A Short Description of How Time Travel Is Possible

"Since you are a capitalist from the 21st century it will be difficult to explain our history after a certain distance from your history, and our technology, which would be completely incomprehensible to you if I were to describe it directly, leading you into all sorts of misconceptions and contradictions that would ultimately confuse you. Take, for example, the computer. What we know as a computer is a radically different tool, fulfills a radically different role in our society, and performs actions of a nature radically different to the binary analysis machine of the 21st century, but symbolically we recognize it as the same thing. So of history and technology I will be brief and intentionally vague, so as not to mislead you, but of causes, which emerged out of your time, I will expound in great detail. Consider this the condensed, or simplified version, but in no way should you feel patronized by that.

"Around your time a group of min invested a great deal of resources into the creation of a machine that could track all of the movements of the global stock market, every trade of every share, with inputs of a variety of economic causes and influences on those trades with a function of determining the flow of market values down to the specific share. In the beginning the process was a complete failure, mostly because the secrecy of the project denied collaboration. Eventually an act of corporate espionage revealed the project which, despite its failures, was by this time showing great promise, and another group began competing to complete the machine first. Once the knowledge was out it leaked almost immediately and ubiquitously. Smaller nations were investing almost all of their GDP into the project and espionage among groups was almost so total as to have created a situation of violating collaboration.

"Eventually the project was successful. Once again, scarcely had the project been completed than was the blueprint copied and available ubiquitously. What had been created was a fair prediction device. All available economic data from as far back as was reasonable was fed into the machine, and a program traced the chronology intuitively up to the present, where economic data from a variety of sources (credit/debit, bank reports, corporate ledgers, all global, national, local economic analytics, not to mention stock activity, etc) was used to determine what the flow of values would be in the future, as determined by what happened in the past. The beauty of the machine was its specificity. The attention to detail. And the fact that it was self correcting. At first the prediction rate was around 30%. Within a few months the margin had closed to a fraction of a percent.

"Part of that success was that depicting decline is a blunt art. There was an almost immediate global economic melt down. Vast resources of capital were moved with such rapidity that the turbulent effect was immense. Companies doing poorly sank almost immediately. Successful companies were unable to respond quickly enough to changes and usually overcompensated to disastrous results.

"Faith in the market based systems was virtually non-existent. This was not due to this event alone, but events leading up to it earlier in the century. Popular upheaval was imminent on a global scale. Drastic measures were taken. Stock markets were shuttered. Crediting institutions were taken over by large multinational interests, and credit was dolled out by them. There was rioting in the streets. Most of the countries that had been struggling their way out of the third world for the better part of the 20th and 21st centuries were reduced to majority unemployment. The top countries suffered no less. Bankers and executives disappeared by the hundreds, usually found asphyxiated on some semi-precious object. Mercenaries were as popular in affluent neighborhoods as they had once been in other areas of the world. Martial law was declared. Anarchy and civil war were imminent.

"Somehow in all of this chaos a few ideas wormed their way into power. First, it was realized that the whole system of crediting and of fluctuating stock markets could be used, not as a way to hedge power and bets, but to regulate business with the aid of the machine, which could make adjustments to a global business model on a scale specific to individual units of production, even to parts per production. In that action all of upper and middle management became obsolete. Now that economics were beginning to stabilize, politics would follow. The second idea was a complete rejection of capitalism in favor of a form of meritocracy. This was the model in which humanity would flourish. Specific goals for the human race were decided. There were many goals, and they were ranked in tiered levels. Foremost were goals to the end of poverty, hunger, disease, resource exploitation, in another tier down was the advancement of beneficial technology, improvement of communication and transit networks, and on all the way down to systems for better heating and ventilation in buildings globally. In this way all of human endeavor was harnessed towards achieving ends beneficial to itself. For the individual, personal economic interaction appeared more or less the same as it did before. Bank notes were printed and distributed for work. Yet, this time the currency was backed by collaboration towards a set of goals. A person was rewarded based on the work that they did, and how much closer it got us towards achieving a particular goal. There was much discrepancy, and much debating, but councils were set up to judge those disputes, much like a system of law courts, different levels handling different degrees of severity.

"Under these conditions we kept up with Moore's law, even as the line appeared more and more vertical. The original machine was dwarfed by its current counterpart, which could take account of much more numerous and diverse subjects. The motions and currents of the molecules in a single body were studied. Then the sample was enlarged. As technology advanced, atoms were the object of study, the body of study was widened. Eventually the atoms of the body of a man were studied. Cancers were revealed in infancy, etc. Then the job of prediction came into the fore. It was not long before the body of study was all of the atoms in a room, then in a reserch center, then in a city and so on.

"It worked like this: a single atom was observed by the machine. It made a prediction as to how the atoms around it would interact with it. Then it tested this and observed the reaction, and adjusted for any discrepancies. Knowing how those outside atoms interacted with the original the machine then predicted how a further edge of atoms would interact with the known ones, then tested, adjusted and repeated.

"The universe was mapped based on the recoil of energy of particles on earth, though the map was only made at the rate of the machine and energy recoil, a rapid enough speed, but given the relative size of the universe the mapping of the solar system on an atomic scale took a long time to complete.

"But we had accurate maps of all of the atoms and how they interacted with one another on earth. Reactions from atoms bumping into one another at the edge of the universe were constantly interfering with the predictions, but these were taken into account when they occurred and the universe map was made larger. Completely accurate predictions were therefore impossible, but a great degree of accuracy was achieved for some things. Predictions were made for the weather, and they came back correct. Agriculture hit its peak. Strangely, when predictions of the actions of individuals were made, based on their atomic recoil, they did not have a high accuracy rate nor did those improve with increased data from molecules at the edge of the mapped universe. Predictions of reality, it seemed, could only be so accurate. The machine had reached a plateau, even though the technology running it continued to advance.

"Scientists began to play with the input variables. The machine was capable of mapping out entire, if only hypothetical, lives on the atomic scale, and broadcasting them on a scale viewable to a human being. One scientist input the atomic history of his life, but changed the atomic inputs for the woman who had left him during his graduate studies by deleting her atoms from the history (or rather scattering them so that they never formed her) and played out the reaction. The result was disconcerting. He saw on a scientific monitor his life, but changed, playing out the actions of his body. It was both enthralling, and horrifying. Thus the machine was used to see lives, deaths and what could have been in many lives, but could not be used to see this life. Those predictions became an item of kitsch, like mythical prediction calendars of older civilizations.

"It was hypothesized that these predictions, alterations and the like were not calendars, but visions into alternate realities. If a universe could be imagined down to the last atomic detail, then it could also exist. Places where these things actually did take place. Alternate reality scenarios were played concurrent to each other and merged. The merging was studied. We divined how to leap from one reality to another this way, how to plant ourselves in any location in any place in another reality. How to arrange particles so that a sort of bridge was created, and our atoms and our consciousness was dragged through it. Thus we could time travel, only not in our own time.