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From: "Jorge Llambias" <jjllambias@hidden.email>
li'o
.o'esai ge darno zgana gi xenru .i ko sezykurji co'omi'e maikl.
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One day, about 10 years ago, I posed this conventional "thought experiment"
to my closest biological colleague (also the most brilliant man I have ever
known), Dick Lewontin: If you could invent a time machine to visit any
moment of the earth?s history, either in the past or future, where would you
go? (You get only one choice, and your temporary visit does not impact
history in your status as pure spectator.)
I offered the conventional and boring paleontological response: take me back to one of the most salient moments in the history of life (the midst of the Cambrian explosion, or the instant of impact for the large extraterrestrial body that struck the earth and triggered the last great mass extinction 65 million years ago).
Dick, on the other hand, answered in the opposite and far more interesting direction. He said: "No, Steve, I?d go the other way. I want the machine to set me down in New York City exactly 100 years from today. I will need only 15 seconds at the site. I just need to know whether it?s still there. All insight that I might obtain from the future, for guiding the rest of my life, flows directly from the answer to this question."
--Stephen Jay Gould
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