What would it be like if you could travel back in time? Recently I went to the movie theater to see Project Almanac, a film about a boy who builds a time machine with his friends. David Raskin is a science whiz who desperately wants to go to MIT. One day, he and his friends find his dad’s old plans for a “temporal displacement device,” which they quickly figure out means time machine. So following the plans his father created, David builds a time machine, and he and his friends are overjoyed that they can now manipulate time in their favor. But soon, they learn that their actions can cause ripple effects with serious consequences.

In the film, David learns that everything he does to change events from happening naturally causes a chain reaction that leads to something else. Though we do not have access to time machines in this day and age, I can’t help wondering what the world would be like if we did. Should people have the right to be able to “play God?”

I feel that humans should not have this right. No one would be able to tell if something had already been tampered with and had already happened before. Would anyone be able to trust anything? Would anything even be real? I think most people don’t understand the true gravity of this scenario. People could change the whole course of history with one single action. They could go back in time and change the outcomes of wars, presidential elections, and assassinations. They could, essentially, do anything. That’s why we call this “playing God.” A person with a time machine could control the whole world.

Furthermore, by changing the natural way in which events happen, other subsequent events can also be influenced. Even the smallest change could set off a dangerous chain of events. For example, in Project Almanac, David finds that on one of their trips back into time, they caused the star player of the school basketball team to be hit by a car and break his leg. Due to this, the basketball team doesn’t make it to the playoffs. So instead of watching his son’s basketball championship game, a father goes to work instead. The father, an airplane pilot, heads to work to fly some passengers to their destination, but crashes the plane. This results in countless deaths. Because David and his friends caused the star player to injure himself, hundreds of people died.

Clearly, although that was a very extreme example, the consequences of manipulating  time could potentially be devastating. As soon as we alter the past, the present is immediately changed, and no one would even know it was changed.

What if our lives are currently being altered? What if someone in the future is changing our lives right now and altering what we think is real? How terrifying would it actually be if someone invented time travel? Imagine the things they could make happen.