Sorry if this question is a bit stupid, I was thinking about it last night after a few drinks and I figured if I was going to find an answer anywhere it’d be here.
Let’s pretend I have a time machine that allows me to travel backwards in time. Only backwards, no moving forwards.
Now I plan to sacrifice my future by travelling backwards in time and collecting historical information to further the study of history, science, etc. I don’t plan to change the past or the future, only document the events as they happened.
My problem is how do I get my information back to the present day. I figure for near history I can leave information in safe deposit boxes or with lawyers for my associates to pick up in the present day.
However once I get further back in time there will be nothing similar to use. So how do I preserve my texts on meetings with Roman Emperors etc so that they can be accessed by my associates in the present. I figure that anything organic is probably going to decay, and modern digital storage doesn’t age that well (plus I’d have to find some way of hiding and powering whatever equipment I had).
Ideally I’m looking for a method that’s foolproof (this is a one shot deal, and I’m not coming back) and isn’t going to be discovered by anyone apart from my present day associates (I don’t want in-between historians stuffing up the future by reading my ramblings).
Ah, but where would that place be and could I be sure that the fact that some madman built a vault there wouldn’t attract attention in the intervening years.
And what’s the best medium to record my thoughts – carving ? painting ? I thought some sort of plastic might survive well, but do I want to risk introducing plastic to the Egyptians and would it survive.
I figure your idea is the way to go, but I’m not convinced of the specifics.
You’d be amazed how well paper stores in a dry place. No carving needed at all. That or parchment will cover you for hundreds (if not thousands) of years.
Rock carvings survive pretty well, when undisturbed.
To get them safely to today, I would first research prehistorical caves (with paintings and/or other artifacts) that were only recently found, and bury the tablets there. Of course, you have to be careful placing them there, so that nobody sees you and the cave gets discovered prematurely.
It’s really easy. Find the place where all your data already is. Knowing yourself, you should be able to guess where that is.
Go there with a friend or three, who will pick the stuff up. You may even be intrigued to read what you wrote (will have written?)
Then go back in time to do the writing - you’ll have to do it to keep everything consistent.
Cheers all for the answers, seems that a simple solution would do it after all.
For the people suggesting laptop/PC solutions would the data on a hard drive/memory card survive hundreds or thousands of years. I would have thought that both the mechanism would be screwed and the magnetic data would have decayed. I’m not an expert and could be wrong.
Oooo, I’d not seen that one before. I recall some similar sounding manuscript that had been dismissed as a hoax.
Plus doing it that way you have the added advantage of getting lots of people speculating on what the hell it all means until time catches up with your start point and then your associates get to laugh at everyone as they explain it.
That depends on what you mean by that. From a certain perspective your travel could be required to create the version of history that was in place when you left. Unless you require true free will, everything can fit together nicely in a single version.
This is weird. I was just about to ask the same question, except I wanted to go back 30,000 years or more.
My idea was to bring lots of ziploc bags, trashbags, and all kinds to durable (steel, etc.) boxes. I would just have to figure out a way to get people to dig.
I thought of this after reading Isaac Asimov’s The Ugly Little Boy.
Well I guess simply by being there I might affect things, but as kellner already said perhaps I’ve always been there at these events and I’m merely fulfilling that prophecy. But then that’s time travel for you …
I had to look up the plot for that, I really need to read more Asimov.
The problem I had with the plastics is that I’m fairly sure they don’t last forever. Steel might be a way to go. If you’re going that far back though you might have problems with things (like bits of land) moving around. Working out where a spot is now and then finding where that spot was then (when you are back then) might not be that trival.
I would recommend you switch vaults periodically as well, possibly leaving redundant copies of your information. Continuing to visit the same vault would propagate your mysterious visits throughout history, as:
2000: you leave for the past.
1700: you establish mysterious vault for your first time. However, it is the last time, historically speaking, that you are seen there. If you never go backward in time, then it is also the only time that you visit it and, as far as any native 1700ers know, you’re the only mysterious thing to ever happen there.
1500: you visit the mysterious vault for your second time, which history now remembers as the first time you were seen there. The act of doing so means that the 1700ers will now remember in their historical records that someone was here long ago, which changes the conditions of your your-past-their-future 1700 visit.
1300: you visit the mysterious vault for your third time, which history now calls the first time, which changes the conditions of your 1500 visit, and so on. The farther back in time you continue to use the same location, the more you are impressing upon the locals that it is a location worthy of investigation.
Therefore you must find a location suitably accessible to your time but devoid of nosy natives in their times, yet somehow you have to be able to get to the vault. I suggest that in addition to a time machine you take a pocket teleporter so you can visit a truly undiscovered, inaccessible, unobserved location—maybe the moon, or a miles-deep cavern.
You need to build a complex computerised storage device on the moon, and send it back in time too, so that when you get to the past all you need is a very small device like a palmtop that you can key info into and beam it up to the moonbase at night. Or it could be an orbiting platform except it might crash to earth eventually… anyway, anything in orbit isn’t going to get noticed by the intervening civilisations.
