How to avoid the time wars
A playfully serious guide to surviving time travel technology in the coming era
It was 1979, I was a precocious 10 year-old, and I was in love with Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic and the Game of Logic; a purple-and-green paperback my parents had left lying around. These were actually two books bound as one. You could read one book at the front, and when you got stuck on a problem, you could read the other book at the back. By the time you came back to the book at the front, your earlier problem would be solved. Though I remember being irritated that the print wasn’t upside-down in the book at the back like the new Devo retrospective, what I loved was that the two books met at the middle, mimicking the way the future and past feel when they meet in the now. That feeling of “folded time” seemed to charm this book with a magical vibration, at least from my child-self’s viewpoint.
Aside from that magical book, I had many formative dreams that shaped my scientific career towards becoming a time travel researcher and technologist. Two I will share here, as they became especially relevant to my future. In one, I was 14, it was the 1980s, and I worried a lot about the threat of nuclear war.
I dreamed I was shown a room with a desk and a chair. A voiceover in the dream calmly told me, “Time is like a room. If you want to avoid bumping into the chair when walking across the room, you can do that — but you have to know that there is a chair and where that chair is in the room.”
After that, I was no longer afraid of nuclear war. The solution was easy. We already knew nuclear war was a risk, we just had to avoid the paths or timelines that would lead to it. Operationalizing the solution was hard, of course, but that’s beside the point.
That dream inspired me to take seriously Minkowski’s idea that time holds all physical events in perpetuity — all physical events in the past, present and future co-exist in a “block-like” universe with no change or real movement. Well, the dream used Minkowski’s idea plus it also gave the suggestion that we can navigate a block of spacetime using information about the future, and offered the idea that this kind of spacetime might also hold possibilities as well as actual realized events. These follow-on ideas are common amongst science fiction fans, mystics, and fans of many-worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics, but you will be hard pressed to find a physicist who believes that both Minkowski spacetime and the ability to avoid future unwanted possibilities can co-exist as physical realities, largely because the ideas seem to be in conflict.
Minkowsi spacetime seems to suggest that physical events are static and those events include the paths of unique physical observers. In other words, the idea consistent with Minkowski spacetime, as I understand it, is that if I will bump into the chair in the future there’s no amount of attempting not to bump into it that I can do. It’ll happen.
But the incompatibility of these ideas did not concern me as a child, and it doesn’t concern me now. I’m not a physicist, for one, so that frees me up a bit since I don’t worry about violating the current-day rules that theoretical physicists set up and then inevitably, in the future, find they must break. The other reason I don’t worry about this incompatibility is that as smart as theoretical physicists are, I have inside knowledge about their ways.
Throughout my childhood I watched my father — a very smart theoretical physicist — struggle to account for everyday observations. For example, the morning after my mother saw lightning strike inside our house in a ball shape, we talked about it at the breakfast table. I could see the cognitive dissonance on my father’s face as she described what she saw. We knew lightning had struck — we heard it, and the TV set wouldn’t turn off even after we unplugged it (much to the delight of my sister and I, who were restricted to 30 minutes of TV a day). So there was evidence of lightning and electrical weirdness, but at that time ball lightning was thought to be impossible or a hallucination.
My father couldn’t figure it out how ball lightning worked, so he resolved his cognitive dissonance by proclaiming that my mother didn’t actually see it. Like an attempt at retrocausally influencing the past, the theory simply didn’t allow the observation to have occurred in the first place.
If we fast-forward to current-day non-family-argumentation-based scholarship, ball lightning has recently been documented as being observed by “trained professionals” (not “just” mothers) and theories about how it works are being put forward among physicists (not “just” families at the breakfast table). If the history of science is any guide, we now ought to be looking forward to the alternative energy applications that will arise from taking ball lightning seriously.
Back to time travel and that dream. It left me with the clear intuitive feeling that as a species we could work to avoid a particularly bad possible event or move toward a particularly good possible event, but we needed some intelligence about what those possibilities are and where/when they are in spacetime. This intuition led me to spend much of my adult life trying to understand the substance and nature of time and how to beneficially navigate it using by experimenting with informational time travel (see section below).
Now the second dream. When I was 23 and struggling in graduate school with some family issues, I had this comforting, healing dream. In it, I was standing in the Illinois farmhouse where I grew up.
I saw all my younger past selves lined up in front of me, and all my older future selves were lined up behind me. Their hearts were lit with a powerful glowing light. When I invited them closer, we connected at the level of our hearts and they walked into me. I felt strong, whole, and fully myself, containing my own multitudes.
That dream, as well as my own waking mental connections with mental representations of my future and past selves, confirmed for me the idea that connecting with inner versions yourself over time is a healing, strengthening experience. Twenty-seven years later this dream came back, apparently to support me and my team at TILT in building and clinically testing a “time travel narrative” technology to support hope and resilience among under-resourced people, using one version of what I call mental time travel (see below).
Here I’ll reflect briefly below on what I’ve learned about time travel so far and what seems to be on the horizon for the time travel technologies space. To wrap things up, I’ll provide a brief discussion of why I think time wars are a real possibility and how best to avoid them.
If you’re wondering about scientific validity, it’s easiest just to assume that no one in what is currently a nascent time travel field will agree with any of this, and they may not even think that they study time travel — and maybe they’re right. They also might deny these examples consist of time travel effects in the first place. There is a heavy bias in academia against the idea that anyone could study time travel and also be taken seriously, so that’s worth knowing.
I think it’s best to see what you think of all this yourself.
A current-day map of time-travel technologies
I’m going to start this section with a disclaimer that has a risk of making things worse, but I think it is necessary. Without much solid data, I admit that I am fairly convinced that some of what I’ve learned about time travel and how to shepherd it for beneficial use is actually driven by a non-conscious map of the future. Said another way, when my future selves walked into me in that second dream, I have the sense that they did not remain silent observers. In some sense they seem to be always busy, going places in time and doing things as well. What does that even mean in a physical sense? Perhaps nothing. It’s just a feeling.
Because I report feelings doesn’t mean that I don’t require actual data and working technology to determine whether any a particular idea about the universe and its workings is correct. Like many scientists and inventors, dreams inspire me. But they don’t tell me what will work and what won’t, just like theory doesn’t tell me that. Empirical results from rigorous basic research and pilot tests of applications of that research are necessary to figure out what works. Assuming many paths to time travel are possible, the results from today’s experiments and beta tests can tell us where we are in the spacetime map of time travel technology development.
Now for a summary of that map.
First, a definition. In this essay, I use “time travel” to mean the experience of mental, informational and/or physical aspects of reality not “happening” in their usual order. So by that definition, a time traveler would be a person, animal, microorganism, piece of computer code, or physical device who (or that):
- experiences visiting a point in time that is not the commonly accepted present and is not a memory of the commonly accepted past,
- influences the commonly accepted past in a way that is detectable to careful external observers at some point in time, or
- receives information about the commonly accepted future that cannot be predicted based on data from the commonly accepted past.
Three types of time travel can fulfill these requirements: mental, informational, and physical time travel.
Mental time travel occurs in the mental realm, which does not mean it cannot be used to influence physical reality or receive information about physical realms. The key here is what is “traveling” (if anything really travels) is an aspect of mind. As beautifully described by philosopher Galen Strawson, we are just beginning to understand the relationship between mental things like intention, experience, and ideas and physical reality — so I will be conservative in the sense of not assuming any unproven constraints about the interactions between mental and physical realms.
As a first example of mental time travel, I’ll use the time travel narrative technology I mentioned earlier, which our team designed to increase hope and resilience among people with histories including experiences of abuse, trauma, incarceration, addiction, and/or poverty. The technology we piloted was simple —we gave each person their own smartphone-based “Time Machine” that they used to connect with their past and future selves. This connection took about 2 minutes per day. The idea was based on many studies showing that future orientation is a crucial key to positive career, education, and health outcomes and that a positive connection with a mental representation of your future self supports life satisfaction.
I won’t go into detail about the technology here; we will be beta-testing an enhanced version in Q3 of 2021 with the same group of individuals with whom we originally partnered. In that study we asked 97 participants to use their Time Machines for 24 days — they performed a self-assessment before and after this trial period to see whether anything had changed.¹ Below is a graph showing some of the results from the first 60 participants to complete the pilot (Figure 1; results from the remaining 37 will be analyzed in Q2 of 2021; new edit 11/10/21 — the peer-reviewed paper has been published here).
The group of people who had 2 or fewer adverse childhood experiences (filled bars in Figure 1; indexed via ACEs score) was more likely to show improvements from the first to last survey than those who had more types of difficult experiences growing up (hatched bars; 3 or more adverse events). But importantly there were no significant differences in improvement between the two groups. Further, the high-ACEs group (hatched bars) showed significantly reduced physical stress, significant increases in overall wellness, and significant increases in future thinking over course of their Time Machine use. This is a big deal, because it’s hard to get people with high ACEs scores to feel better using a scalable technology (see published peer-reviewed paper here).
The take-home message here is that pure mental time travel tools are the first to gain traction as we enter the time travel technology era, because they don’t strain current-day credulity as much as the other time travel technologies. If done well, not only can they improve our wellbeing, they will teach us all to think about time differently — an essential shift to support beneficial use of the technologies to come.
Another example of mental time travel is mentally retrieving information about a future event at a rate beyond that expected by chance. I and others have written and✎ EditSign✎ EditSign spoken many times about the decades of peer-reviewed evidence that support this human ability — known scientifically as precognition — so I won’t repeat that information here. What is important to point out here is that precognition is no longer just a scientific curiosity. Based on the U.S. military’s initial success at precognitive remote viewing, people all over the world are using precognition to try to predict financial markets. They’re not always performing better than stock analysts, but they’re learning — and so are their algorithms.
Depending on whether it is the mind or the information that is traveling (and of course depending on what “traveling in time” really is), precognition-based time travel technologies might more accurately be classified as a mix between mental time travel and informational time travel. Eric Wargo discusses a thesis related this possibility in his compelling work, Time Loops.
Informational time travel occurs in the informational realm, which does not necessarily exclude the mental or physical realms. The key is that what is “traveling” is information. If you’ve been watching the FX series Devs (spoiler alert!) you know about one form of informational time travel — the main characters influence the past while attempting to connect with it, which influences their future. This time-loopy problem is not a bug in the world of informational time travel, it’s a feature. In fact, influencing the past is the feature for past-directed informational time travel. For future-directed informational time travel, receiving that influence from the future is the feature — it’s the mirror image of influencing the past. The difference between what we call “retrieving information about the future” and “influencing the past” is really where we put ourselves relative to the action. It’s the same action —just observed from different points in time.
This observation is not novel, and it is solidified by experiments in quantum mechanics showing that causes and effects can be ambiguous. Physicists have been creating so-called “quantum switches,” in which each of two non-simultaneous events can influence the other one. If it sounds to you like this kind of discovery could support the possibility of applied informational time travel, I think you are right. The current day idea is that quantum switches can be used to speed up computations. But what about finding the solution to a computation before the computation is started? That would be real informational time travel.
For example, using photons to retrieve information about random future events seconds or minutes before they occur is an example of real informational time travel. That’s where Amelia comes in.
Amelia is the time machine in my closet (pictured at the top of the article). I named her after Amelia Earhart, whom I romanticize as being a pilot ahead of her time. My Amelia doesn’t use the same type of quantum switch used in the experiments referred to above, but she may be using some kind of natural and seemingly retro-causal or retro-correlating quantum switch that becomes available when you do a simple experiment. Don’t ask me how or why this switch becomes available during this experiment — I’m not a theorist. I have some ideas but they’re far from rigorous; more like intuitions.
But I can definitely tell you what happens when you do the unusual but simple experiments described in this Experiment.com video, because I’ve been doing them for the last two years. And if you want to hack your own time machine like Amelia to try this out yourself, I encourage you to read the details about the way she’s wired and her amazing capacities in this preprint, including the important acknowledgments of the people who helped the project.
Amelia was created from a student-quality single-photon optical system from TeachSpin. So for our purposes she’s essentially a long tube with a light bulb at one end and a photon detector at the other, hooked up to an Arduino board that allows me to use a computer to turn on and off the light source and the photon detector. The photon detector allows me to know the number of photons that are received at the end of the tube over a given period of time, and this information is sent to the computer. The number of photons received over a given period of time is the information that seems to be “time traveled” from the commonly accepted future in this experiment.
In each run of this experiment, the computer software tells Amelia to turn on the lamp and the photon detector, then keeps track of the number of photons detected until the software tells the lamp and photon detector to turn themselves off. The catch is that 30 seconds after Amelia is turned on, the software uses a random process to decide how long Amelia will stay on after that moment. For example, that decision could mean Amelia will be on for 0 more seconds, 220 more seconds, 330 more seconds or 660 more seconds. So far so good; nothing to see here.
The novel part of this experiment is the idea of comparing the numbers of photons received in the first 30 seconds after Amelia is turned on but before the random process decides how long to leave her on. The key finding is a consistent (5- to 6-sigma) effect showing that you can predict the decision of the random algorithm using the number of photons in this pre-decision time period (Figure 2). This is not trivial, though it could be.
Depending on what you’re predicting, it can be easy to predict the future from the past or present — if you turn on a light bulb and it’s bright at first, you might predict that it might be somewhat bright in the near future. But the results of this experiment are like saying if you turn on a lightbulb and it’s bright, that lightbulb will be on for a longer period of time in the future — even when you don’t have control of how long it’ll be on (and no one else does either).
What does this kind of effect allow? I believe it allows real informational time travel — that is, receiving information about future probabilities that are not determined by the information we already have. More on that in the pre-print and when Amelia reveals her full skillset.
My assertion is of course debatable, and the whole effect might be some sort of a correlation between past and future events called a post-selection phenomenon, which would not allow for sending a message “backwards” in time. I strongly believe this is not the case based on current experiments I am running, but I am also confident that many people won’t believe this for awhile. That’s why I’m talking about it openly here, so I can be openly wrong or right while the theory evolves. In this approach I am taking a cue from astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who speaks to the importance of sharing with the world scientific work in progress despite the results not being nailed down.
“After all, the anomalies we confront are not for scientists alone. They confront all humanity, and when there are breakthroughs, much like medical advances, it is to the benefit of everyone. We should show the world our work in progress, especially when it is full of uncertainties and buffeted by competing interpretations due to lack of conclusive evidence.”
— Avi Loeb, Extraterrestrial, Chapter 7
What if we assume that the data in Figure 2 actually do show evidence of informational time travel. How would that work? My intuition is that there is a “staging area” outside of spacetime, and photons that are not “currently” detected live in that staging area. So a photon that is not yet emitted in our commonly agreed upon present is available to exchange information with a photon that is currently being emitted in our commonly agreed upon present, because neither the “current photon” or the “future photon” has yet been detected. According to this idea, once a photon is detected, an instance of it is “locked in spacetime” making fewer available in the staging area to interact across time. This means that when the decision is to keep Amelia on for a longer duration, the greater number of available photons to interact prior to the decision, for some reason, causes more pre-decision detections.
It’s as if the bigger the pile of photons in this “staging area” at the very beginning of the experiment, the more that are available for detection during the experiment — suggesting that the staging area contains not only the photons emitted by the light source in the upcoming duration of time, but additional photons that are going to be stimulated by the photons emitted by the light source. I’m aware this doesn’t sound like it makes sense, and that’s because I don’t think it’s 100% accurate; I’m aware of the cases in which what I’ve explained isn’t upheld by the data. But I do think this is a flavor of what’s going on.
I’m not a physicist — my background is in cognitive neuroscience — so I think about these things rather like a trained musician trying to paint.
In any case, this “future photon” idea seems to also include an aspect of physical time travel, in that it’s possible that the photon itself is “traveling” along with the information. So let’s move onto learning more about that.
Physical time travel occurs in physical reality, which does not exclude concurrent mental or informational time travel. The key here is that what is traveling is physical matter or energy. It may be “traveling” outside of spacetime, but it is physical matter or energy in itself, and it “begins” and “ends” in spacetime. The most compelling possibility to me — brought to us by theorists pushing science forward by removing restrictions, no less — is the idea that one could send a microscopic piece of matter through a very small wormhole. Recently, collaborators from the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton unveiled calculations suggesting that perhaps humans could survive a trip through a wormhole. But for everyone who didn’t go through the wormhole, those wormhole-traveling people would be long gone (unless they came back through another reversed wormhole, presumably).
However, for current-day time travel technological purposes, it seems to me that given the miniaturizing revolution in applied physics, as exemplified by the international effort to build a particle accelerator on a computer chip, the next step is to turn these sci-fi world-building Redditors’ discussions about wormholes-on-a-chip into a reality. Using the type of physical time travel that would be afforded by a shoebox- or chip-sized wormhole, we could transport not only information encoded on a very small scale (another instantiation of informational time travel), but perhaps we could transport into the past a vaccine embedded in a very contagious virus infected in a single cell. The idea is that once the single cell is sent to the past, the virus containing the vaccine would burst out and vaccinate the first person who came in contact with it — then move on to vaccinate more people as they “caught” the virus.
The trick here is that unless the sender in the future gets very lucky, the recipient would have to be aware that a “message” in the form of a beneficial virus was coming. If they didn’t know it was coming, or if they didn’t know that it was beneficial, or if the single cell carrying the virus just ended up somewhere in space with no humans around because the future senders didn’t know where humans would be, the whole trip back in time would be for nothing.
The past recipients of a message or resource sent from the future via mental, informational, and/or physical time travel have to believe it was sent:
1. by those who have our best interests at heart, and
2. with knowledge of our current situation.
Otherwise, the message fails. That’s the critical juncture where the time wars come in — or not.
How to avoid the time wars
There’s a wonderful novel written by two great authors, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone — This is How You Lose the Time War. In their story (spoiler alert!) two time travelers are supposed to be rivals; they continually foil each others’ spacetime tweaks to try to create two different outcomes down the timelines. It’s an enlightening read. But I’m not interested in losing time wars, or winning them. In real life, I think it’s a great idea to avoid them entirely. We need to be thinking about time wars as chairs in a room that we can choose to avoid stumbling over, if we just admit the possibilities are there and so are ways to avoid these possibilities.
Without trusting future versions of ourselves, we will miss messages and even physical resources that could be otherwise beneficial, assuming we can influence our futures using those resources. If our future selves or our children or grandchildren do nail time travel down, we ought to already be receiving useful messages and perhaps physical things that could help us know or help them or us. But I think our willingness to trust our future selves so we can use those messages and resources well is limited by our current-day vision of what humanity can be and do.
This is not a theoretical problem — it is a real applied problem in the advancement of beneficial time travel technologies and the avoidance of possible time wars. The problem is that if we don’t trust the senders of these messages and resources, we end up in a time war with these senders rather than selecting and using the messages and resources that are there for our benefit.
I think this is a real applied problem for two reasons. First, all three kinds of time travel (mental, informational, and physical) are being investigated at Tier 1 research institutions throughout the U.S. and the world (examples: Washington University, ETH Zurich, University of British Columbia, Argonne National Lab, University of Connecticut, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics). Those are some of the public-facing research projects. Second, China has banned stories about time travel, which is just super intriguing.
That should be enough to convince a time travel technology skeptic that even if time travel never comes to fruition, the race to develop it (or to seem like we are developing it) is not-so-quietly underway among superpowers. But regardless of which superpower wins, the race to develop time travel in itself could cause us to behave as if we are in a time war — wrestling with our imagined or real futures — even if we actually cannot do that.
In this context, it’s worth pointing out explicitly that time travel is only useful if the ability to influence the past or retrieve information from the future allows you to make different decisions than you were planning to make — or different decisions as compared to another version of yourself in another timeline. So let’s assume that by knowing useful information or by receiving a resource from a possible future, you can try to make good decisions and take positive actions in the agreed-upon now or near term in an attempt to reach a beneficial goal for yourself or humanity. But even if this assumption is not true and there is no possibility of a real time war, perceived time wars can be equally destructive and therefore should be avoided as well.
Assuming there is a risk of time wars that we’d like to avoid, what characteristics would time-traveling information or resources have to have in order to be trusted in the agreed-upon present? As pointed to already, we’d have to be convinced that we knew by whom a message or resource was sent and also that it was sent with good enough knowledge of our current situation to be useful to us. Both are difficult in the current times.
First, we don’t trust our future selves to have our best interests at heart. We are too polarized in the current day to trust future scientists sending a message, even from tomorrow. Whatever system we put in place could be infiltrated by someone who purposefully sends the wrong message. In response we can take the step of limiting the ability to send information and/or resources over time to a select few highly trained “neutral” time operators, but even if we trust them, how can we trust that these few will not become infiltrated or replaced with those we don’t trust? Also, there is a move among intelligence professionals to make secret information and programs more open, in part because small secret batches of information controlled by a few individuals can end up creating feelings of distrust among those without access to the information and ironically can also hobble those who do have the information. In a more open world, we would need to find a way to trust any sender, even if we didn’t know their identity, who used a given time travel medium. In other words, we’d need to find a medium we trusted rather than a particular person, entity, or technology.
Second, even if we could convince ourselves that our future selves did have our best interests at heart, why would we trust that our future selves could actually be correct about the best path to take? An action may appear to be the best path at first blush, but we get things wrong all the time. That likely won’t change. What if some overzealous AI researchers ran their super-smart machine and it spat out a 99% likelihood that at the current day, if we just do X Y and Z we can avoid extinction? Then of course it turns out that when we do X Y and Z they lead to our extinction, just because that AI was wrong.
It seems unsolvable, this conundrum. Until you realize — it’s completely simple. We just have to learn to access unconditional love.
Here’s the proposal I’m offering in all seriousness. We avoid the time wars by accessing unconditional love on a global scale.
If you’ve gotten this far in this article, you’re definitely open to wild moonshot-like ideas. So you’re probably not going to balk at this one. I just want to explain how unconditional love helps us avoid the time wars, so you can see the value here. The idea is based on the profound experiences shared by the participants in the time travel narrative technology study (quantitative data in Figure 1). Here’s an example from one participant at the end of the 26-day study.
I have struggled for so many years with a lot of mistakes and a lot of bad choices. I haven’t been able to think about myself without a bit of hatred for who i used to be. Y’know what? I don’t have those feelings right now. I understand myself now I think. I am able to feel peace now and empathy, which is something I struggle with. Am I where I want to be yet with how I feel about myself? No. But am I on the right track? Yep. I am looking forward to meeting my future self one day I think she is ready for us now too.
— Design partner/participant in time travel technology study, Q4 2020
Many of the participants in that study came to understand that to develop the habit of hope, you have to learn to believe that your future self is capable of supporting your current-day efforts. That means you have to believe that messages from your future self are both beneficial and sent with wisdom and knowledge of your current state. In our study, we discovered in our follow-up surveys and focus groups that the only way people learned to do this was by unconditionally loving their current and past selves. They had to love who they are and who they were, then they could feel the love from their future selves. Yes, this was all in their mental-emotional space, but these feelings produced real life changes that most of them valued.
How does this apply to the more technical methods of time travel? What about precognition, time-traveling photons and wormholes? I think it works like this. The method doesn’t matter, while the medium is crucial. The medium for time travel transmissions that we can trust will have to be unconditional love. That is, regardless of how we receive a resource or message from the future, if it was sent with unconditional love and it is received with unconditional love, it can, will, and should be trusted. That doesn’t mean it will be correct, but it can be used without fear.
What do I mean by unconditional love? I use unconditional love here to indicate something like a physical force that is accessed using human emotions and motivations. I am talking about something we don’t understand well, to be sure. But in one study I led with a team of researchers trying to bring unconditional love to artificial intelligence, we defined it this way:
“Unconditional love is the heartfelt benevolent desire that everyone and everything — ourselves, others, and all that exists in the universe — reaches their greatest possible fulfillment, whatever that may prove to be. This love is freely given, with no consideration of merit, with no strings attached, with no expectation of return, and it is a love that motivates supportive action in the one who loves.”
— Paper presented at NeurIPS 2018✎ EditSign✎ EditSign
Maybe we can learn to use unconditional love as the medium for all messages that are meant to be beneficial, whether sent through time or not. We can learn what unconditional love feels like, so we cannot be tricked. With unconditional love, the sender in the future must fully accept and love themselves as well as those of us in the past so that the message or resource they are sending is mutually beneficial. With unconditional love, the receiver must also accept and love the future senders as well as themselves, hoping to use the information and message wisely.
This sounds ethereal and frankly impossible, but what if unconditional love becomes as well understood as, for instance, electricity is today? Wrapping a message in unconditional love as a protective device for human and planetary thriving would become a technical skill — like creating “stealth”-level or better detection-avoiding features on sophisticated aircraft.
This approach was highlighted in the science fiction movie Arrival, based on Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life (spoiler alert!) in which only the unconditionally loving linguist can unravel the informational time-travel message sent by alien creatures who unconditionally love humans. The idea is that unconditional love can be used almost like an energetic signature that validates a message or resource sent with whatever time travel means we eventually invent. According to this idea, using our minds, bodies, and emotions to discern whether unconditional love is present in a message or resource would become a valued tool that could help all of humanity use these gifts from the future.
In this way, discerning what it feels like when a message or resource is wrapped in unconditional love becomes a built-in self-correcting process; the key to avoiding time wars. Coincidentally, it’s probably the key to avoiding all other types of wars too, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves.
If this unconditional-love-as-time-travel-medium approach is correct, then the current-day problem becomes not how to solve time travel technically, but how to understand the mechanics of unconditional love so it can be generated at will and scaled worldwide within the context of what will eventually be scalable time travel.
There is a simpler way that unconditional love can work to avoid time wars, and that is this: if we see that humanity is moving toward unconditional love on a global scale, we are more likely to trust our own future selves. Because we see and love where we’re headed.
Understanding the mechanics and technicalities of unconditional love is a real solution to many problems, but it’s not currently a well-funded area of research. I’m hoping that as a team — me, you, our children and grandchildren as well as all sorts of wonderful past, present and future thinkers, tinkerers and funders² — we will be able to more freely draw on the gifts, sent with love, from our future selves.
FOOTNOTES
¹ Data not shown include statistics from the crossover placebo-controlled design revealing an order effect in the self-report data, which indicated to us that response bias was not responsible for these effects.
² I would like to thank everyone on all my wonderful project teams as well as my funders, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (currently the Pioneer team support for the Scalable Time Travel Narratives project), the Bial Foundation (currently grant 369/20 for “A trait-and-state analysis of precognitive remote viewing focusing on gender, emotions, and pregnancy status” as well as previous grants), and Quantum Gravity Research as well as the other funders of the experiment.com project (the time-traveling photon experiment).
