Financial & Travel Musings

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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.

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Everyone and their dog tends to look for aliens from outer space but the number of people looking for time travellers is very much smaller. There isn’t really a good reason for that on the whole. After all, absolute proof that time travel was possible would cause just as great a stir on earth as would absolute proof that aliens were out there.

It would be impossible to find a time traveller though, wouldn’t it?

It certainly would if they were really careful or even if they were careless but took the trouble to remove traces of their visits after the event. Would either situation apply though? Somehow I just can’t see it applying on all of their trips nor for that matter on any of them so long as their target time period was well before the invention of the time machine itself. After all, why bother trying to cover your tracks when anyone who knew about you would be classed as a nutcase?

If we take it as read that they wouldn’t bother to cover their tracks to any great extent then how about trying to find them? Where, or rather when, would you look?

I suspect that we can also take it for granted that they’d be visiting ever famous event over the range of their time machine but realistically we’d never know for sure that they’d been to any time much before the 1900s because the documentary evidence that we would need to detect them simply isn’t around. They might well need to be more careful any time from about 10 years ago when CCTV became commonplace too and, of course, the requirements for providing ID might make extended stays in the past more difficult too.

However, there is one event that would fit our requirements ideally and probably fit theirs too.

That’s the Titanic disaster.

Why? Well, it’s very well documented so that we have the potential of discovering them and they would like well documented events too so that they’d know where they could go and, in this case, who they needed to be. The plus point for us is that if we assume that their time machine goes back with them and they need it to return home, then they have to be one of the survivors.

So, in principle, all we need to do is to check through the records of those survivors to find someone who a) doesn’t have a past more than a few days prior to them getting on the ship and b) disappeared after they returned to England (or Ireland). That task is easier than you might think as the Encyclopedia Titanicia has biographies of all of the survivors and, of course, you can ignore the first class passengers (too famous) and those who were part of families which narrows down the field somewhat.

So what’s stopping you?

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