Time Experiment: Digital Time Travel

Scientia in Posterus. (Credit: Ben McGee)

In the interest of exploring some of the more intriguing implications of our ubiquitous Cyberverse, I’ve decided to attempt to use WordPress as something of a digital time machine.

You see, there’s a “Schedule” feature for blog posts that I realized should work as long as WordPress and the Internet are around, and through it, we may be able to send information across immense spans of time.  (Sure, this feature is intended to make it easy to spread out posts over the course of days or weeks, but why not send messages a year, a decade, a century, or a millennium out?)

-So, presuming the digital infrastructure is going to exist for a while, I’m going to send messages from the present into the future at regular intervals, and each message will be sent to an exponentially-more-distant temporal location.  (E.g., one month, 6 months, 1 year, 10 years, etc.)

Then, when I receive a message from my past self, I’ll post an honest reply as though I were having a real-time conversation with myself in the past.  The conversation might be light or very revealing, depending on what mood it is that’s prompted me to talk to the future – and I’ll do my best to answer in kind.  In this way, we’ll see if I can’t engage in a bizarre, superchronistic conversation across the very fabric of linear time.

(For the interested, I’ve created a new post category called, “Digital Time Travel,” which will chronicle the experiment.)

…And, the kicker here is that to my surprise, I’ve already started the experiment.  As it would turn out, I had a similar idea months ago and already sent a message into the future.  However, at the time I thought it’d be a one-time deal – a single digital time capsule.  Now, I think it’d be better-suited as a long-term experiment; An exchange that breaks the timestream.

Anyway, I thought I’d put the experiment out there so that when messages from the past start showing up on my blog in the present, everyone won’t assume I’ve finally gone all the way around the bend.

(Man, in the spirit of the experiment, I can’t wait to tell my past self what he involuntarily started when that original “time capsule” message finally arrives…)

Time flies, and I hope to invoke some turbulence.