Editing 1191: The Past

{{comic
| number    = 1191
| date      = March 27, 2013
| title     = The Past
| image     = the past.png
| titletext = If history has taught us anything, we can use that information to destroy it.
}}

==Explanation==
"The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there" is the opening line of "{{w|The Go-Between}}", a novel by {{w|L. P. Hartley|Leslie Poles Hartley}} (1895–1972), published in London in 1953. The phrase was intended to highlight the impact of changing social norms and customs. As when dealing with a foreign society, one must be prepared to encounter different ways of life than one is accustomed to. And that's true, even over a single lifetime, so in recalling one's past, it's important to understand the context in which those memories take place. 

[[Black Hat]], however, decides to take the first part of the quote literally, and consider "the past" as it it were an actual foreign country. In true Black Hat fashion, the first thing he considers is that this "nation" would have an outdated military (by definition, because current technology and military doctrine hadn't been invented) and huge oil reserves (because their reserves would not yet have been depleted). The implication of these two points is that such a country would be ripe for invasion by a more powerful nation, seeking to control their natural resources. 

The pensive way in which he makes these points implies that he's genuinely considering trying to mount an invasion of "the past".  Such an invasion would, of course, require inventing a time machine, and would introduce all sorts of potential issues with the space-time continuum. But [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Category:Time_travel time travel is hardly unknown in the XKCD universe], and Black Hat isn't the type to worry about consequences when there's an opportunity to gain some benefit. 

This notion has shown up in fiction before. For example, "Mozart in Mirrorshades" is a short story by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner, which features the use of time travel to exploit earlier eras' natural resources. As another example (from the short story ''{{w|Young Zaphod Plays It Safe}}''), “When the hunt for new sources of energy had at one point got particularly frantic, one bright young chap suddenly spotted that one place which had never used up all its available energy was - the past. And with the sudden rush of blood to the head that such insights tend to induce, he invented a way of mining it that very same night, and within a year huge tracts of the past were being drained of all their energy and simply wasting away. Those who claimed that the past should be left unspoilt were accused of indulging in an extremely expensive form of sentimentality.”

The "If history has taught us anything" is usually used to introduce a lesson that the speaker takes to be clear and obvious from history. The title text of this strip subverts that by implying that lessons learned from history can count as military intelligence to use against it.

The concept of going back to the past to collect resources (or, at least, set up the collection of resources) shows up again in [[2321: Low-Background Metal]].

==Transcript==
:[Cueball and Black Hat talking.]
:Cueball: Well, you know what they say. The past is a foreign country-
:Black Hat: -With an outdated military and huge oil reserves!
:Black Hat: ''Hmmm...''

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Black Hat]]