I’m currently reading (very slowly as it’s my “login” book at work) _In Search of Time: journeys along a curious dimension_ by Dan Falk. I would highly recommend this as a very readable and interesting look at the subject of time generally. But today I’ve come to an interesting section in which he talks about “mental time travel” – the ability to think outside the present. A couple of paragraphs particularly struck me and seemed relevant to Traveller even though I suspect he’s only talking about our immediate futures – not the 57^th century:

“Thomas Suddendorf (University of Queensland) and Michael Corballis (University of Auckland) have argued persuasively that the capacity for mental time travel gave our ancestors an invaluable edge in the struggle for survival. They believe there is a profound link between remembering the past and imagining the future. The very act of remembering, they argue, gives one the “raw material” needed to construct plausible scenarios of future events…

… as far as your brain is concerned, the act of remembering is indeed very similar to the act of imagining the future… while we do not “remember” the future, we do picture it, and it turns out that we do so in ways that closely parallel our efforts to picture past events.”

“In fact, they claim, what we have traditionally thought of as memory’s primary role – allowing us to conjure up the past – may be “only a design feature of our ability to conceive the future.”

He goes on:

“Other observations support this idea. Psychologists have found that imagining an event in the remote future is more difficult that imagining an event closer at hand, just as remembering a more remote past event is more difficult that remembering an event that happened more recently. We also seem to lose both “directions” together: as we age, our powers to use episodic memory being to fade, along with our ability to envision the future.”

The questions which immediately leapt to mind were:

Did Marc Miller do such an excellent job of envisioning and describing a 57^th century because of his background as a history major (IIRC)?

Would I be better at the future if I read and studied more history (which was never a favourite at school but is becoming increasingly interesting to me now a little late in the game)?

Do I need to get my ideas for adventures/characters/whatever down now, l as quickly as possible, before the ability to envision the future begins to fade?! (Or is this kind of fictional invention different to imagining what could be a 'real' future?)

Oh, and the author promises we’ll get to physical time travel in chapter 8. I’ll keep you posted if it’s interesting.