Quote from Kingofrunes;977825:
Never said it was an awesome idea and that I would do it. I wouldn't do it. I just was doing a what if discussion. Wondering what it would be like to be in another person's shoes.
But I can see that you clearly don't understand that.
Let us draw an arrow, its direction arbitrary. We will let the substrate upon which the arrow is drawn be time. If, as we travel in the direction of the arrow, we find the material world becoming more and more disorderly, more random, we say the arrow points to the future. If we find more and more the structure and order of the world, we say the arrow points into the past.
It is an impossibility to travel toward the past, and physical matter progresses at whatever pace it may unceasingly toward the future.
Now let us restrict our substrate that we call time. Suppose we only examine the substrate insofar as it occupies or represents the existence of humanity as a species. We can call this new substrate "The History of Humanity" or just "History". Now, if our arrow is parallel to a forward-facing arrow, that is, if it runs contrawise to a past-facing arrow, we can call that arrow "Progress".
As a species, we have always strove to trudge unceasingly as physical matter we are toward the future in a manner we refer to as progress. However, in this case, progress is more arbitrary than future or past, and traveling backwards in progress is not impossible. Consider, though, the analogy of future and progress, of past and degeneration. You can "go back in time", go back in progress, quite easily, but invariably it is the unwise thing to do. It's as if the impossibility of backwards time-travel is so potent, that it even makes itself apparent by analogy.
Imagine you have at your disposal an infinite amount of weightless blocks. You could, given the time, arrange them into many different structures. You could simply form piles, more complex pyramids, or vastly elaborate towers and buildings. If you were allowed to cause blocks to adhere to one another, the complexity to which you could form structures would be increased by powerful magnitudes.
So imagine with these blocks you have built a structure of some kind. The shape and form is arbitrary. If you allow the arrow's substrate to be restricted to only the time you used to build it, you have a time line of the the building's formation; its history, where the forward facing arrow is again progress. The building began as a pile, was arranged into a basic form, was given complex form on top of that, and was finished off with whatever arbitrary decorations you care to imagine it having. You are not so restricted by the physical laws of nature that you cannot return the building to its original state: a pile. (Though this would be traveling backward in progress only, you would not be traveling backward in time.)
Why would anyone purposefully revert the flow of progress? It makes no logical sense, because you have still exerted all the time and energy required to build a complexity, but what you are left with is little more than what you began with. It is much more effective to have simply not built the structure in the first place. In one case, you expend vast amounts of your time (which you have precious limited little of) and energy (which must be constantly replenished) to produce something that you could have produced by spending zero time, and zero energy. If that's how you care to operate, I can be an infinitely more efficient builder than you by simply calling my starting pile my end product.
The history of the imaginary block building, and the history of humanity are not quite different, and the states therein are analogous to each other. What you suggest is to smash parts of your complex structure away to make your building look similar to a more basic form that it had taken in the past. You suggest working against the stalwart force of progress for reasons quite facetious. It may be true that a more complex building must suffer more complex conditions (such as the strain of bearing its own weight, or resisting the effects of wind, which it is altogether more sensitive to) but the beauty of creating complexity is the solving of these new and delightful problems, not trying to pretend they don't exist by pretending to revert the flow of time.
We can't let the pretense of a hypothetical musing be the excuse to encourage this kind of behavior. The grand imperative of the future-facing arrow demands it so. Why should we be gleeful and happily reminisce about progress past, when we are swept so vigorously toward the future?
It is not the same as fondly recalling memories of mirth, for in those moments we don't wish we could impede or reverse the mighty force of progress, we merely recall the gay feelings we experienced, and the memory of the time enacts a memory of the feelings, so the reminiscing becomes a pleasant act. That too is a progressive action.
To finish off my analogy of the tower, if you continue to strive to let your tower grow, it will reach an inevitability; a certain point where, if it doesn't buckle under the immense strain of its own weight, it will never. After your tower continues to grow, it must either crumble or reach the glorious critical height where it has become so vastly tall that the fantastic revolution of the earth actually causes the tower to exhibit centrifugal forces in great enough display that these forces support the tower itself.
The base of the tower becomes then, not a foundation, but an anchor, and the tower may continue to grow indefinitely and never fear of falling over.