November 23, 2015

EP. 97 — Why Time Travel Would Be Weirder Than You Think

Going back all the way to our very first episode, one of the topics that we’ve discussed most on this podcast is the Flynn Effect: the inevitability that each generation will be smarter than the last. We’re smarter than a generation of people from the early 1900s and the future-people of the 2100s who ride driver-less cars and get wi-fi implanted into their eyelids will laugh at how dumb we are.

Knowing this, the Flynn Effect would actually make time travel a bit more problematic than you thought. If you travel to the past, like Marty in ‘Back to the Future III’, in all likelihood you’d probably be burned as a witch or drawn and quartered for insisting the Earth traveled around the sun. If you go to the future, you’d be considered slow and thick-witted, that’s if the people could understand you at all. You’d be Fry.

Recorded live at the UCB Sunset theatre in Hollywood, Jack O’Brien is joined by Cracked’s Dan O’Brien and Soren Bowie to analyze the horrifying intricacies of ‘Back to the Future’, and then move onto why time travel as a whole is probably not a good idea.

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