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Time Travelers' Convention
usermilk writes "Some folks at MIT are holding a time-travelers' convention. The idea is to make it so famous and so widely-known that even thousands of years in the future, people will still know exactly when and where this time-traveler convention went down, and will all come travel to it at some point in their illustrious time-traveling careers. For those interested in attending, it's on May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC) in the East Campus Courtyard at MIT. 42:21:36.025N, 71:05:16.332W (42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees)."
But will John Titor be invited?
But I couldn't figure out where those coordinates posted. Would you mind pointing out where you are at the moment in your galactic and solar orbits relative to a few quasars, please?
Why didn't they set the date for yesterday? That way we wouldn't have to wait to see if it was successful.
hmm...things to remember:
1. if a time travel came back in time and altered the past, no one would know but him/her.
2. it is impossible to prove that our recorded history now is the same as it was 1 second ago due to rule number 1.
3. You may be caught in a temporal causality loop, doomed forever to repeat the same period of time over and over.
4. If time is an expression of entropy, then the only way to travel through time is to prefectly reverse entropy, which is impossible because, iirc, entropy is chaotic.
5. If the universe is nonlinear, or rather, linear is an illusion, then there is no past or future to travel to, but only the present wich exists at any instant as a snapshot in the cascade towards greater entropy.
6. The universe is moving towards a state of pure heat, at which time entropy will cease, as all engery, which drives entropy, will have been used. if you intend to travel through time by altering the universe around you, then you can not go past this point, or ever return. if you time travel by using internal independent means, then you may travel past this point, but you would no longer have any external means of measuring the passage of time in the universe. To time travel through external means you must increase the general entropy of the universe such that all events happen faster outside your time machine. to travel through time internaly you must slow down your own entropy. in both instances you must phase away from the universe such that you do not exist in it, lest you collide with something going faster than you can percieve.
7 If time is a seperate dimension then you must find a way to travel in the direction that is forwards or backwards from where you are now. 4 dimensional travel occurs at a steady, measurable rate. As you approach the speed of light, this rate of passage decreases. Thus, it is logical to assume that by exceeding the speed of light in our universe of spacetime you would travel backwards in time.
8. You may be your own great great grandparent.
9. If you change your own past you can not go back to your own future to reap the benifits because the new future would have a new you to match it.
10. Journeyman Project is t3h roxors!!!!!
They should plan out all the conferences in advance for the next 10,000 years, like the freemasons did in 5000 b.c.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
youve gotta love those mit guys and their uncanny study avoidance manouevres
It was great.
For those interested in attending, it's on May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT
Oh, I'm sure I'll get around to it one of these days.
The place will be full of dozens of idiots dressed in spandex and insisting thet they come from the future.
If no time travellers turn up on May 7th, will everyone stop promoting it after the date?
Personally I would have thought it'd make sense to give a bit more advanced notice than a week, if only to give people a chance to get the word around more beforehand (thus more likely to be archived).
I'm a time traveller. Unfortunately, you can't tell, because I travel through time with the help of an angel and an invisible lech, and the process causing me to appear identical to someone in the time I'm travelling to.
Hold on, I have to go get this Erik kid married to his one true love.
Oh boy.
It could be a ruse... the organizers may be stranded time travellers trying to send a message to the future to get rescued now. It may not be a genuine convention, but rather a lifeboat technique for the Insiders.
> [...]it will have been a blast!
I believe you mean willan on-be a blast.
Its gonna be boring. But the after party they're planning last year kicked ass.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
You could have a Time Traveler supply booth running there:
- Legit costumes for whatever era. WW2 uniform, peasant outfit, etc
- Monetary exchange: buy/sell money from different eras, at varying rates. You will always need money(depending on the time)
- Fake IDs. Going back 20 years? get an ID 20 years prior to your birthday
- Fake license plates. Travelling in an old car back to an earlier time? Get "legit" license plates that are either from the same car, or just some convincing out-of-state plates.
WARNING: Management is not responsible to disruptions in history.
The sales possibilities are endless.
Even if someone time travelled into the past for a few seconds, wouldn't they wind up in the icy cold of space while the planet speeds along on its normal course around the sun?
[o]_O
in which you can travel anywhere in time after the machine was switched on
I can do that, but unfortunately the speed is fixed. One second per second.
deus does not exist but if he does
dude. you totally missed the point!
Let me hop in my delorean and I'll be there in 5 minutes ago.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
"So if there is no one present from the future theoretically we never figure out how to transend time." Or the party on May 7th becomes famous throughout time as one of the most suck-ass parties in all history. So, time travelers decide to skip it.
Pshaw... everybody knows that nobody goes to these things because they are too crowded.
For a universe in which time travel is possible and the past can be altered by time travelers the only stable state is one in which time travel is never invented. Work it out.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Dude, it's not like you don't have time.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
I think "Time is an illusion" is an easier way to say it. If you have a picture you and a friend are looking at, and he wonders if the right side can ever travel to the left side and modify things, you'd wonder what he was talking about. I would argue that time is like that: static if viewed from enough dimensions, available for observation (in theory) as one massive N dimensional statue.
If you were really a time traveler, why would you want to show up at a known place on a known date? The government would be waiting with an awesome arsenal of firepower, waiting to forcefully take your tools from you.
Or if you're the big-business conspiracy theory type, substitute "government" for "private mercenaries."
What's your damage, Heather?
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Don't go. It was boring so a bunch of us went to ancient Babylonia for the invention of beer.
..why didn't you get first post?
Reminds me a bit of what my friends and I did back in high school/college (we were in a program called TAMS in which, for your last two years of high school, you went to college and stayed in a dorm). A few student groups were famous for spamming our mailboxes with notices for the meetings and posting their signs everywhere, and it was quite annoying.
So, as a countermeasure, we formed a "Time Travellers Club". We put out notices in everyone's boxes, first notifying people of an upcoming meeting a week prior, and the second time thanking everyone for such a large turnout at our meeting a week later. We got permission to post our own sign - a big hanging one that ha our group name, and its motto ("I'll See You Yesterday!").
Later, we found the notices on at least one RA's and one student's door - the student had apparently actually tried to go to the meeting that we thanked people for the turnout at, because they had it next to a note that said "I went, and it sucked!"
Dear Lord: One of your creatures may be hurt tonight. Please let it be the other creature.
http://www.ibras.dk/montypython/episode12.htm
Though this is hardly the time to be conjugating verbs in the past-impossible-future-never-tense.
But what you could do is slip into an alternate universe which is exactly like ours, only 60 years behind. Once there you could kill Hitler and alter History... but only in THAT copy of the Universe.
Where are referenced Universe instances when you need them?
He wouldn't be around to decide whether or not to go back in time and do her.
Obviously, he went back in time. Pervert.
Most likely, a time travel path would be along a line of freefall (geodesic). ie. Imagine if you could fall through the ground, wobbling back and forth from one side of the planet to the other.
For any given initial velocity, there would only be certain periodic times when you *wouldn't* end up inside the planet. And the position on the planet where you come out would also be problematic. If you're not satisfied with those precise times and places, then you can adjust your velocity a tad, to get another set of options.
If you're in orbit then you have much less to worry about.
Well, I went back about 2000 years with a couple of pound of good hydroponically grown weed and started a groovy movement. It was back in the area that is called Israel today.
I used this funny hispanic name, Jesus...
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
This is where it started. A couple of Sullibans attended (they really are party animals once you get to know them), but unfortunatley one present-time Enterprise fan thought they were just other geeks in a costume and poured his beer over their heads.
That kinda sparked it, really. We told Bermann that showing history programmes before the events actually happened was really not a good idea, especially given how his documentaries polarise against de Sulliban but that's Rick for you. When he was a kid, he showed the moon landing to Jules Verne, who was rather impressed.
But no worries about the Temporal Cold War. Admiral Daniels will be dispatching Archer to stop the party from happening, thus preventing the onset of the war. Some of you present-timers might actually look forward to this, as it will result in the purging of all Temporal Cold War references from the documentaries Bermann has slipped into your time.
Shame about the party though. It really was a good laugh. Well... would have been.
So you'd look like Prince Charles?
If a time machine uncouples itself with the current time, wouldn't the planet spin away from it in its orbit? You might turn up at the right time, but in the wrooooong place.
Watever everyone says, time travel is possible. The thing is you can only travel to the future and it is incredibly slow...
As someone who frequents these types of parties I can tell you they never go bad. Whats so bad about a bunch of engineers having huge drunken bonanza?
"Dude, why is your volumetric spirit flow rate decreasing exponentially as a function of time while your volumetric elimination flow rate increasing as a logarithmic function of time?"
Yeah, those types of parties.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
The correct tense might be "The government troops didn't show up, so it's safe to go."
So let's say you have yourself an Acme Time Machine, and it works. So you set it to transport you back in time 24 hours. Has no one ever considered that the earth has moved? Assuming for the moment that time travel is possible, if you do not calculate precisely where the earth is, and the location you want to go to, then you will most likely end up in space, but with a nasty possibility of "arriving" inside the earth (or possibly even the sun or some other body).
A time machine would have to also be an instantaneous space travel machine, capable of transporting you anywhere in the universe. I mean, if you can magically transport yourself the 17,640 mi (28,224 km) the earth will have moved in 24 hours, then whatever principle it uses will probably transport you over much greater distances.
Read "The End of Eternity" by Asimov... he also alludes to the episode in other books.
Your friendly neighborhood nitpicker
Actually, that is a misrepresentation of the movie. It does not do anything silly like gun-jamming or heart attack. What's interesting (partial spoiler) is that Bruce Willis' character actually generates the reason for him being sent back in time. It is one of my all time favorite movies due to the complex story nature, Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt's excellent acting ability and Terry Gilliam's genius. Ultimately the mission is accomplished and the people from the future do change the past. Of course the story ends there, so we don't know how the timeline is effected...
Find coupons in Greeley
Seeing the location depicted so accurately, I have only one fear...
Telefrags.
Ugh, time travel discussion.
:-)
Queue fifty pages of "Yes, I could kill my own grandfather." "No, you couldn't!" "In Soviet Russia, time travels you." "First Post!" "No, this is the first post, I traveled back before you posted yours", and so on...
Convention's a neat idea, though
Really, they've got to schedule it sometime in advance so they could arrange for hotel room space. A few people will show up yesterday anyway just to grab the weekly rate, but they'll probably bop in, hand over their credit card, and not spend much time in the room until next weekend. And the waiting line at Mary Chung's will just be outrageous...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I attend the "Time Travel" conference, but it is a near-disaster. As far as I can tell the conference is spectacularly devoid of time travellers and instead is full of wannabees wandering around speculating about time travel. Worse, there are glitches at the registration table forcing people to wait in long lines as the students try to get organized. The "food" leaves much to be desired as well, what there is of it. And about the conference sessions, the less I say, the better.
It certainly doesn't compare with the twin millennium celebrations on December 31, 999 and 1000, where the hostesses pull out all the stops to outdo one another. Now, those are parties!
When you gave the coordinates, you neglected to give the "altitude". You may want to have a big safety net over and at the bottom of a big pit, for those who don't have their "Heisenberg Compensators" correctly adjusted. After all, this period is rather high in Uncertainty.
Ok, but all Star Trek allusions, temporal fugues and jokes aside... how WOULD you specify altitude to a person in the future? Sea Level is not a constant, and not particularly well documented as it rises and falls. I suppose you could use the GPS, but that prolly won't still be in the sky when time travel already became possible (Future Past Tense).
Also, what about currency? How are you going to set exchange rates even with future humans? PayPal points? Beer?
One more thing... How do you think the Dept. of Homeland Security will feel about an sudden rush of 'temporal aliens'?
--
"Everything is defined in 6 Dimensions: X, Y, Z, Time, Money and Politics"
I've read through their discussion and changelog, I think one more person coming along with "Shh! grownups are talking" will yet again be met with "if someone believes it for whatever reason, it's a valid opinion" line of thinking.
Yeah, it's a rather strange phenomenon. "Fair and balanced" means presenting both sides of a case, even when one side is obviously right (or at least more right), and one side is wrong. The John Titor case is one of those (obviously a very artful hoax). Intelligent Design vs. evolution is another. Both John Titor and Intelligent Design are attractive falsehoods (at least, attractive to some people). That doesn't make them right, or even viable.
I mean, if I claim that I have invisible aliens called Dvutels living in my attic...
Jesus, you've got those, too? How do you get rid of them? I've been using invisible Raid, but that ain't working.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Going back in time and changing the past is akin to trying to lift yourself up off of the ground. Both are equally impossible and equally silly; it's just that people understand space better than time, it's not quite so obvious.
Actually, here's the real reason this won't fly...
/. perhaps), in the distant future by a timetraveler, and he decides to go.
Let's assume for the sake of argument, that this convention is discovered in a historylibrary of some sort (archives of
When he does, he'll instantly split the timeline, and the one he came from will become a parallel universe to the one he's in when he attends the convention.
Why? Because in order for a time traveler to notice it in the future, it will have to happen at least once without him. Ergo, if I were to go to this meeting, I would not meet a time traveler, because this is "my" timeline.
However, if this were to happen, an alternate version of me would be able to meet the time traveler, because he came back in time, after having lived later in "my" timeline, where the convention took place without a visitor from the future.
In fact, the moment he interacts with anything or anyone from our timeline when he arrives, is when the timeline splits, because he wasn't there the first time around. So unless he's already here in our timeline, which would make me the alternate version of me, then I won't meet him.
It's more than likely nobody from the future will show up at the convention. Unless, like I said, we're already in the alternate timeline.
Also, when he goes back to the future, his timeline will have been altered and he may not even exist in the timeline he returns to; and he will have no way to get back to his own previous future timeline, unless he goes back again a little earlier and tells his alternate self to go back immediately without going to the convention - which of course would create a grandfather paradox, as he would then have no reason to tell himself not to go and the entire universe would simply cease to exist.
Is that clear?
-- This sig for rent.
This has nothing to do with free speech (or even Free Speech) whatsoever. Free speech guarantees your right to hold and voice an opinion, unmolested by the powers that be. This concept is often warped into the notion that it obviates the need to defend such an opinion, or that merely holding it requires others to recognize it as valid.
Nobody is even remotely pondering curtailing the "Titorites"' rights to self expression. What I have a problem with is that the editors of the particular article, in their treatment of the subject matter are giving far too much credence to this particular crackpot theory. They do this in the laudible pursuit of neutrality, but in this case that leads to a product that reflects negatively on the project as a whole.
Free speech does not mean the abandonment of objective reasoning. Neutral point of view does not mean that wikipedia editors should parrot everything they read on the internet.
Oh and thank you for providing a link to the article on free speech - how deliciously patronizing.
sic transit gloria mundi
would slam the traveller against the wall at 30km/sec
The wall slams into the traveller.
paintball
WARNING:
Cubic time is proven fact and cannot be disputed. Nature's simultaneous 4-day cube proves that there are four parts to a day, and four days occuring always at the four corners of earth. 2x2=4, and people who insist in time as something that can be traveled think of THREE parts, past present and future, but there are in actuality FOUR parts, fact which is ignored by antiHarmony academia criminals. Time "theories" from people educated moronic in evil institutions are ignorant of the four corners of the time and of the world. Denying the existence of four-sided nature of time and universe is to ensure your own demise. You are stupid arrogant curse to all creatures of the planet.
/obligatory
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
This only holds for a few specific theories of how time(travel) works. :)
Sort of a multi line/track switch theory you have for your explanation.
Now try and work it with single-line editing allowed and still explain away the 'paradox' that implies, for extra credit give two paradox solvers.
Time Travel is one of the more fun things to consider.
Wish I could remember if anyone fun showed up at this one.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Everyone acts like a thousand years is the equivalent of "yesterday". The very concept that in thousands of years everyone will even know about one particular nerd party, is at best a joke.
You know how long a thousand years is? Columbus discovering America is _half_ that time ago.
A thousand years ago, the Vikings were still getting converted to Christianity. Do you know where the big parties have been at this time? If I told you that Bjarni Hrolfsson and Erik Karlsson (made up viking names) had this fabulous party 1000 years ago, would you even know when and where to go?
Heck, would you have even heard about it? History tends to recall more like royal events and wars from that long ago. We know roughly when and where the saxon earl Harold Goodwinson fought the Vikings and we know where he later lost to William of Normandie. But do you know exactly where some vikings or normans from back then had a party? I don't think so.
Roughly a thousand years ago, we had the first crusade. We remember that because it's a bloody big war... went awfully wrong, with a bloody huge PR, but even then a lot of details are missing.
Roughly a thousand years ago, temperatures peaked _higher_ than they are today. In fact so high that Greenland thawed and was green enough to be called that. The Vikings could farm it.
That's a bloody huge event even on history scale, but even the vast majority the global-warming scare gang doesn't know about it. (E.g., that it happened without driving SUVs. Or that no, all that molten ice did _not_ kill all fish life, and did _not_ reverse the gulf stream either.)
Roughly a thousand years ago, Leif Eriksson decided to sail west from Greenland, to check out Bjarni Herjolfsson's story that he's seen land there. And he discovered America. That's a bloody huge event, and even about that we have little more than a saga and some ruins that sorta look like a Viking village. And even that's _one_ of the landfalls that Leif made.
So what makes anyone think that a nerd party would go into every history book for millenia?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Jesus is greek for Joshua... apparently Jesus's actual name... go fig - as the catholic church originally used greek as their official language until Pope Victor I changed it to latin (his native language).
BTW, if you want good alternate history regarding Jesus - I highly recommend Chrisopher Moore's "Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal".
BlackNova Traders
"What you are forgetting is that in this day and age, more information is being recorded and stored each day than ever before.
In a hundred years, I would expect for us to at least have some sort of storage media that is unaffected by time."
Point well taken, but the summary said _thousands_ of years. In which case, sorry, nope.
Don't forget that a lot of information before had been engraved on metal, carved on wood (which is why runes look the way they look: they were designed for carving into wood), or inscribed on clay tablets and baked. And it still got lost.
Do you think someone's backups on CD will be more durable than that?
Also while we do record more data, also more data is lost every day.
A clay tablet is still readable in a hundred years if you still know the alphabet. Whereas nowadays can you tell me where can I buy an 8" disk drive for my PC, to read my old CP/M diskettes? Is there even a filesystem driver for any OS that can still read CP/M disks?
And after less than 2000 years time we needed a Rosetta Stone and some big pictograms to re-discover how to read the ancient Egyptian pictograms. Now think that we had just found a shiny plastic disk. Even if we figured out how to read it, you're left with a string of numbers that say _nothing_ about the actual text. Which combination of bits is Anubis-looking-left?
So I wouldn't expect that much data to survive us.
Plus there's a lot to be said about noise-to-signal ratio. Even if all the information did survive, after 1000 years we'd have a mountain of blogs, Counter-Strike clan pages, flamewars, etc. Trying to even search for anything through this data is like looking for the proverbial needle, only this time in a whole mountain of hay.
Do you really think anyone will look through that data for a nerd party? Or they'll be more interested in our wars?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I do have a nifty t-shirt from 2007 though.
To go through all the effort of risking life and limb to show up at such a lame event, avoiding the government agents, and nobody believes you are from the future anyway.
That's why I'm not going anyway. There's a much better convention held every year on the dark side of the moon anyway. We get quite a chuckle out of you losers on earth not being able to figure it out!
Let's assume for one moment that time travel is possible, and that's its discovered by people at some indeterminate point in the future (or past... ). Obviously time travellers don't interact with us. I haven't seen Hitler be assassinated recently... So either time travellers have some code of ethics that prevents them from changing history, or the Government heavily regulates time travel, or for some other reason interaction is impossible. Whatever, no-one will turn up to this party. Sounds like a lot of parties at MIT.
Years ago when I took physics, we had a lecture or two on an interpretation of anti-particles as time-reversed particles, and annihilation reactions and pair-production reactions as time reversals. (For those interested in the real physics, do a google search on the title of this post). Anyway, it was good for a couple of BS over beer discussions. It did appear to allow time travel, but it didn't let you leave the time line to do it. While traveling back in time, you interact with the universe as if you're made of antimatter, which pretty much meant any time machine had to be a spacecraft. The energy requirements were enormously huge ( greater than twice your rest mass at both ends of the trip). There is a real problem avoiding hitting yourself on the way back (which would be bad), but it looked like it actually did permit the travel.