How Not To Blog ?

The Time Traveler's Convention is hoping "people" from the time travel-enabled "future" show up and say hello.

Just as the organizers believe "...the ancient Greeks would have thought computers were impossible..." we, too, approach alien concepts with the same frame of mind that causes the alien to be so divorced from our experience.

Most Ancient Greeks, then, would not have been able to fathom the concept of computers just as most modern humans would not be able to fathom time travel. I have a hard enough time explaining what the internet is to my own father. Something so pervasive, and his mental architecture still has not changed to embrace that and related concepts (IP, digital networks, etc).

That might be funny considering this is 2005, but do you think humans would have readily grasped the concept of computers, or even the internet, 50 years ago? Some would have, but most would not be able to. Try going into a remote village today and explaining what the internet is. You'd get blank stares, even if you spoke their language.

If the convention organizers are really serious about being able to see or communicate with "visitors from the future", then how about opening up multiple receptive channels?

I've always thought that one day an Internet protocol will be invented that allows communication with other periods of time (provided that time is simultaneous). Publicize the phone number, too, as you can't rule out a phone call. (A phone call from the future may make a phone ring constantly from the moment the number is activated until the time you pick it up.) And why wouldn't a time traveler be able to travel via dreams?

Our concept of time travel via machine is mechanical. I'm sure there are people now trying to "create" a time "machine", as if it were a new type of beverage that is just waiting to be discovered. If only they had the correct 'ingredients', they think.

Time is not a science. It is an experience. Physics, for example, could never allow someone to experience what it's like to play basketball. Science, or quantum mechanics, would probably never be able to 'create' a time machine until it places at its foundation the concept of time as an intimate personal experience. Thereafter, no machines are necessary.

Time is first and foremost experienced personally, in our minds. It could be said that one has a sense of time. Quantum physics show that time does not work independently of our perception of it. It is highly relative and exists only when we perceive it.

So, how does one travel through time? One doesn't.

One re-experiences time. You do this all the time (fun intended) when you slow your experience of time down or speed it up. Sometimes we may smell something or hear something from our 'past' as if it were our present, for example. (To our minds, there is no difference. It reacts the same, because it is the same.) It is not time that is changing, it is you that changes. More specifically, your thoughts and emotions that change.

All of us already have the facilities by which to "time travel". We just haven't yet learned how to consciously alter our sense of time. We have learned how to control our breathing, though we don't need full awareness of the process, but we haven't learned how to control our experience of time, though we carry our consciousness "forward" through it at every new moment.

The convention would be much better off, I think, creating a blog and asking each interested party to consciously alter their sense of time and then relay their experiences. To start.

If their statement, "we of the present (2005) don't have time travel", were true they would not be able to hold the convention. They would be stuck in time.

Using the internet would not be very appealing to Archimedes. We, now, would not be excited by the idea of using our minds to time travel more than we already (subconsciously) do.

So many of us, looking for an excuse to get together and be social.