First Time Traveller Convention

A group at the MIT is promoting the first (and, possibly, the last — you only need one) Time Traveller Convention. It will be next Friday, in the East Campus Courtyard (42°21’36.025″N, 71°05’16.332″W).

Even if you can’t attend, you can help by publicising it and making sure that people from the future, when time travel is invented, know about it so that they can attend.

Why do you need my help?

We need you to help PUBLICIZE the event so that future time travelers will know about the convention and attend. This web page is insufficient; in less than a year it will be taken down when I graduate, and futhermore, the World Wide Web is unlikely to remain in its present form permanently. We need volunteers to publish the details of the convention in enduring forms, so that the time travelers of future millennia will be aware of the convention. This convention can never be forgotten! We need publicity in MAJOR outlets, not just Internet news. Think New York Times, Washington Post, books, that sort of thing. If you have any strings, please pull them.

Great idea, I’d love to help! What should I do?

Write the details down on a piece of acid-free paper, and slip them into obscure books in academic libraries! Carve them into a clay tablet! If you write for a newspaper, insert a few details about the convention! Tell your friends, so that word of the convention will be preserved in our oral history! A note: Time travel is a hard problem, and it may not be invented until long after MIT has faded into oblivion. Thus, we ask that you include the latitude/longitude information when you publicize the convention.

You can also make an absolute commitment to publicize the convention afterwards. In that case, bring a time capsule or whatever it may be to the party, and then bury it afterwards.

Closer to home, and with apparent official support, the City of Perth has appointed Forrest Place (31°57’7″S, 115°51’32″E) at noon (GMT+8) on March 31st, 2005 as Destination Day, a reunion place (and time) for all future time travellers. It is a little disheartening, though, that the day has passed with no visible tourists from the future.

1 comment so far ↓

#1 Thomas Williams on 05.09.05 at 2:24 pm

Hi Wilson – as I was reading your post I thought that this convention would make a great basis for a sci-fi story: at first, people believe that if no-one shows up, there’s no such thing time travel, but then we discover that no time travellers attended because (a) the world was plunged into war soon after and all records were lost of the convention, or (b) this culture was not yet ready for the knowledge of time travel, or (c) time travellers *did* attend, in an alternate reality. Perhaps a Michael J. Fox tie-in would work 😉

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