A Time of Magic

Not so long ago the gifts that we could choose from were those stocked in the local shops and if you were anywhere at all remote or even in a small town that was very limited.

Nowadays it’s all changed of course. Not only is the largest bookshop in the world available to all of us but we can choose gift baskets which would put to shame any that were available even just ten years ago and would have truly amazed our grandparents both in terms of the range that you can choose from and the price which, despite years of inflation, has barely shifted the price of a wide range of products available online.

Of course, it’s that much greater market that is both increasing our choice and driving down the prices. Who’d have thought 20 years back that to buy a CD you’d use a shop that was based over 1000 miles away from you?

It has to be Florida, doesn’t it?

At just everywhere else in the world you can expect theme parks to add another attraction or two each year, in Florida they seem to add another theme park. Paradoxically, that makes Orlando vacations more difficult to plan in that there’s just too much to interest everyone. It’s somewhere that you need to cut down the number of places you intend going to rather than scabbling around to find somewhere of interest that can happen in many other vacation destinations.

Still, ’tis nice to have way too much to see than not enough, isn’t it?

Let’s face it, that’s just not going to happen, is it?

I don’t mean the time travel aspect of it: that’ll happen one day. No, it’s the business of getting to see the President right away that’s not going to happen. Unless it’s planned for in advance.

I think the only time travel series I’ve seen which even thinks about this is Seven Days that where they arrange the codeword in advance and, of course, that’s the only way that it’s going to work. In the early days of time travel it’s likely to be similar to the early days of air travel ie there will be limitations on the distance that you can go back.

Limit that distance and it doesn’t leave you a lot of time to get in touch with the authorities, convince them that you really are from the future and for them to do whatever is necessary to prevent the disaster. Without a codeword or similar quick way of proving that you are who you say you are then it’s going to severely limit the possibilities, at least in the early days of the technology.

One final thing is worth noting and that’s if there’s some really, really major disaster that spurs on the development of time travel in order to prevent it then it would actually be necessary to put the contact mechanism in place for time travellers well in advance of time travel being possible. Ridiculous as it may seem now when time travel is considered, at best, science fiction and indeed thought of as impossible by a large number of people, it seems only sensible to put in place those contact and proof mechanisms in place just in case that major disaster is going to happen soon and time travellers do turn up in time to prevent it.