Friday, October 29, 2010

Cell Phones and Time Travel

Not all that long ago I posted a story about time travel called Guidebook. I suggested that if time travel was real, then the time travelers would already be here. The point of the story was the hero was looking for evidence of that visitation. Now we seem to have it in the form of a photograph from a 1928 Charlie Chaplin film.
This would be the sort of proof that someone was time traveling because no one in 1928 would have a cell phone. As I mentioned in my article about my Star Trek communicator, the cell phone links me to all the knowledge of the human race. I would imagine if you are time traveling, then your cell phone would be able to operate over the span of time... maybe marking where you are for retrieval or to provide you with the latest information from your point of origin.

Yes, I know that Isaac Asimov explored time travel in The End of Eternity, which suggested you couldn’t really travel much beyond the point where time travel was created, except in very limited and very special circumstances.

And yes, I know that Wilson "Bob" Tucker explored time travel in his The Lincoln Hunters where they were very careful about leaving anything in the past that didn’t belong and worried about meeting their selves...

Or Ray Bradbury’s idea that even the slightest change in the past would have grave consequences as the change radiated outward. Which gave us some interesting variations on The Simpson's and A Sound of Thunder.

But all that is unimportant because we have the picture of the woman with a cell phone...

Okay, I don’t believe it to be a cell phone. Just something in the photograph that looks like a rather old-fashioned cell phone. It’ll be interesting to learn exactly what she is holding. And it’s fun to speculate about it... especially if it is a cell phone.

In the end, I’m sure we’ll find out that it is something mundane. But, until then, I think I’ll just call it a cell phone.

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