MIT Hopes For Future Invention of Flux Capacitor

For those of you who haven't heard, M.I.T. held a Time Travel Convention this weekend. That's right, a Time Travel Convention.

The FAQ page on the website includes such topics as "Isn't Time Travel Impossible?" and "I'm From the Future, and I'd Like to Attend." They also tell you how you, the reader, can help to make sure that people in the future know about the Convention, even though it's already happened:

We need volunteers to publish the details of the convention in enduring forms, so that the time travelers of future millennia will be aware of the convention. This convention can never be forgotten! We need publicity in MAJOR outlets, not just Internet news. Think New York Times, Washington Post, books, that sort of thing. If you have any strings, please pull them. Write the details down on a piece of acid-free paper, and slip them into obscure books in academic libraries! Carve them into a clay tablet! If you write for a newspaper, insert a few details about the convention! Tell your friends, so that word of the convention will be preserved in our oral history! A note: Time travel is a hard problem, and it may not be invented until long after MIT has faded into oblivion. Thus, we ask that you include the latitude/longitude information when you publicize the convention.

So, M.I.IT. and the internet will not survive into the future. But latitude and longitude (and public library microfiche) is forever.

Last night on SNL, my neighbor Tina Fey said (and I'm paraphrasing because I couldn't remember it exactly) that unfortunately, no one from the future attended because they already knew that the party sucked. Heh.

The donation button on their website was to raise funds for snacks. That's lame...snacks need to be part of the promotion for any event, and that's not likely to change in the future. Even Eric Cartman knew enough to promise "punch and pie."

Why aren't they calling it the "first annual" Time Travel Convention? Because, as they point out on their website, all you need is one. "Time travelers from all eras could meet at a specific place at a specific time, and they could make as many repeat visits as they wanted." Of course they could. And I hope they do. We all have questions (some of which I've posed in a similar post at Jewlicious) about what life will be like in the future.

A glimpse into the future would provide valuable information about things of global consequence: will we ever find Osama bin Laden and eliminate the al-Qaeda threat? Will there be peace in the Middle East? Will I stay single for the rest of my life? Will I finish my book proposals and become a best-selling author, or will my glamour be discovered and exploited by the television, film and fashion industries? Or will I work at Walmart and live in this studio forever? (See? Issues of global import.)

(Want more on the conference? Here's the NY Times article on the subject...)

Comments

[gatsby]

In Douglas Adams's book "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" he writes of time travel:
One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father ot mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broadminded and well adjusted family can't cope with. There is also no problem about changing the course of history - the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end. The major problem is quite simply one of grammar."
He goes on to discuss the very tricky grammatical problems of tense. Well worth a read when considering time travel.

[T.A.B.]

As memory serves, Adams also wrote of "the Search for Real Time" in which time-travellers were mucking about with time so much, changing history a great deal (particulaly marketing companies), that nobody knew what was the real history anymore.

Wouldn't it be funny if someone went to the past and completely cancelled the convention? I think so.

[Gotham Image]

Time travel convestion- it sounds so stupid, that it must be brilliant. Thanks Esther.

[Madonna]

Somebody tell Mark "I'm not here to talk about the past, I'm here to focus on the future" McGwire! That way, instead of thinking about the future, he can just go there already!

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=baseball/calendar/september/october

September 20: Mark McGwire meets with a team of engineers and physicists from M.I.T. and tells them he wants to finance the construction of a time machine that can take him to the future.