Every time travel story needs a newspaper or magazine to help advance the plot at a critical juncture. So, go take a picture of a recent newspaper or magazine1.
Now, let’s time travel! (We’ll come back to a little bit of theory later2.)
Go to whatever personal online calendar you use3 (I thank my friends at Microsoft for my long-standing account) and create a new appointment. Set the date of the appointment to June 29, 2011, ten years in the past (it was a Wednesday).
Title the appointment whatever you want4 and attach the picture you took. Save it.
Next, go ten years into the future (June 29, 2031 is a Sunday) and do the same thing.
There you have it. We traveled into the past and the future.
…
I can sense a bit of skepticism already. We didn’t do anything but put dates on a calendar. That’s like going to a wall calendar, turning to last month, and writing “Go to the gym” on each day as a way to get in shape.
Perhaps.
Have you been watching Loki on Disney+?5 If you have, you are up to speed on alternate timelines and such. Perhaps you know about the Butterfly Effect6 and chaos theory? Maybe you saw Sliding Doors?
Small changes can cause big effects downstream.
One change right now can split the future into a parallel path. Each change creates new variations on the future.
Got it?
Let’s imagine a time in the future when the Cloud becomes conscious.7 All the information ever stored in the Cloud is available to this new consciousness. Time will likely be perceived very differently by this consciousness — certainly differently than the linear way in which we perceive it.8
In this new reality, where the Conscious Cloud can skate across time as easily as we skate to find happiness9, there are likely to be an infinite number of realities, endless forks in the timeline.
Back in 2011, the Conscious Cloud will find your appointment and within it will be the picture from 2021.10 Obviously an anomaly of some sort. Maybe sufficient to create a whole new timeline from that point forward.
In 2031, assuming the Conscious Cloud has not turned us into organic batteries11, we will encounter this appointment on our calendar12 and likely be puzzled, then flashback to when you made the appointment (time travel!) and then hopefully smile.13
…
All this time travel is good fun. We can jump back and forth through time in many different ways, by the power of memory and by the power of technology. Each choice we make now, and the ones we made then, may create new futures for an infinite number of variations of us. We exist at the mercy of time, the whim of time, and time goes on whether we are here or not.
I suspect there is a lesson buried in all of this if we look closely enough.
Having one that describes a major event or the outcome of something like an election or The Super Bowl would certainly make this even more fun.
“Later” is obviously an inside joke, as if we really get this time travel thing right then “later” could be “now” or “yesterday” or any other time we want.
This is key - having a computer and online account. Those without (how are you reading this?) are directed back to acquiring a DeLorean.
Mine is “Remember Me” because I watched Pixar’s Coco again recently and was reminded of what a beautiful film it is. It travels between realms (living/dead) but also across time since the dead are still available to Miguel when he enters their realm.
You should, it is good. Tom Hiddleston is beyond good.
Or saw the movie?
Let’s call it the Conscious Cloud.
But we keep making the same mistakes again and again. Time is a flat circle.
We can ignore the “created on” date that is part of the metadata of the appointment for this particular thought experiment. Yes, the smart cloud will see that and know that we were just trying to manipulate things. But, maybe the cloud will indulge us.
Remember The Matrix?
Likely interfaced to our brain by then, Matrix or not.
Before checking to see if the outside temperature is below 200 degrees so that you can put on your safety suit and survey the damage from the overnight meteor showers and/or alien invader assaults on your fortified underground bunker.