Just an excuse for a kegger?
Some students at MIT have created the world’s first Time Traveller’s Convention. The premise is that if one sets a date and place for such a convention, and if one publicizes it enough, people from the future will travel back in time to attend.
…presumably because these people from the future have already saved Kennedy from assassination yet assassinated Adolf Hitler, tipped off the government to an imminent attack on the World Trade Center, and provided us with the cure for AIDS and cancer. So why not travel back in time and have a party with some college students?
Among other advertising venues, the students propose writing the details for the meeting on acid-free paper and placing these adverts between the pages of obscure volumes in research libraries. I also like their idea of carving the latitude and longitude of MIT into clay tablets, which presumes a lot about the future (that time travel won’t be invented until long after MIT is an ancient ruin, and that latitude and longitude will nonetheless remain meaningful).
I find it most interesting that the students at an institute of technology apparently don’t trust technology to get out the word on their convention. They consider digital media, such as the Internet, to be an unreliable carrier of data into the future, thus these techno-mavens resort to acid-free paper and clay tablets. That’s kind of scary. What does that say about the possibilities of our societal heritage surviving us? Even the technophiles we have entrusted with our heritage apparently doubt the ability of digital media to preserve it.
The idea of a Time Traveller’s Convention is an interesting concept, and my intention is to promote it, not to mock it, but what does it mean if no one from the future shows up?
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It means they have far superior liquors in the 25th century.
Comment by Todd — Monday, 2 May 2005 @ 11:34 am
If you were a time traveler, why would you want to hold a convention in the past? And if the past, why 2005? There are more interesting years to hold a convention…like 1979, maybe.
Comment by Zesmerelda — Monday, 2 May 2005 @ 12:33 pm
An even trickier question is, if people of the future are so primitive you can comunicate with it only via acid-free paper, clay tablets, and word of mouth, how the hell are they going to build a time machine?
Comment by Matthew — Monday, 2 May 2005 @ 12:38 pm
Or if you were a time traveler, what’s to stop you from disguising yourself as one of these students? Perhaps there’s an interloper amongst them now, subtly giving them suggestions on how to leave their messages.
Comment by Mel B. — Tuesday, 3 May 2005 @ 3:54 pm
Sounds like you’ve got an idea for a short story there, Mel.
Comment by Matthew — Tuesday, 3 May 2005 @ 4:00 pm
Oh, I dunno, I bet that’s been written before, somehow. And I have a hard time taking time travel stories seriously any more. There’s a whole mediocre subgenre of that stuff, not to mention alternate realities. In order to do something like that, and to do it well…it takes more time than I’m willing to spend. Unless I get myself a time machine.
Comment by Mel B. — Thursday, 5 May 2005 @ 7:56 pm
This convention is an interesting concept. I wonder if there will be a follow up about how successful it is.
Comment by Brandi — Thursday, 5 May 2005 @ 8:05 pm
I suspect there will be an update. The site has already been updated once or twice. Check it out. Sounds like they are expecting quite a crowd. At the very least, the lecture by the Physics professor would be fascinating.
Comment by Matthew — Friday, 6 May 2005 @ 9:48 am
In the future these kinds of conventions will be legion. The time travellers will avoid them, because they know that they will be full of a lot of rip-offs, people either trying to sell them something, or to get their assistance in marketing something. I imagine a sufficient amount of time travel would leave people rather jaded.
Comment by John Stark — Friday, 6 May 2005 @ 3:51 pm
I do think time travellers would avoid such conventions, but I have a different reason. Presuming time travel is possible, travelling back in time and revealing this fact to us could potentially be do more damage than good. I’m not talking sci-fi stuff like rips in the “space time continuum” or anything fancy like that. Psychologically, knowing that time travel is possible could be devastating for a people because so much human endeavour is linked to time (or our lack of it) and especially our mortality. Take away time constraints, and theoretically, one might take away human initiative or worse, human restraint. There are no consequences if you believe you can always go back in time and fix your mistakes at a later date.
Comment by Matthew — Monday, 9 May 2005 @ 7:00 am