Time travel is bad for your health

That’s my theory, anyway. I’m guessing that all future attempts to travel back and forth through time will turn out to have dire side effects. Otherwise folks from the future would be as common as reality TV show contestants.

The adverse side effect problem might also explain why no time travelers showed up at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Time Traveler Convention last week. But you can’t say the MIT conventioneers didn’t give it their best effort when it came to publicizing the event.

Imagining that all the kinks of time travel might not be worked out for perhaps thousands of years, they proposed ways to publish convention details in “enduring forms.” In other words, they weren’t just trying to get a good turnout – they wanted to make time travelers from the far off future aware of their convention in hopes that so many of them might show up it would become a “Woodstock-like event that defines humanity forever.”

I wonder if they planned ahead to provide parking for 500,000 time machines.

So how do you send an invitation to someone many centuries in the future? Not with a web site. Sooner or later the Internet will be an outmoded curiosity. The convention planners’ suggestions: “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 anyone actually tried these methods, they didn’t seem to work. But here’s a thought: Maybe someone carved a clay tablet, but when the time travelers didn’t show up, destroyed the tablet after the convention because it obviously hadn’t gotten the message through, but maybe the reason it didn’t get through was because the tablet was destroyed, so if the tablet hadn’t been destroyed

I’m getting dizzy just thinking about it. A perfect example of how time travel can create health problems.

Source:
“We Need Your Help For the Time Traveler Convention” Mas sachusetts Institute of Technology, 5/7/05, web.mit.edu