As mere humans, there have always been things that our puny minds haven’t been able to comprehend to it’s fullest extent. One of those things is time, or as some call it, the “Fourth Dimension”. Now let alone being able to warp time, we don’t have the capabilities to grasp time itself. But set that aside for now, doesn’t being able to warp time sound too good to be true? Well, yes, but let’s assume that we miraculously gained the ability to warp time or gained access to the 4th dimension but there’s a catch: we can only pick one of the choices. Either we pick the ability to time travel to any time possible or we can stop time. Personally, I made my choice, so let me help you make a choice as well.
Firstly, let’s talk about the ability to time travel. Now, time travel is a really delicate topic, well, because of time. Since we haven’t yet invented time travel, we don’t know the limits of the universe. We don’t even know if time travel is possible since the existence of the time travel is a paradox in in of itself. Let’s set that aside for now as well, just imagine that you can time travel to any possible moment in time. Sure, it can be really useful to science to learn what happened when but, really sounds a bit underwhelming for personal benefit doesn’t it? Either you use it to go basically sightseeing, which I stated before that it seems a bit underwhelming to me, or you can just choose to live at the time which will almost definitely will leave you as an outsider to the whole world. It doesn’t really sound too appetising to me. And on the side note, time travel is really confusing to think about because of the infinite paradoxes and universes it needs to create. Or also because of the severe consequences it can cause because of the “Butterfly Effect”.
Now let’s talk about the second option, the ability to stop time. But if you think about it, time stop is really confusing to talk about as well. For example, do you age normally when you stop time or does time stop for you as well? Even further, if time does stop for you as well, then what, can you only think or is it just useless? Let’s just time go with the “time doesn’t move but you do” approach for convenience. Just the ability to have more time to think is great on it’s own. But having the ability to do whatever you want is such a useful ability to have. We have limited time on earth so, why not make it longer?
So to wrap things up, my personal preference would be to have the ability to stop time since, in my opinion, you get the most bang for your buck. However, that doesn’t mean that time travel is necessarily bad; it’s just my opinion and you are free to have your opinions as well.