Chronillogical

On a lark, and since it seemed sort of rel­e­vant, I decided to google “time travel”. The stuff you’d expect comes up at the top: Wikipedia, NOVA Online, How Stuff Works, etc. You know—the boring stuff. Worm­holes. Cosmic strings. Tipler Cylin­ders. Alcu­bierre Drives. All that science-​based malarkey that’s “theoretically possible” and “kinda makes sense” and “could fea­si­bly happen under some rea­son­ably self-​consistent and work­able model of the universe”.

Who needs it? says I. Where’s my Time Cube at?

Well, I’m happy to say that once we get past these ini­tial search results, the inter­net doesn’t dis­ap­point. Here’s the Google’s fourth hit, a page simply titled “Time Travel”. It starts innocu­ously enough, with worm­holes, quan­tum entan­gle­ment, and all that jazz. In fact, I believe they just copied and pasted the Wikipedia arti­cle for all this sci­ence gob­bledy­gook. But even­tu­ally it pro­gresses into what appears to be wholly orig­i­nal material.

Hon­estly, you don’t even need to read it. You can divine the entire con­tent by merely skim­ming the images. Here’s the gen­eral progression:

1)

Sci­ence? Bor­rrrrrrrrring.

2)

A-ha! Now we’re get­ting somewhere…

3)

Jack­pot!

4)

And why not throw in one of these at the end for good mea­sure?

So you get the idea. Moving on.

Google also yields the Time Travel Insti­tute as a fairly early result when I search “time travel”. I like the straight­for­ward­ness of that name. It is an insti­tute. They are inter­ested in time travel. The equa­tion is simple, each term trans­par­ently con­tribut­ing to a single, gras­pable sum. (Inci­den­tally, I’m reminded of the Dino Insti­tute at Disney World, a center that is also known for its muck­ing about in time.)

Unfor­tu­nately, it appears that some­thing has gone ter­ri­bly wrong at the TTI: their site hasn’t been updated since circa 2000. Did the Y2K bug screw around with their equip­ment? Did some­thing explode? (We can empathize.) Maybe they were acci­den­tally thrown into some kind of unfath­omable time loop and now they have to relive some arbi­trary and mun­dane instant ad infini­tum. (You know, like in Ground­hog Day.) That would be ter­ri­ble! Oh no! Oh no!

Or maybe not.

You know, I don’t really know why I’m being snarky about the TTI—it’s pretty clear that they don’t (didn’t?) take them­selves seri­ously as some kind of actual research insti­tu­tion. It’s just one of an end­less march of dusty old inter­net hubs. Their portal page insists upon an Inter­net from the late 90s; link after link directs to long-​defunct Tripod and Geoc­i­ties pages, or 404 errors, or those depress­ing ad pages that creep like kudzu across domains whose owners haven’t both­ered to renew. But the TTI is one of those sites that per­sists in spite of having been made obso­lete by the Googles and Wikipedias of the world. Such sites per­sist either out of sheer obsti­nacy, or because they con­tain some living core, an eso­teric com­mu­nity tucked away in a forum some­where. The TTI appears to fall into the latter cat­e­gory, having slowly decayed into a kind of tech­no­log­i­cal verdi­gris that pro­tects its ancient bronze forum. I can respect that.

Anyway, while we’re on the sub­ject of time travel, does anyone want to chip in with me on this doozy of a deal?