Deck Hazen should be careful what he wishes for: it might come true. The American-born IT specialist, who has retired to Kerikeri, has invested in - and signed up to be a customer of - an Australian cryogenics facility.
For a mere $50,000, his body will be stored after he dies, in the expectation that science will eventually be able to bring him back to life. But it is not what Hamlet would have described as a consummation devoutly to be wished.
Social historians tell us that time travel would be a very mixed blessing. A visitor landing in, say, Shakespeare's London direct from the 21st century would almost certainly be overcome by instant gagging nausea from the smells of unwashed bodies (and worse). Everybody would be at least slightly drunk all the time (the water would not be potable and tea would not be arriving for another 50 years, so it would be flat beer for breakfast).
Fisticuffs on the slightest of pretexts would be more common than in Queen St on a Saturday night (the upper-class twits would be engaged in swordfights). In short, the culture shock would be so profound, it would knock most of us off our rockers.
Travelling to the future has got to be worse. In his 1970 book, Future Shock, Alvin Toffler argued that the exponential rate of technological change was becoming mind-numbing. In that year, the computers in the world numbered a few thousand; now the amount of technical information is more than doubling each year, so the amount of new stuff the human race is learning annually is equivalent to everything it ever knew before.
