The Future Past Present - is Time Relevant?

Spider Robinson conjectured in a story sometime back (Time Pressure)that our descendants might develop time-travel capabilities and go back through time implanting recorders into every infant's skull throughout our species history, for the sole purpose of capturing everyone's experiences which would then be stored in cyberspace.

My rather shaky understanding of current physics is that time may very well be a construct of our own thought. Makes me a bit dizzy to think too much about it.

We all know that time is relative--unpleasant events last orders of magnitude longer than pleasant events. And it's possible to simply not record a period--blackouts can be induced in many different ways. History is mutable as is the present. I know a man who rewrite much of his life for 2 decades and then reacquired the older version.

Men in Blackput it quite well: "There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, and the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they DO NOT KNOW ABOUT IT!" 

We do not know, and perhaps cannot know, what is of vital importance even to ourselves!

Humanity runs briskly along a razor's edge trail--a single error from certain destruction.

And at any time any one of millions of events in the universe could wipe us out, elevate us to godhood or ???

Is it any wonder that we invented gods? So that at least things might have some purpose even if we don't know what it might be? Religion exists primarily in order that we might retain hope that we actually matter beyond our own boundaries. It has been a valuable tool in our arsenal against the universe.... But there need be no truth behind it in order for the value to have existed, and it's basic premise is that humans are important, if not the single most important, part of the universe. We b spcl.

If time is an illusion--as an increasingly large part of what we comprehend appears to be--then cause|effect become one. Where is free will? Do we in fact matter?

We've conjectured that the entire universe is naught but a dream--God having split into many parts so as to assuage loneliness. Perhaps it is.

But is a dream of less import than the dream we call reality? Major events in our history have turned on no more than a dream or interpretation of an omen....

And in dreams there is no linearity of time either...you may control your present...you may control your dreams.

Or you may let others direct them for you.