Change the Future, Change the Past

The past is an endless banquet of injustices: racism, sexism, colonization, slavery, genocide, and more. Some of these injustices continue in the present, but even past injustices are kept front and centre on social media, which makes everyone angry for either being oppressed or being labeled as an oppressor. As a healing solution, it’s not ideal.

Arguably, ideal scenarios are the stuff of science fiction, like traveling into the past to change the future. But actual science may offer us an even more unbelievable option:

Traveling into the future to change the past!

How can changing the future possibly change history? Well, history is simply the determination of the past, as recorded by observers. So, the interpretation of past events that defines their relation to the past and future is almost entirely observer-dependent — and thus malleable. In short, history is based on perception, and perception can change. After all, perception is just energy stored as information.

This concept is the basis of the quantum physics principle of retrocausality, a contentious concept that eliminates the distinction between cause and effect. Instead, retrocausality suggests that intertwined particles (or events) affect each other regardless of where in time they fall… which means the past can be changed! Not because we can travel back in time (we can’t), but because the state of a particle (or system) in the past can be affected by a measurement we perform in the future.

It certainly sounds unbelievable. But as we change the future by changing our information and energy, our perceptions of history change. So, in a sense, the future can change the past. We should let that liberate us from being bogged down in the baggage of history when we need to be focused on solving the problems of the future, because solving the problems of the future will help us change how we view history as well. If we focus on solutions that help us manifest a better future that is free of these social injustices, hopefully, it will unite us rather than divide us.

Retrocausality is a strange and confusing concept. And some people think it’s complete nonsense. But if we can imagine traveling into the past to change the future, why not imagine the reverse? Who knows, maybe by thinking about these ideas, we are changing history.