Time Travelers' Convention

usermilk writes "Some folks at MIT are holding a time-travelers' convention. The idea is to make it so famous and so widely-known that even thousands of years in the future, people will still know exactly when and where this time-traveler convention went down, and will all come travel to it at some point in their illustrious time-traveling careers. For those interested in attending, it's on May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC) in the East Campus Courtyard at MIT. 42:21:36.025N, 71:05:16.332W (42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees)."

Ahh...

[metlin]

But will John Titor be invited?

I tried to make it

[Anonymous Coward]

But I couldn't figure out where those coordinates posted. Would you mind pointing out where you are at the moment in your galactic and solar orbits relative to a few quasars, please?

Hm

[inKubus]

They should plan out all the conferences in advance for the next 10,000 years, like the freemasons did in 5000 b.c.

gets the imagination going

[Anonymous Coward]

youve gotta love those mit guys and their uncanny study avoidance manouevres

I was there

[Winlin]

It was great.

RSVP?

[Dachannien]

For those interested in attending, it's on May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT

Oh, I'm sure I'll get around to it one of these days.

so naturally

[Edmund Blackadder]

The place will be full of dozens of idiots dressed in spandex and insisting thet they come from the future.

Re:Ahh...

[Zugok]

he's already been and gone.

Fuck

[erikharrison]

I'm a time traveller. Unfortunately, you can't tell, because I travel through time with the help of an angel and an invisible lech, and the process causing me to appear identical to someone in the time I'm travelling to.

Hold on, I have to go get this Erik kid married to his one true love.

Oh boy.

It could be a ruse...

[Anonymous Coward]

It could be a ruse... the organizers may be stranded time travellers trying to send a message to the future to get rescued now. It may not be a genuine convention, but rather a lifeboat technique for the Insiders.

Re:The Convention

[Mr. Bad Example]

> [...]it will have been a blast!

I believe you mean willan on-be a blast.

I went there next year.

[Unknown Poltroon]

Its gonna be boring. But the after party they're planning last year kicked ass.

Re:Why did they set the date in the future?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just include a note in the advertsing, asking someone to drop by and give you a lift there.

marketing idea

[British]

You could have a Time Traveler supply booth running there:

- Legit costumes for whatever era. WW2 uniform, peasant outfit, etc
- Monetary exchange: buy/sell money from different eras, at varying rates. You will always need money(depending on the time)
- Fake IDs. Going back 20 years? get an ID 20 years prior to your birthday
- Fake license plates. Travelling in an old car back to an earlier time? Get "legit" license plates that are either from the same car, or just some convincing out-of-state plates.

WARNING: Management is not responsible to disruptions in history.

The sales possibilities are endless.

Re:so naturally

[grungebox]

The place will be full of dozens of idiots dressed in spandex and insisting thet they come from the future.

Maybe spandex is all the rage in 3166.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Sweet!

[morcheeba]

dude. you totally missed the point!

Let me hop in my delorean and I'll be there in 5 minutes ago.

Re:so theoretically

[johnjay]

"So if there is no one present from the future theoretically we never figure out how to transend time." Or the party on May 7th becomes famous throughout time as one of the most suck-ass parties in all history. So, time travelers decide to skip it.

Re:so naturally

[agm]

It is. Or is that "was". I mean it will be,

Re:so naturally

[aarku]

Well, to prove you're from the mind boggling far off future, a retail box of Duke Nukem Forever will be required to be presented at the door.

Not Bloody Likely

[the eric conspiracy]

Pshaw... everybody knows that nobody goes to these things because they are too crowded.

Re:zerg

[inKubus]

As long as you're travelling in time, you are in hyperspace therefore you can come out anywhere. Although you are right, you would want to calculate where you are going or you might end up in the _middle_ of the earth, which might be a little more unpleasant.

Thankfully, with Windows 64-bit edition coming out, we have adaquate memory addressing capabilties to model all of these possibilities.

Re:Hmmm....

[Basehart]

"You couldn't go back in time and shoot Hilter"

Don't you mean Mr Hilter?

Re:I was there

[Anonymous Coward]

If you remember May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC) in the East Campus Courtyard at MIT. 42:21:36.025N, 71:05:16.332W (42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees), you weren't there.

Re:Why this ain't gonna fly

[Datamonstar]

Dude, it's not like you don't have time.

Re:Hmmm....

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Actually Time Travel by itself is impossible.

But what you could do is slip into an alternate universe which is exactly like ours, only 60 years behind. Once there you could kill Hitler and alter History... but only in THAT copy of the Universe.

While useless to alter history, I do find the technique works well for obtaining quality building materials, and collectables for my Ebay super-store.

Re:so naturally

[ErikTheRed]

Well, to prove you're from the mind boggling far off future, a retail box of Duke Nukem Forever will be required to be presented at the door.

Dude, they probably won't be coming from that far in the future.

Re:Hmmm....

[rar]

You couldn't go back in time and shoot Hilter before he got into power for the very simple reason that it didn't happen.

No, no, no; you got it all wrong. It was just exactly because someone went back and shot that Hilter you speak of; that the much worse dictator Hitler we do remember could come to power. :)

Re:Ahh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Truth is I never cared if you "buy it", as you are all so fond of saying.

None of you would be laughing if I wouldn't have alerted the people who needed to know about the Y2K bug. Trust me.

Nothing changed though, you are all still gluttonous egomanianics. Sometimes I wonder if I should have bothered.

Oh well, Pamela is still alive anyway. That should count for something.

Re:Why did they set the date in the future?

[Fjornir]

Dooom! You've uncovered the secret of Flash Mobbing! Now all of us time travelers will need to go back to using raves as our cover...

Queue Red Dwarf...

[Chuck Chunder]

Lister: Hey, it hasn't happened, has it? It has "will have going to have happened" happened, but it hasn't actually "happened" happened yet, actually.
Rimmer: Poppycock! It will be happened; it shall be going to be happening; it will be was an event that could will have been taken place in the future. Simple as that. Your bucket's been kicked, baby.

Re:Hmmm....

[l810c]

8. You may be your own great great grandparent.

So let me get this straight. You have never met your great great grandma, but the pictures of her in her younger years show that she was one hot babe. You decide to go back in time and do her?

I already went.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't go. It was boring so a bunch of us went to ancient Babylonia for the invention of beer.

Re:so naturally

[sjbcfh]

The place will be full of dozens of idiots dressed in spandex and insisting thet they come from the future.

Oh, you mean like a Slashdot meetup?

Re:Paradoxes

[jdhutchins]

If no time travellers turn up on May 7th, will everyone stop promoting it after the date?

No, it will be continually duped on slashdot until a time machine is invented. That way no one will ever forget about it, and the editors have an excuse for the dupe. MIT probably planned it this way becuase they knew slashdot would carry it for the next 50,000 years.

If you came from the future..

[Anonymous Coward]

..why didn't you get first post?

Re:Sweet!

[Rei]

Reminds me a bit of what my friends and I did back in high school/college (we were in a program called TAMS in which, for your last two years of high school, you went to college and stayed in a dorm). A few student groups were famous for spamming our mailboxes with notices for the meetings and posting their signs everywhere, and it was quite annoying.

So, as a countermeasure, we formed a "Time Travellers Club". We put out notices in everyone's boxes, first notifying people of an upcoming meeting a week prior, and the second time thanking everyone for such a large turnout at our meeting a week later. We got permission to post our own sign - a big hanging one that ha our group name, and its motto ("I'll See You Yesterday!").

Later, we found the notices on at least one RA's and one student's door - the student had apparently actually tried to go to the meeting that we thanked people for the turnout at, because they had it next to a note that said "I went, and it sucked!"

Re:Why did they set the date in the future?

[k-0s]

Been there done that...it wasn't that good. John Titor got drunk and they had to call the campus police. He began yelling about having had sexual relations with the police officers grandmothers and granddaughters. They tazered him and after that the party kind of broke up. Now the 2033 Convention, now *THAT* was a party.

Re:The Convention

[Nehle]

Though this is hardly the time to be conjugating verbs in the past-impossible-future-never-tense.

References

[Yolegoman]

But what you could do is slip into an alternate universe which is exactly like ours, only 60 years behind. Once there you could kill Hitler and alter History... but only in THAT copy of the Universe.

Where are referenced Universe instances when you need them?

Re:Why this ain't gonna fly

[IdleTime]

Well, I went back about 2000 years with a couple of pound of good hydroponically grown weed and started a groovy movement. It was back in the area that is called Israel today.

I used this funny hispanic name, Jesus...

Re:Fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent's statement is absolutely true. Although it is a little known fact to acheive this rate of time travel one merely has to perform the following procedure. 1. Sit down on the floor cross-legged. 2. Repeat the following phrase, "O wah tena siam" 3. Repeat step 2 increasing speed each time until you have reached your destination.

Temporal Cold War

[teslar]

This is where it started. A couple of Sullibans attended (they really are party animals once you get to know them), but unfortunatley one present-time Enterprise fan thought they were just other geeks in a costume and poured his beer over their heads.

That kinda sparked it, really. We told Bermann that showing history programmes before the events actually happened was really not a good idea, especially given how his documentaries polarise against de Sulliban but that's Rick for you. When he was a kid, he showed the moon landing to Jules Verne, who was rather impressed.

But no worries about the Temporal Cold War. Admiral Daniels will be dispatching Archer to stop the party from happening, thus preventing the onset of the war. Some of you present-timers might actually look forward to this, as it will result in the purging of all Temporal Cold War references from the documentaries Bermann has slipped into your time.

Shame about the party though. It really was a good laugh. Well... would have been.

Re:Why this ain't gonna fly

[B3ryllium]

So you'd look like Prince Charles?

Re:gets the imagination going

[ChairmanMeow]

So the lesson in all this is that you should never study.

Re:TT is possible

[LinuxRulz]

Watever everyone says, time travel is possible. The thing is you can only travel to the future and it is incredibly slow...

Re:so theoretically

[dj245]

Or the party on May 7th becomes famous throughout time as one of the most suck-ass parties in all history.

As someone who frequents these types of parties I can tell you they never go bad. Whats so bad about a bunch of engineers having huge drunken bonanza?

"Dude, why is your volumetric spirit flow rate decreasing exponentially as a function of time while your volumetric elimination flow rate increasing as a logarithmic function of time?"

Yeah, those types of parties.

Re:Hmmm....

[LiENUS]

Akin to subversion branching. The only question is, is there a "universe merge" command waiting to be discovered?

Re:Hmmm....

[gfody]

I've actually never seen 12 monkeys. I probably wont now that I know it's based on a 12 year olds perception of time travel. Your gun would jam or you'd have a heart attack? Thats nonsense.. wouldn't your time machine break and you wouldn't be able to even try, after all there's no documented history of an attempt on his life or ANY time travellers for that matter.

Are you a time traveller? Didn't think so. I am, in fact, a time traveller. What happens once you leave this dimension to travel to another one you can do anything you want, however you can't return back to your original dimension because it becomes impossible to find. For instance, I went back about 30 minutes to fix a spelling mistake in my original post. The dimension I left is now missing a me (unless me from another dimension happens to populate it (possibly correcting a different spelling mistake)) and me in this dimension can't return to that one because I'd never find it since I would have to predict all the events in the universe since the fork 30 minutes ago and I'd much rather stay here 30 minutes behind because it's similar enough to the place I left and I don't feel like killing the native version of myself again.

No

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, he accidentally brought back a C64 instead of the IBM 5100 and is banned from returning to the past.

Re:I tried to make it

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I don't know where they are at that point in time relative to the nearest quasars, but I know that the RAC (or Relative Andromeda Configuration, a coordinate system that measures coordinates inside the Milky Way from the Line between the Andromeda Core and Milky Way Core) as 4I,2V4590KL2GETV:DN,AF6277PBE74F:8Z,R1417145YG14L with the Date/Time combination being exactly 08 May 2005 02:05:01,141461 UTC.

For you natives, The numbers are in Base-36 (For quicker accuracy when time is of the essence. Ironic, no? Our ability to travel through time and we can't stop the Eastern Eurasian Federation from launching raids on us back home) The three numbers equate to the position of what you're trying to reach, adjusted with Sardinov's Constant to ensure you don't have any... mishaps. Most current devices have safety checks to ensure you don't hit a wall or another person, but there are many other problems with the Templar...

Oh, if any of you see me, I'm the one on the roof with the small "laptop" device.

Re:zerg

[Repton]

Even if someone time travelled into the past for a few seconds, wouldn't they wind up in the icy cold of space while the planet speeds along on its normal course around

Nah, because the rotation of the solar system around the galactic core, combined with the movement of the Milky Way (propelled out by the big bang, and pulled on by the gravity of various neighbouring galaxies) just happen to exactly cancel out the movement of the earth. This means that we are, in fact, absolutely fixed in position in space.

This is why the aliens keep coming here --- we are the only stable point in the universe where time travel can (safely) happen.

HTH.

One fear...

[aXis100]

Seeing the location depicted so accurately, I have only one fear...

Telefrags.

Re:Hmmm....

[roman_mir]

but when you got there she turned you down because she doesn't date geeks and so you can never exist in the future. Thus if you are your own great great grandfather you don't exist.

Time travel

[amaiman]

Ugh, time travel discussion.

Queue fifty pages of "Yes, I could kill my own grandfather." "No, you couldn't!" "In Soviet Russia, time travels you." "First Post!" "No, this is the first post, I traveled back before you posted yours", and so on...

Convention's a neat idea, though :-)

Couldn't get hotel rooms at a decent price

[billstewart]

Really, they've got to schedule it sometime in advance so they could arrange for hotel room space. A few people will show up yesterday anyway just to grab the weekly rate, but they'll probably bop in, hand over their credit card, and not spend much time in the room until next weekend. And the waiting line at Mary Chung's will just be outrageous...

Conference review

[SiliconEntity]

I attend the "Time Travel" conference, but it is a near-disaster. As far as I can tell the conference is spectacularly devoid of time travellers and instead is full of wannabees wandering around speculating about time travel. Worse, there are glitches at the registration table forcing people to wait in long lines as the students try to get organized. The "food" leaves much to be desired as well, what there is of it. And about the conference sessions, the less I say, the better.

It certainly doesn't compare with the twin millennium celebrations on December 31, 999 and 1000, where the hostesses pull out all the stops to outdo one another. Now, those are parties!

Re:Ahh...

[fishbowl]

Forget John Titor. Invite Wisest Human Dr. Gene Ray, and admit that Time Cube proves You Educated Stupid.

Re:Why did they set the date in the future?

[TexVex]

Willen haven been. You're forgetting your conjugations.

Or this...

[Lendrick]

Going back in time and changing the past is akin to trying to lift yourself up off of the ground. Both are equally impossible and equally silly; it's just that people understand space better than time, it's not quite so obvious.

Re:Ahh...

[kernelfoobar]

I can even provide a picture of my attic to show that they are invisible.

Pffff, they're not even invisible, I can easily see them....

Re:I tried to make it

[millennial]

Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha, of course.

Re:zerg

[EEBaum]

That's why you have to be going 88mph.

Duh.

YOU ARE ALL STUPID UNEDUCATED IDIOTS

[EEBaum]

WARNING:
Cubic time is proven fact and cannot be disputed. Nature's simultaneous 4-day cube proves that there are four parts to a day, and four days occuring always at the four corners of earth. 2x2=4, and people who insist in time as something that can be traveled think of THREE parts, past present and future, but there are in actuality FOUR parts, fact which is ignored by antiHarmony academia criminals. Time "theories" from people educated moronic in evil institutions are ignorant of the four corners of the time and of the world. Denying the existence of four-sided nature of time and universe is to ensure your own demise. You are stupid arrogant curse to all creatures of the planet.

/obligatory

Re:Ahh...

[John Titor]

Actually none of the previous posts are me.
This is what happened , the short version.

I spent too much time in this world line, time travel missions are usually of only a short duration. My lengthy stay on this world line "caused" an increase in divergence greater than expected.
Effectively my internet fame changed your history, increasing the divergence from my own original world line.

Towards the end of my stay here the NSA and CIA came calling; I made a quick exit to return home.

Sadly for myself, the increased divergence between world lines meant that when returning I arrived in a word line closer to this ones future than my own world lines present.

In other words I can never go home.

Plans here were changed to fix mistakes and minimize resistance based on the information found on the internet about me.
I am sorry the good guys lose this time and it is my fault.

I decided to come back here to see how things play out.

Unless you can be encouraged to take back the power of government from the corporations, then the future is very bleak.

Is it me? : Slashdot ID and email John Titor,
As my story is old someone would have registered these long ago for a prank. They were both registered today.... Now how would I have managed that?

Re:Ahh...

[RinzeWind]

I mean, if I claim that I have invisible aliens called Dvutels living in my attic, who only communicate with me, and only telepathically

You can call that religion an earn serious cash.

Re:Ahh...

[zippthorne]

According to the WP article, the future hates us. If he really was from the future, you'd think he'd have a little more tact. There are few bullies that can affect the people of the future more profoundly than the directed anger of six billion forbears.

My descendents hate me? pshaw. i'll show them. I won't have any. mwa hah ahha haha.

It Was Boring

[cowgoesmoo2004]

They only did it for a few years, then it fell out of disfavor.

I do have a nifty t-shirt from 2007 though.

Re:Yeah, like the government won't be watching THA

[cowgoesmoo2004]

Interestingly, what if a time traveller was actually there. How would they be able to prove it to you.

To go through all the effort of risking life and limb to show up at such a lame event, avoiding the government agents, and nobody believes you are from the future anyway.

That's why I'm not going anyway. There's a much better convention held every year on the dark side of the moon anyway. We get quite a chuckle out of you losers on earth not being able to figure it out!