin and his group end up being chased by SERN for attempting to stop their evil plans. As mentioned before there is a lot of time traveling that takes place. At first the main character used the “time machine” to do simple things like win the lottery or predict the weather. However later he faces more serious problems such as the death of his close friends and he needs to choose between one or the other.
I want to shift focus from the show to time traveling in general. There are so many pros and cons with time traveling. With time traveling the smallest change can affect the future and you can never truly tell what the future will hold. In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state, according to mathematician Edward Lorenz. The same idea can be applied with time travel, and this can either be a good or bad thing depending on what has changed.
Growing up, I’ve always come across the question of “What I would do if I could time travel?” For me, the answer to this question is constantly changing. I notice that when I was younger, I wanted to travel into the past so I could find dinosaurs and other creatures that are extinct today. Realistically with the help of a time machine, I would not be able to survive that era let alone observe dinosaurs since most of them would try to kill me anyways. As I grew up, my answer slowly leaned towards financial success. More specifically with the idea of crypto currency or stocks. In July of 2010, bitcoin began trading at the price of $0.0008 per bitcoin and eventually reaching $0.08 by the end of that month. Looking at its current price, it is currently sitting at $58,298.80. Looking back at it, if I were to have a time machine and went back to July 2010 to invest in bitcoin, I would be rich and financial successful for the rest of my life. This is still my current answer to this question however we never know what the future holds, and my answer could change again.
That being said, everyone would has a different answer to this question and it is interesting to see different people’s perspectives when it comes to time traveling. There is a website chrisguillebeau.com where the author posed the question “What would you do if you could travel back in time” and there were a lot of similar yet different answers. Most people opted not to change a significant part of there life since they thought that it would have a huge impact on who they are today. The answers that I enjoyed reading about were ones about spending more time with relatives and friends that aren’t around anymore since we take that time for granted in the moment and we don’t really know how much we miss something until it is take away from us.
All in all, we fist talked about the Japanese anime Stein’s Gate and to what extent we would go to to alter the past. We then shifted gears and talked about what we would change if we could go back in time. There is a variety of different answers for this, and we could see that in the article provided earlier. For me it would still be the Bitcoin idea however we never truly know what the future holds for us.
