If you could travel back in time would you try and make things right by taking some kind of action? Or, would you learn from what was done wrong and not do it again? I know this has been written about by many people over the last 200 years but just go with me for awhile.
If you went back would you try and right the great wrongs of history by – say … killing Hitler’s mother before he was born and the same for Stalin, Pol Pot and Genghis Khan to name a few? Would their nonexistence then be filled by someone else we don’t know about? Their positions in time just being shadows of systems of thought in the greater population.
There are other people who have caused far greater damage to Earth and Humanity by the massive negative impacts of their work on the environment than these other men ever did. Their work was done with the best of intentions and hailed as breakthroughs but the long term negative results we have seen and will be seeing for centuries.
One of these men is Thomas Midgley. He was the inventor of Freon and tetraethyllead (which is used in leaded gasoline). These inventions are two of the greatest environmental threats of the twentieth century. It was never his intention to cause environmental disasters and human suffering but rather to help the world. Midgley’s work has “had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth’s history.” The results were millions of tons of lead released into the air and the Earth’s ozone layer depleted.
What would I do? I don’t think I could leave my principles behind me when I went through time but I might try and turn a young Midgley’s mind in the direction of becoming an insurance salesman.
What would you do?
Follow the link to learn more about Midgley.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
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