A Time of Magic

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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.

At just about every turn you find people that are looking for evidence that aliens are amongst us, but there seem to be a great deal fewer people looking for time evidence of time travellers even though one would think they’d be easier to find.

Where (or when) would you look though? The problem in identifying them is that, as we’ve discussed here before, it would be far from easy to pick them out whilst they were in our time period. There’s all kinds of reasons for that but boiling down to the fact that they’d be unlikely to have as detailed a knowledge of events in our period as would be required for them to be able to prove that they were from the future. It would be small things that would identify them and they’d be quite hard to pick out: a different way of phrasing things (but then that could just be because they were from another country), a different way of dressing (if you’ve looked in the highstreet lately you might come to the conclusion that everyone was from the future!) or different expectations (like not understanding why you had to dial a phone number instead of just asking for the person perhaps?).

However, we should be able to pick them out from the past if we narrow down the time period and look very carefully.

In that respect, perhaps the best event to consider is the sinking of the Titanic. It’s something that’s become very well known in our own time and because it sets so many precedents (eg lifeboats for everyone, manning the radio 24/7, etc.) it may remain sufficiently attractive right through to the time when someone builds a time machine. The other attraction for a potential time traveller is that it’s been very well researched so they’d know pretty much exactly where to go to see the various events and even where they needed to be to be amongst those rescued.

That last point is quite critical. If we assume that the time machine itself would need to go into the past then they would need to be amongst the survivors. Naturally, if the time machine didn’t need to go into the past then this wouldn’t apply but let’s be optimistic and assume that it needed to for now.

Think about it: this means that there’s a good chance that at least one of those survivors was from the future.

Thanks to the sheer volume of information available, it might even be possible to identify them too. What you’re looking for is someone on their own (ie exclude anyone with family on the ship or who subsequently returned to family in Europe), who wasn’t famous and who disappeared after they were rescued. An impossible task? I don’t think so: the Encyclopedia Titanica contains biographic details on all of the survivors so, in principle, it’s just a matter of working through the 712 survivors to identify the time traveller.

Not so long ago science fiction was placed firmly in the 21st century and it was a wonderous world with flying cars, spaceships flitting around the stars, robots to do your housework and so on.

Yet, we’re well into the 21st century now and none of that flashy stuff is available yet. OK, so we’ve got a space station up there but we’ve not even set foot on Mars yet never mind taken flight to the stars. Robots are pretty boring pieces of equipment too and certainly don’t walk around like they did in the films.

Actually, we have quite a lot of the 23rd century technology knocking around: the mobile phone was a communicator in Star Trek, the talking computers appeared in the early 1980s and disappeared soon after, the memory chips that Mr Spock always seemed to be shuffling are our SD RAM cards. It’s just that we don’t have the really interesting stuff.