To pour wisdom into young minds

Remember your senior year in high school? My memory is fuzzy – it was more than 50 years ago – but a few moments, and some of the people, still stand out. The yearbook has a photo of me reading a book in between classes, which probably helps illustrate why my memories of the rest of the place are faint.

Imagine yourself in one of those 50-minute classes. The now-year-old you would be bored silly by the material, and frantically trying to recall the names of the classmates around you.

Now imagine that 17-year-old you suddenly has the now-year-old you's mind and memories. You have 45 minutes – 5 to persuade the teacher to let you speak, and 40 to address your friends (aka captive audience). What do you say?

"Buy Microsoft" is pretty trivial advice. What do they need to hear? Can you warn them, inspire them, encourage them?

• They're young, and think what they've grown up with is permanent. "Almost all of you will live to see the USSR come to pieces without war." "The country of Poland was in a different place, within living memory!" I'm showing my age here.
• They have no idea yet how much their ideas and values are swayed by popular culture, and how much these will change along with the culture, without any thought on their part. Maybe a spot of Socratic dialog?
• They only think they know themselves and what they need in life. "We need to be needed." or "You want to be happy? Be grateful."
• Do any of them need an apology from you?
• Do they need to be warned that youth are ignorant, despite the popular call to "listen to the youth", and that the only change they'll make in the world is the little that will actually be in their scope?
• Do you explain your current religious or political faith?
• For that matter, are you a creature of current culture? If so, do you actually have any wisdom to impart?
• And, what would you promise the teacher to get permission to take over the class?

Would any of it do any good? Maybe just the apology...

It might be fun to guess how your friends might answer. Everybody at a table secretly writes what they would do, and then everybody guesses who wrote what.

What If: Shakespeare

If you haven't read Simak's Goblin Reservation, do. It's a fun sci-fi book set in Madison in an era with interplanetary teleportation and also time travel--which sets the scene. The Time Department has brought William Shakespeare forward to give a lecture. (There's a saber-tooth and a ghost and a Neanderthal as well, but read the book for yourself.)

Take that notion as the what-if. You have Shakespeare available for a couple of weeks. He's an astute businessman, and will be happy to write whatever play you commission, and might be happy to write fewer than five acts. (Producers and directors would trample each other for the chance to produce/direct/film it. I suspect Shakespeare would love the "Take-2" capability of film--and also the ability to work with women instead of boys for the female parts.)

Would you risk a comedy? He might need a crash course in "what's funny this year"; as AVI noted, humor doesn't always age well. You might feel overawed and leave it up to him, but just for laughs, try to think of something--maybe a fairy story?

He did some historical plays. Their Finest Hour might be too huge a canvas even for him, but WWII seems like an inevitable choice. Unless you wanted him to try Apollo? Or if you wanted to keep it to things he knew about already, King Harold? Odyssus might not be a good fit, but Achilles might.

Or a tragedy. I brought the topic up at the table, and Youngest Daughter suggested Yamamoto: facing Fate in the form of the death cult militarists and the Emperor, and Nemesis in the form of the US Army Air Force. I don't think Nixon's story would be dramatic enough for Shakespeare. Maybe something classical?

Just for fun, what would you suggest?

Columbia

Our military is supposed to (in between bouts of self-flagellation) make plans for defending against and defeating enemies known and potential. I'm told we entered a world war with a North Atlantic naval plan in the safe to fight Britain, but not Germany. Somebody fell down on the job.

One of my favorite scenes (at the time) from movie Marooned was the supervisor explaining that the checklist was going to take too long to make the deadline, and the manager taking the checklist book from him and throwing it away and announcing that "We're going to find out if the redundant systems work." Or words to that effect; I decline to try to find and re-watch it to get it exact

Since then I've been part of starting complicated systems myself, and seen from afar how regularly NASA hits glitches in its countdowns--not infrequently serious enough to demand delays. No, you can't skip the checklists; and sometimes A, B, and C have to be done sequentially.

Ars Technica has a very interesting article (updated from 2014) on whether Columbia's crew could have been saved by sending up Atlantis.

Maybe. If there were no major glitches (fuel valve issues are what I remember as most common). If the last CO2-poisoned astronauts could have donned the complex spacesuit successfully. If Atlantis didn't have foam damage too. (NASA had had 6 foam incidents before.) If NASA already had a plan in the safe.

For the rest of the shuttle flights (except the last), they did.

One of my responsibilities for some years was the backup of our servers. We spent a fair bit of money on it, and it took a little time, but I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times we needed the system--and just as many incidents where people wrote to areas they were warned weren't backed up. I also had a role in disaster planning--and of course the disaster we had wasn't one of those we'd planned for (we couldn't afford the necessary redundancy anyway). Disaster planning feels a bit like make-work, especially when nothing bad happens. It's an easy expense to put off for another fiscal year, and "something went weird with the kubernetes servers this morning" too.

I suppose you can fail in the other direction too--creating new bureaucracies to be ready for an ever-expanding list of potential problems. And they'll each itch to justify their existence by spotting their target problem under every rug. Oh well.

What if: Shakespeare

Our Youngest Daughter is currently fascinated with and learning about the Original Pronunciation of Shakepeare's plays, and speculations about original staging as well.

Flip the focus: If Shakespeare had modern theater layout and equipment at his disposal, would he keep the old staging or chuck it for something easier? Sets would be easier to manage, and entrances and exits be more flexible with the modern layout. The compromises on which way the actors face would be different--I'd think easier. And he'd have much better behaved audiences.

I suspect he would enthusiastically take to using actresses.

But if you introduced him to movies, and the possibilities in retakes and mixing close-ups and medium shots, would he hire a producer and switch? I'm not expert, but what I've seen suggests that movies need more and more varied visual action than stage plays--or at any rate, people expect it so it has to be there. What approaches he would use? He liked to throw in puns and bawdy jokes--maybe some slapstick?

I'd bet he'd keep an eye on what the modern customers wanted, and make the productions shorter.

And I'd bet the Shakespeare scholars would disdain the movies.

Future

Everybody knows the argument that if we knew the future in at least moderate detail, we would not be as motivated to work hard. Perseverance would turn into something entirely different—more like a willingness to follow a script than courage.

Free will changes nature into something we can't wrap our minds around. Let that go for now.

What about the gifts of the Spirit? How would they grow? (assuming there weren't different ones that I can't wrap my mind around)

• Love: There might be some plus to knowing how it would grow. OTOH, if love is willing the good of another, the "scriptedness" of life would seem to diminish the "will" part of love.
• Joy: Would joy in the present be diminished by the knowledge of problems ahead, or increased by the knowledge of greater joy later?
• Peace: This would depend on what we chose to concentrate on: the waterfall in the crags or the precipitous path to get to it. And perhaps, whether our earthly goals will be ultimately frustrated.
• Patience: This becomes meaningless.
• Kindness: Why would this change? Maybe if we knew in advance that some of those we were kind to would be ungrateful, we would have less of the spirit of kindness in those actions.
• Goodness: Why would this change?
• Faithfulness: What would this mean anymore?
• Gentleness: Like kindness; maybe it wouldn't change.
• Self-control: This might weaken. Que sera sera

The future pain might discourage, or the future victory encourage—it would depend on you.

Faith, Hope, Love: Hope isn't entirely about this world, so knowing the future doesn't make as huge a difference as you'd expect. Faith—maybe less.

I've said that if before my wedding you'd told me the bare bones of what I could expect , I'd have run screaming. And I'd have been wrong, because the troubles were worth it. I would have "known" the future, but not known it well enough.

I suspect God designed the universe just fine. Though I'd really like a little sneak preview on a couple of vexing questions.