Category: Others

Time travels allows one to go back in time and meet their parents as children, one could see George Washington, or even have a conversation with some cavemen. All of these occurrences seem wonderful until one looks at the travel restrictions. The short story A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, as long with the movie Back to the Future depicts the true dangers of time travel. It is about a hunter who wants to go back in time to hunt a dinosaur. When he returns from his trip, he realizes that he has killed a butterfly. This minor mistake caused major changes to the world he knows. Time travel is dangerous because it can cause terrifying chain reactions and create alternate timelines.

One danger of time travel is the cause of chain reactions and impossible outcomes. When the Eckel, the hunter, comes back into modern day, Everything from the English language to a presidential election has been altered, just because of a single tiny butterfly. This is caused due to the butterfly effect, or the domino effect. These ideologies mean if something is changed, it can slowly lead up to a more significant change. In the story, the tour guide also explains this chain reaction effect. He states how killing a single mouse can eliminate all of its millions of its offspring reproduced after the sixty million years. Each lost mouse also possibly contributes to a starving fox, which in turn leads to a starving lion. When the cavemen step foot on the world, the lion that they once hunted for food might have not existed, which causes him, or her, and all their offspring, including humans, to have never existed. This theory highlights how even changing a relatively microscopic event in the past can lead up to catastrophic events. These changes can also lead to an impossible outcome in time. One of the time travel paradoxes that still continues to boggle the human mind is the Grandfather Paradox. Suppose that someone goes back into time to kill their grandfather, for whatever idiotic nonsense reason. This means that their grandfather would have never met their grandmother, which means that the person’s parents were never born. The conclusion is that the person never exists. If the person never existed, then how did he kill the grandfather? This is just one of the many impossible outcomes of time travel. Traveling into the past is extremely dangerous and causes what some people call “a rip in the universe.”

Another danger of time travel is the consequence of creating another timeline, or also known as entering an alternative universe. Eckel returns from his trip, the world around him has changed in many ways, but Eckel is the only person to notice these changes because everyone else belongs inside this alternative timeline. This meant that Eckel is the only living being on the entire planet who belongs in another timeline. Creating alternative timelines is dangerous because there is no return. Trying to redo the changes seems promising at first, but one has to meet themselves in order to perform the change, which will obviously create even more alternative timelines. In the movie “Back to the Future,” a character introduces an alternative timeline by bringing a sports book displaying the outcomes of all the games. from the future into the present day. This caused someone to become extremely rich by winning all the bets, and that person was the new husband of the time traveler’s mom. In the movie, the characters simply redid their changes, but this is obviously impossible in real life. When someone from an alternative timeline enters another timeline, even interacting with anybody is dangerous. This is because before the person came back into modern day, their alternative self was acting normally inside their alternative timeline, but when they return, they will be missing the knowledge of the alternative individual, but posses information from the original timeline. Time travel is an extremely complicated and dangerous step to take.

In conclusion, humans should never time travel unless mankind somehow invents something capable of preventing changes. This is because making even the smallest change cause a catastrophic chain reaction or an impossible outcome. Additionally, time travel causes new alternative timelines to be created. Stephen Hawking once said, “If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?” This famous quote might just simply prove that time travel is impossible, or it shows that humans have already time traveled, but they have not interacted with anything.

Many pet owners love their pets as much as their family members. Those people wouldn’t want their pets getting sick or infected with any sort of virus. To do this, they get antibiotics to make sure they stay healthy and live a long life. Of course, too much of anything isn’t good, but some pet owners aren’t aware of this and give too much medicine.

A lot of medicine would be bad for any kind of living organism that is offered to eat it. It is unhealthy because the more antibiotics you feed your body, the more immune the viruses and bacteria will get. They will become used to it and will not be defeated. The point of doctors reminding people to eat their medicines on specific dates is because if the person misses it, they will not kill the right amount of bacteria, if they eat too much, it will end as a result of the bacteria becoming immune.

Humanity and other organisms need to look after themselves to make sure they don’t have too many antibiotics. Antibiotics will be used up and no more will be produced at a certain time that will be enough for the world. Without medicine, people might perish, so we need to use our medication wisely without using too much or too few.

Disease devoured many people in the past and was hated by every single human being. There are many diseases or pandemics that happened in this world. And every one of them was a disaster.

There are many diseases that happened in the past that were catastrophic. One of them is the Antonine Plague. This is quite similar to the current Covid-19 pandemic. There are quite some similarities and differences between these two diseases. First let’s talk about the similarities, the main similarities is that they both cause the economics and the politics to go down. When you have a pandemic, people die so that reduces the income of your job. On the other hand, the difference between these two diseases is that the method of dying is different. 

Overall, there are many difference and similarities between these two diseases.

Ray Bradbury’s, A Sound of Thunder, takes place in a post-modern world where humans are able to travel through time. A man named Eckels, and a hunting group go back into the past to hunt down a dinosaur. The group quickly finds the dinosaur, and it approaches them at a fast pace. After seeing the dinosaur in person, Eckels becomes afraid and decides to go back. Since Eckels was so afraid, he accidentally abandons the path back to the time machine. He later discovers that when he strayed away from the path, he had stepped on a single butterfly. The group later discovers that this small butterfly changed the entire future drastically. When the group arrives back to their time, they find out that things were different. The new world had different languages, new presidents, new smells, and so much more. Everything in the world had changed because of the hunting group’s small mistakes. Throughout the story, Ray Bradbury adds numerous clues of symbolism to further enhance the plot of the story, and possibly teach a lesson.

One example of symbolism is the frequently occurring thunder. The subject of thunder is introduced several times throughout the story. When the dinosaur approached the group, it came with great flashing thunder. When Travis was about to shoot Eckels, there was also a sound of thunder. Thunder is typically a frightening occurrence, and can represent many different things. In this case, thunder represents danger and death. The first time thunder was brought into the story was when the dinosaur was charging at the hunting group. It was as if the thunder was introducing the deadly dinosaur, hinting to the hunting members that they were facing danger, and possibly death. Bradbury includes a second flash of thunder when Travis was holding a gun to Eckels’ head. At that moment, thunder flashed, hinting that Travis had shot Eckels, leaving him dead. By including thunder throughout the story, Bradbury is able to foreshadow and show the dangers of the hunting group’s choices.

In the story, the path that is taken to the time machine was greatly emphasized. Bradbury even capitalized the words “the Path”, to further demonstrate its significance. The Path was described as narrow, meaning there was no room for even the smallest of mistakes. When Eckels saw the terrifying figure of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, he fled back to the time machine, straying away from the original path. This is another act of symbolism that Bradbury puts into the story. The path that is mentioned in the article can also represent the path that life takes, also known as destiny. Eckels was supposed the follow the correct path back to the time machine. He failed to do so, and because he was so afraid, he strayed from the original path. Altering the path could greatly affect the future, and the same goes for life. The Path is a symbolic message, suggesting that if someone strays apart from their path of life, it could lead to the entire future being changed.

Time traveling is easily one of the coolest ideas that are found in many fictions. However, is time travel actually a good goal to pursue in real life? Or does it even do more good than harm? The answer is no, traveling through time is more harmful, due to the many consequences that could happen when you are in the past.

Time traveling is very dangerous. Just stepping on one insect, or killing one animal, can end a whole race and change the future drastically. For example, if you killed a bee, that bee which you killed may have had an important part in pollinating flowers or other plants. This can lead to some plants not being pollinated, and might change future races of plants. The different types of plants can effect the animals consuming it, as it might slightly change their diet. Or it might have an increase or decrease in population, effecting the plants’ environment.

Also, leaving something behind from the future can change the outcome of some events. For instance, if you leave behind a cellphone, people from the past might uncover it, and make more recent or different discoveries. These discoveries can change the future a lot, as humans could have invented flying cars in 2020 if they discovered technology earlier in life.

However, many people believe that time travel is beneficial, since they could change what happened in the past, and maybe avoid something terrible that was about to happen. Still, doing that can create worse problems. For instance, someone went to the past and stopped people from creating plastic. This could help the Earth be more clean, but it can assist the creation of something way worse, such as radioactive, super unclean, and wasteful metal.

In the book “A Sound of Thunder,” Ray Bradbury tells a story in a future where time travel is possible, and used for leisure as a safari event. The story explains the potential consequences of time travel, and explores the butterfly effect. However, the story could also be used to show the negative effect humans can have on the world.

The problem is that ever since humans started the Industrial Age, they have been polluting the planet with greenhouse gasses, which has caused negative consequences to the environment. Since then humans have not done anything significant to try to fight climate change, partly because nobody really knows where to start. This is a big problem because places that usually contribute the least to climate change are usually the places that are the most heavily affected.

One problem is that nobody really knows who to blame. Western countries point out the China is currently producing the highest amount of greenhouse gasses, While China points out that the greenhouse gasses are produced to keep the people working and surviving, while Western countries also produce high amounts of greenhouse gasses, except those gasses are usually not necessary and are produced by luxury items, such as cars.

Another problem is that there aren’t many good solutions. Clean energy is better for the environment than using fossil fuels, but fossil fuels are still more efficient, and cheaper. This does not really give people lots of incentive to use renewable energy, such as solar panels or windmills. In order to second and third-world countries a better reason why they should use renewable energy as they become more developed, renewable energy must be able to be produced easily.

The Ted talk “The urgent case for antibiotic-free animals” said that farmers should only use very low levels of antibiotics, or not use antibiotics at all, but what can we use instead of antibiotics? One solution, is to use a more balanced meal, like said in the video, and to have cleaner water and living quarters, and to have better hygiene, as the video described. However, there is a problem with that. Farmers are raising the animals for money, and the better meals, living conditions, and hygiene for animals will cost more money, and it is a huge hassle to prepare and do. So as long as antibiotics work, I think farmers will use them, because their goal is to make money.

So I watched this youtube video before, it was by “Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell”, and it was about bacteriophages. They area form of life, that is bacteria’s natural predator. It is everywhere, like germs, and bacteria, and like germs and bacteria, there are many times of bacteriophages. Each type of bacteriophage targets one specific type of bacteria, and its close relatives. The Video said, that now that there are bacteria practically immune to drugs, (superbugs) we can use bacteriophages to kill bacteria. There has already been cases that have been cured with bacteriophages, and according to wikipedia,

“Phage therapy is the use of bacteriophages to treat bacterial infections. This could be used as an alternative to antibiotics when bacteria develop resistance. Superbugs that are immune to multiple types of drugs are becoming a concern with the more frequent use of antibiotics.”

This makes it seem that bacteriophages are the perfect solution to bacteria, especially now that bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics. And they do not harm any human or animal cells, only bacteria. They do this by clamping on to the bacteria, making the bacteria cell make bacteriophage parts, and then assemble the bacteriophage parts, and then it explodes the bacteria, releasing the bacteriophages. Bacteria might adapt to bacteriophages, as life adapts to changes, but bacteriophages will adapt too, since they are also life. And the video also said, that it is proven, that if a bacteria’s resistance to antibiotics rises, it’s resistance for bacteriophages lowers, and the opposite is true, so there is just about nothing to worry about. So a simple and effective alternative (other than solution to superbugs/antibiotic resistant bacteria, are bacteriophages.

Eckels went on a time safari to kill ancient animals in time,

some people might think that this opportunity is sublime.

The year was 2055, in fact it was the future,

the time machine went fast through the past,

Eckels and his two inexperienced companions were probably really scared,

until the fearful ride passed.

Their guide, Mr. Travis, warned they not to stray from the path,

or else they’ll have to feel his wrath.

The little group shot at a Tyrannasorus rex,

even though the planning was quite complex.

When they got back though, the setting was quite bizarre,

a lot of things were different, not what they expected them to be,

nothing was the same inside, not even a single flea!

While Eckels was cleaning his boots, he noticed something shiny,

it was a butterfly, so tender yet so tiny.

Travis was unhappy, because Eckles didn’t obey his order.

he raised his rifle and shot Eckels, in a single sound of thunder.

I didn’t really have a “plan” for this. I just liked how creatively books used it and it’s a fascinating subject.

Wikipedia defines the butterfly effect as “the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.” Basically, the butterfly effect is when you do something somewhere or sometime, and the consequences of your actions get larger and larger, until something big happens.

In “A Sound of Thunder” a tiny action, stepping in mud, causes a change in which a different president is elected. Everything is fictional, including the presidents, but it shows a great example of the effect.

If you, hypothetically, went fishing, and fished all the fish in a creek, then you might have doomed humanity in the future. Perhaps a bunch of animals relying on that animal for food die, and omnivores who eat that animal for food turn to eat oxygen producing plants or something. That is the example of the butterfly effect.

Many books involving time traveling take use of the butterfly effect. In my opinion, it is a cool concept.

“A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury is a story about how small things can change the future drastically. The protagonist, Eckels is traveling back in time to be able to shoot some dinosaurs. He is warned several times that touching anything he is not supposed to can cause great dangers. Unfortunately, he goes off track and steps on a butterfly. Although this does not seem important, when Eckels returns back to the present, he realizes that a whole nother president has won the election, and the alphabet is all different. The tour guide he went with realizes, too, and shoots Eckels. 

This story teaches us that something may seem insignificant, but it can change the future by a lot. Although I do not believe that time traveling will ever be created, if it were to be, people would need to be careful when going to the past. Another lesson that is taught is when doing something important, make sure to pay close attention to what you are doing and listen to directions. If Eckels had just stayed on the trail instead of being too curious and walking off, the world would not have been changed so much.