Novel solutions to the planet’s problems

A future world, as in Brin’s Earth, is threatened with ecological disasters - algae blooms, viral clouds, diebacks and extinctions. Moreover, civilisation is in decline. Most of us are familiar with cinematic solutions to such problems involving messengers from the fictional future sent back in time to warn earlier generations of mistakes being made, and to offer preventative guidance to anyone willing to listen. More than a few popular movies have been made on this theme over the past couple of decades.

Benford takes a different approach: tomorrow’s concerned scientists in his award-winning novel send not a courageous messenger on a rescue mission into the past, but rather a comparatively simple time-travelling message of deepening gloom, impending doom yet hopeful salvation.

In a recent interview he subsequently elaborated on the origins of this work:

My first thoughts were: is time travel possible? You have to have the right physics. Is there any physics around today that might make it happen? Maybe tachyons. Suppose I was a real scientist - wait, I am a real scientist! What would I do first? Build some kind of phone booth that you walk into, and it turns you into tachyons and transports you? That sounds appetizing. Why don’t we test these ideas by sending a couple of tachyons into the past to see if we can convey some information? My first notes said, time telegraph? I want to send a signal to the past, and that’s actually enough. My God, if you do that, wow. Marconi wanted to send signals to other people; he didn’t want to transport human beings through radio waves. It was the investigation of how I would do it, what would be the first step. That led me through the logic to build the novel. I never got around to the phone booth that transmits people into the past. Bill and Ted did that eventually.

How would any message sent back in time affect the present. Would it cause a paradox?

Benford’s future scientists decide to employ faster-than-light tachyon particles (still theoretical) to convey a series of morse code (don’t laugh!) messages to interrupt experiments conducted by scientists in the past. The tachyon beam is projected to the astronomical position occupied by the earth at that earlier time.

The idea is to give past scientific colleagues - should they receive, unravel and understand this information - sufficient details to commence solving the forthcoming ecological crises. But these must not be entirely solved otherwise a paradox could be created, and an alternative universe could emerge. OK, this is science fiction but the incredible questions concerning time-travel-paradoxes have long intrigued physicists. Of course you will have to read Timescape to find out and (disturbingly discover) how Benford resolves this issue.

In the meantime (not in the novel), according to the Internet Encylopedia of Science, Raymond Fox of the Israel Institute of Technology has actually proposed another faster-than-light particle called a dybbuk (Hebrew for “roving spirit”). Such a particle may possibly avoid the resulting paradox “problem of tachyons”.

So perhaps, while contemporary scientists continue to work on alleviating the planet’s present and prospective ecological threats, we all might remain alert for any helpful messages being communicated from a gloomy but hopefully saveable future. Who knows? Novel solutions to the planet’s problems may even come backwards in time via the Internet.

Stop Climate Change Today (sponsored link).