What if you could have a peek at your future?

Hi friends

“What if?” was the topic given to us in the latest Blog-a-Ton and due to paucity of time, I had to use an earlier post on a similar topic for this edition – and I am happy to say that I got good reviews for it! Check out the post here in case you wanna read it.

Now that I am relatively free, I started thinking about a recent TV series that asked the question “What if we could see the future, even if could only just a small part of it?” Does seeing the future (if possible) change things in the present? Such questions are addressed by the TV series “FlashForward”. It challenges your thoughts, philosophies and assumptions about the present and about time. 

Brief Summary: October 29^th witnessed a worldwide blackout – everyone in the world blacked-out for exactly 2 min 17 seconds at the very same time. That day 8000 planes crashed all over the world and more than 20 million people died. During that black out, almost all people (barring a few), saw a vision of their future. And it changed their lives, forever. A woman saw that she was with a man other than her husband; A man saw that he was with his daughter who has been dead for more than 2 years; One woman saw that she was taking care of a child that she never saw and another girl saw herself as pregnant having a ultrasound (although she was a lesbian). A team is investigating the cause of the blackout, as new clues unfold.

Now it begs the question – Having seen the future, is there a chance that you have invariably changed it? As I see it, our future is like a function of everything that happened in the past – your next second in life is a function of the millions of seconds that you have already lived through. Now your “present” involves you seeing your own future. Will the fact that you have seen the future change it, or is it possible that the future that you have witnessed had already taken this factor into consideration? One can never be sure of that.

Now comes to the action – your action. Suppose, in one such vision, you saw that you were in Paris near the Eiffel Tower, waiting for someone to come. The question is: What will you do now? Will you let the future take its course – in which case there is a 50:50 chance of that event happening (as you will never know if what you saw was meant to happen or not) or will you do something really stupid to change that – perhaps you will lock yourself up in your room at home and things will turn out as such so as to make that future happen – then you will never know if your actions caused the event or if that event was meant to happen anyways. If an event happens in spite of you avoiding it - then it means you made your future that saw before in your past – so it could have never happened unless you interfered with your present!“The future is not what we are living for now, it’s what we living by” - a very powerful statement that defines the life of those who have seen their future.

Both I and my friend (with whom I had a chat regarding this @ 2 am) wanted to have a Flashforward, fur different reasons though. Got me thinking – will we be happy on seeing our future? Well, we cannot comment on it unless we see it.

The show is part philosophy (which you need to derive out of the various dialogues) and part thriller (which is clearly visible). Watch it, if you have the time and the patience.

Ciao.

(Most of the thoughts presented here are form a chat I had recently with a good friend)