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NOW AND THEN
Time travelers gather at MIT
BY MIKE MILIARD

Not long ago, MIT grad student Amal Dorai was reading the Web comic Cat and Girl. He noticed one of the characters uttering something cryptic and profound: "Technically you would only need one time traveler convention."

Of course! Visitors from the future, after all, would simply get together at a given place and time; if the party were enough fun, they could return to that specific point on the space-time continuum again and again. This gave Dorai a thought: "If you only need one, why not do it here, and why not do it now?" So on Saturday night, the MIT campus is the place to be — whether you’re from now or later.

At first, the idea was just to have a mellow get-together: a physics professor or two speaking about the tricky technical aspects of temporal traversal, a few bands, some chips and salsa. But interest has grown. And, with the small but very real possibility that visitors from millennia hence might crash the party, the bash has become a bigger deal. "I might even get a DeLorean!" says Dorai (referring to the vehicle Marty McFly drives to 1955 and home again in Back to the Future). "I’m gonna take the specs down to the nerd lab down at MIT and see if they can’t build me a flux capacitor."

Of course, as with any party, publicizing the thing is key. And since time travel may not be invented for thousands of years, Dorai is counting on media that’ll stick around for a while, like newspapers and radio interviews — "Radio signals last infinitely long; they get broadcast out into space and just keep traveling," he reminds us — to get the word out to folks from the by-and-by. "Those kind of longer-term media are going to preserve the memory of this forever, so time travelers from the future, if they exist, will find out about this and come back and party with us," he says.

Dorai is also asking volunteers to write details about the convention on pieces of acid-free paper and secret them between the pages of seldom-read library books. (And, if they’re able, to carve them into clay tablets.) Remember, though, that since "time travel may not be invented until long after MIT has faded into oblivion," you should include the campus’s latitude and longitude coordinates (42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W) so visitors from the future can find the punch bowl.

It might surprise you that Dorai is actually a skeptic. "Do I think time travel is possible? No. But I also think that I don’t know whether time travel is possible," he says. "The best way to find out is either to build a time machine, which some people are doing but not succeeding [at], or to try to send out a message to the future saying, ‘Hey, if you have invented one, come back and show it to us.’ I don’t have any delusions that we’re guaranteed a time traveler or anything. But it’s a pretty low-risk way of trying."

Low risk, high reward. Chances are slim, of course, but what if some dude from the future does show up, ready to party down? It would be a pretty significant moment for humankind. So be there or be square, says Dorai. "If you were told that one of the biggest events in human history might happen on May 7, that there was a one-in-a-billion chance that the defining moment of humanity was happening this Saturday, would you come?"

The Time Traveler Convention takes place this Saturday, May 7 at 8 p.m. on the East Campus Courtyard at MIT. For more information, visit web.mit.edu/adorai/timetraveler.


Issue Date: May 6 - 12, 2005
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