Future or Past?

If you could time travel and could only go one way, would you choose to travel into the past or future?

That was the question I asked a couple of guys at the boarding home when I visited this past Sunday. I can't remember why I brought it up. I think it had to do with something that was on television there at the time. Anyway, one fellow said he'd like to go to the past and one fellow said the same as me, that he'd like to go to year 3000 in the future. What a copycat, eh?

I have no idea why I picked that year. It just seemed far enough into the future where there'd be significant changes on earth. Of course, I don't know what sort of changes the future would hold. We might live in post-apocalyptic decay or we could find ourselves in blissful nirvana with no more pollution, no more conflict and first-class flights to Pluto (or any other planet in the solar system you'd care to visit) for everyone. That would be pretty neat. I guess that's the risk I took in choosing the future instead of the past. You know what you're going to get if you visit the past. You could travel back to the Cretaceous period and see dinosaurs; you could travel back 2000 years and meet Jesus; you could travel back to the 60's and meet the Beatles (who, incidentally, would be more popular than Jesus according to John Lennon). It would be fairly predictable (unless you happened to get eaten by a T. rex).

I guess that's the thing with me... I believe it would be much more exciting not knowing what's around the corner rather than playing it safe and predictable. Also, I'm so very curious... I mean traveling into the future... what sort of technological advances would be made in the following 1000 years? Could you imagine? If you've looked at the progress we've made in the past 100 years it's been incredible to say the least. With the invention of the airplane, the car, the telephone and personal computers, for instance, we've broken many new boundaries. Not to mention sending man to the moon and the hundreds of medical breakthroughs we've seen during this time. The sky's the limit, to coin a phrase. And I, for one, would like to see how far that limit goes.

How about you? Past or Future? And how far in either direction and why? Comments welcome if you have any.