I was watching an old episode of Doctor Who, and there was a “time space visualizer.” Like a “time television” letting a viewer choose a time/place and watch the events. And, so, being the kind of person I am, I wondered how such a thing would affect study of history. But I had to put limitations on it because of the spying and criminal investigative ability and potential for invasion of privacy would elsewise overshadow the part I was interested in. It can’t find history for you. You have to enter a time or place to see something. You can use the remote to fastforward or rewind once you settle on a date, though, and can manually follow around one person if you like.
So, presuming it cannot look off-world and cannot look at any time more recent that 100 years prior to the date of viewing, what sorts of impacts could it have on the study of history. I mean, I know there are present-day political implications (who was there first, etc.) and religious implications (what was going on in Jerusalem ca. 30 at Passover) too, but I was thinking about historical as an academic field. First thought was that historians would love it. Second is that they’d hate it because the layman would say they were now unnecessary and were could just dial up any date and check it out directly. Would that lead to more of less understanding of interconnectedness and how one event prompts another - not sure.
Specific things where the time and/or place were already known could be checked. Or daily life in cities/villages we know about in a given time frame. We could see a lot more about the customs and practices and daily lives of the “peasant class” or show actual footage of the life of American slaves. We could disprove (or prove) the fringier ideas: how the pyramids were built, how old the Sphinx is, what type of people built Gobekli Tepe, whether Shakespeare really wrote his plays, whether aliens built Machu Picchu. JFK assassination will have to wait a few decades.
But I really don’t know enough about the field to know how such a technology would be utilized. Any ideas?
Religions could take a big hit – we could find out exactly what Jesus/Mohammed/Moses/Abraham/etc. said and did (or if they existed, in some cases). It’s very likely that some of this would differ from religious texts, sometimes wildly so. We’d undoubtedly find some unfortunate personal details about certain historical ‘heroes’. We’d confirm and deny many theories about how certain historical events occurred.
History would be verifiable – there would be much less “written by the winners”. We’d know all the true and actual genocides and atrocities, eventually, no matter how well hidden they were at the time.
Isaac Asimov pointed out that a time viewer was an omniscient surveillance device in his “The Dead Past.” His question was, “when does the past begin?” If the answer is “one second ago,” then you basically can watch anyone in real time. A 100-year limit would probably not exist for long.
Assuming that there was a hard limit, historians would spend time watching important historical events at first*, while others would want to look at everyday life.
The religious would be uncomfortable seeing the origins of their belief, that’s for sure, but they’d rationalize it away (“It’s not really the past”).
*See “The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig Van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs” by Carter Scholz, though that’s a different form of time viewing.
Forget history. I’d travel back in time, find out who won the big Powerball jackpot, then return to present day and… well, I need to work out the details, but you catch my drift!
If one assumes that such a device is rather expensive to build and expensive to run, which doesn’t seem like much of a stretch IMO, it being used for present day or near present day spying doesn’t seem particularly likely.
Somebody like the NSA might have a handful or two to check out Big Bad Guy X who is causing trouble right now or the like.
But wholesale spying on the populace wouldn’t be remotely (heh) practical.
The OP specifies that the last 100 years are too close to focus, so that wouldn’t help.
However, there are probably plenty of cases of historical loss of treasure where times and dates of loss are known, as well as the location that the lost treasure started out from, and only the precise location of loss is unknown - for example, the lost crown jewels of Bad King John, or the lost treasures of the Knights Templar.
With a time-o-scope, it would be possible to follow the treasure from a known point up to the moment of its loss. Of course, natural processes might have moved it a bit from its initial resting place, but it would significantly narrow the search.
Yes, but a very large fraction of the lost treasures you’d see being found by someone. It wouldn’t do any good to follow treasures looted from the Pyramids, because the gold got melted down and sold and made into other objects which got placed in the tombs of later Pharoahs, which got looted. It’s the circle of life.
The viewer would also be a great tool to explore environments hostile to human life, or difficult for human beings to enter. Explore underwater caves, watch sperm whales hunt giant squid, soar over Kilauea caldera. Hey, can be do some research and fix the damn range limit on this broken machine and check out the Moon, and Mars, and the interior of the Sun? And how’s Alpha Centauri this time of year? I mean last year.
There are enough cases of treasures we know or strongly suspect to have stayed lost - this would at least narrow the field. Ships that were reported as setting off with large treasures, that are known to have sunk, for example.
The time-osity-box would also be great for resolving archaeological mysteries. What were Roman Dodecahedra used for? Were all these artifacts labelled ‘for ritual purposes’ just toys or trinkets etc?
Again. Let’s say these things are pricey to build and run. Our society is only going to be able to support a rather limited number of these things.
I think an interesting aspect of this question is how time on the machine would actually be alloted. What would “serious” historians actually research? How much “popular questions” that historians think is bullshit would still get “machine time” anyway?
If these operate on an hour here equals an hour in the past, you are only talking a few thousand hours of time “travel” viewing per year per machine. There are A LOT more historical questions than can be covered by that amount of time.
I was just about to make a joke about the signing of the Declaration of Independence and just that thing
I reiterate. Assuming this is just a magic physics machine (though would such a thing actually violate the fundamental laws of physics?) makes a BIG difference than if this is a magic “answer machine”.
The further back in time you go, the more of a pain in the ass it becomes to hunt down the big event in time and space.
Even once you find the virgin Mary, you are going to have to follow her for ninth months plus delta for obvious reasons.
And did Jesus actually turn water into wine or was that just a clever magic trick?
Let’s assume these things are cheap and easy to run. Then pretty much everyone would have one and it might replace most peoples tv watching time. Also the government would be spying on everyone, more so than they do now.
