Over the last few months I've spent countless hours thinking up ways it might be possible to send a message through time (mainly so I can send the winning lottery numbers back to myself ). Obviously it's simple enough to send a message into the future, just put the message in a place where it is likely to last a long time and be found at some point in the future. For instance our posts on ATS will probably last a long time into the future and be read by future humans.

However sending things into the future isn't very interesting or amazing... but sending things back in time, now that is something which could have a whole lot of spectacular benefits. As far as I'm concerned sending physical objects back into the past is most likely impossible, but sending pure informational data into the past, that doesn't seem so implausible in my mind. Quantum entanglement can transfer information over infinite distances in an instant...

If information transfer can break the barrier of space, then why not the barrier of time? Time and space are intimately linked after all. But how would one go about transmitting a message into the past? Well I honestly don't know, there is no technology or method in the public domain which provides the ability to transmit a message into the past. We have numerous theoretical ideas, most of which involve the use of some exotic technology.

Obviously I don't have access to the materials or money which would be required to build and test those machines. But I do have access to one of the most advanced pieces of technology on this planet: the internet. A world wide network of interconnected computers all sending and receiving data at rapid speeds. In my months of pondering this subject I came up with all sorts of crazy ideas, but today I thought of something which sounded half-reasonable.

Now I may not have any idea how to send data into the past... but what if there were some way to receive data from the future, from a time when it is possible to send information into the past? After all that is the real goal isn't it? So I started to develop this crazy idea into something I could utilize and test. This entire idea all hinges on one crucial assumption: that my future self will gain access to technology which can transmit data into the past.

But how might I go about setting up the necessary conditions for receiving such a message? Well I can't really know the conditions required without knowing how the technology works... but I can make some educated guesses. Once again I need to rely on some assumptions about how the technology might work, but the range of assumptions I can make is rather limited in scope because there aren't very many logical pathways of reason which seem plausible.

In fact I've only managed to think of one way it might be possible to set up the necessary conditions. This idea relies on the use of the internet, mainly because the internet is good at storing pure data which is easy to edit. To understand this idea you must first understand some basic principles demonstrated in quantum mechanics. One must think in terms of probability and wave-functions. Remember Erwin Schrödinger's thought experiment about the cat?

The cat is placed in a box which is rigged to poison the cat, and the poison is set to be released based on random particle decay. So it's impossible to know when or if the cat gets poisoned because it's impossible to predict when the decay will happen. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics tells us that the cat is both dead AND alive at the same time. When we measure/observe the actual state of the cat, we collapse the system into a finite state (we find it dead OR alive).

This is much like the infamous Double Split Experiment... if we fire small particles, such as electrons or photons, at two small slits, the particle will go through both slits at the same time! We know this happens because it produces an interference pattern on the sheet behind the slits, even if we fire the particles very slowly one at a time. The interference pattern can only be the result of waves, this is the reason we often now describe matter as particle-waves.

Even the electron particle acts as a wave and it "flows" through both slits and then interferes with its self on the other side. But what happens when we try to observe which slit the particle goes through? Well you should already be able to guess the answer: we collapse the wave-function, and the particle only goes through one slit, and the interference pattern disappears. By observing what actually happens we collapse the system into a finite state.

So how does this all fit in with sending information through time? Well this relates to the next assumption I was talking about. It seemed to me that anything which I have observed is in a collapsed state, its state has been determine and I'm aware of the finite value... so it would seem paradoxical to assume anything which is in such a state could be altered by anyone in the future. Meaning it's not possible send information into the past by altering existing information in that state.

For example, if I type "ABC" into a text editor and then I blink and it says "CBA" because someone in the future decided to alter the past and change that text, it would result in a paradox because the entire future would be changed. It could, however, be possible in the multiple time-line theory which suggests such an act would cause the time line to split into a reality where the text was changed to "CBA" and a reality where it wasn't changed.

But for now I'm just going to assume such a scenario would be paradoxical. So in order to actually transmit information to the past you need to be able to control something which hasn't been measured and collapsed into a finite state by any observer. So this gives me a clue about what conditions I need to create... I need to set up a system which is still in the wave state: floating between possibilities but not determined to be in any absolute state.

This state might allow the observer from the future to manipulate and determine that data because it hasn't yet been determined by any observer of current time. The data is manipulated before anyone in the present time has a chance to observe the data. This would appear to create a loop-hole around the paradoxical situation because nothing in our current time has actually changed in any measurable way, it has merely been determined by an observer located in another point in time.

Imagine now that I generate text using a random text generator, and I wait I few minutes or hours before looking to see what the text is. The time between when the text is generated and when I look at it provides a window where the text is in a state similar to that of Schrödinger's cat. It has not been observed, the system has not been collapsed into a finite state, and as such it should be in a wave-state, a state which represents all possibilities at one time.

Here is the process I have developed which makes use of these assumptions in an attempt to setup conditions which might produce a system which can be manipulated by a person in the future:

• generate a set of random numbers between 31 and 127 (these numbers correspond to all the common ASCII characters).
  
• without observing the numbers, I copy them to a dependable long lasting location, probably some place on the internet.
  
• the location must enable the numbers to be edited otherwise anyone accessing the data from wont be able to change it.
  
• wait a period of time before observing the data, thus ensuring a large enough window of time for the data to be manipulated from the future.
  

Now there are several important things to keep in mind about this process. First of all, the numbers must be truly random otherwise it is theoretically possible to determine what the numbers are without even seeing them. Keep in mind that computers are completely deterministic machines with a finite set of operations. They can't generate truly random numbers, they just use algorithms which are so close to random we can't tell the difference.

We can only produce this undetermined wave-like state of the data if we truly don't and can't know what the state of the data is unless we actually measure/observe the data. So for this task we can turn to a service such as the one provided by random.org. This website provides true random data derived from atmospheric noise, which is completely unpredictable, meaning we have no way of guessing what numbers such a system will produce.

You may also be wondering how large the so called "set of random numbers" should be. Well it can be any size really, depending on how much space you want to provide to the message senders. Keep in mind that if you pick the length, that is something you have determined already, meaning that size can't change because it would create obvious discrepancies and alterations to reality, which would once again cause paradoxical situations.

While it doesn't seem absolutely necessary for the data to exist in a location where it will last long into the future, it probably is a good idea if you wish people from the future (other than yourself) to know where the data is going to be located at some point in the past, so they can go back and manipulate that data within the time window. If you store the information on your home PC only you know its location and it may be hard to establish a connection to that data from the future.

Putting it on the internet is ideal since it will last a long time and it can be stored in a way which allows it to be modified from anywhere in the world via only electrical and light (informational) signals. This may prove to be a crucial aspect of the conditions which are necessary for future people to manipulate data existing in the past. They may not be able to establish a direct physical line to the past but it's likely they will establish an informational line.

Keep in mind that the future person must also edit the data before it is seen by anyone in our present time. We have no way of knowing anything has changed until we measure the state of the data at least one time. Since they are starting with data which is in an undermined state, anything they do to the data during that window is something we can never be aware of, it's completely irrelevant because we only observe the data once the window has closed.

This is the most critical aspect of the operation, because obviously if the data doesn't provide a way of being modified then it can only be observed by the future people, in which case they wont be able to transmit any message because they will simply observe random text, just the same as we would observe if we were the first people to observe it. The real trick is that from our perspective it's impossible to establish that the data has already been observed.

It may as well be random for all we care, even if it does contain a message there's no solid way to establish whether that message is the result of pure coincidence or if it's because someone from the future observed and edited that data before we had a chance to observe it. There's nothing to tell us that reality has been manipulated by people from the future, and if there were such a method it would lead to the sorts of paradoxes I mentioned earlier.

We must also wait a reasonable amount of time before we actually take a look at the data because we don't have any idea how their time-bending technology functions. It may possibly take them hours or even days to tap into that window of time when the data is existing in an undetermined state. If we don't wait long enough and provide a large enough window then we may not provide them with enough time to work their technological magic.

Now you may be wondering if I have actually tried any of this and if it does work why would I even be talking about it? Of course I have tried it, I wouldn't post this thread unless I had tried it, and I wouldn't have posted this thread if it worked. I mainly posted this idea because I find it extremely interesting and I'd like to see if anyone has any ideas about ways in which this procedure could be optimized and refined, and possibly what I might be doing wrong.

It could be possible that I never get access to any technology which will allow me to send messages to the past, meaning I need to place the data in a location where it will easily be located by future people, thus telling them where to look for it in the past, and thus enabling me to receive a message from anyone in the future who has access to such technology. Or it could simply be we never figure out how to send messages into the past and thus this is all a useless exercise.

Another potential problem which I just though of, is that the random numbers from random.org are not entirely unmeasured by all observers, they are likely to be copied into a database on their server, which would indicate the numbers might need to be measured and modified at that location, but that's impossible without hacking into their database. I may need to use true random numbers which are discarded from all sources after I obtain them and save them at my chosen location.

I did, however, get some interesting results the first time I tried it. I established a "start" and an "end" character which would indicate the start and end of the transmission. That way I could know if the messages I received had been cut off or damaged in some way. If the start of the message began with the start character and ended with the end character I would know I had a complete message. The first time I did it the first character was indeed the start character.

However the rest of the message was complete gibberish. But that is basically a 1 in 100 chance that the first character was the start character. So I thought maybe I just didn't provide a large enough time window and my future self only had time to manipulate the first character, thus giving me a sign that it was working. Well it turns out that probably wasn't the case, because I've tried it a few more times now but I haven't gotten the start character in the right place again.

So anyway that's my interesting little experiment in sending messages through time and I hope someone else found it interesting or useful in some way. If you have anymore insight or ideas then don't hesitate to post them here, especially if it concerns the problem about isolated random numbers. This is a fascinating subject and I'm eager to hear your thoughts on this topic. If you have any other ideas about sending information through time I'm all ears.

First off, I like the way you think. It's a fascinating idea and well done for going through with it well into the testing stages. I do see potential issues with this, however. The first is that it makes some assumptions about the collapse of the wave function that are perhaps not sound. It could be that consciousness does not play a role in the collapse, and the very act of storing the data string on the internet actualizes that data instantly.

It seems an even bigger assumption that it is even theoretically possible to access your random data and inject a replacement message directly into it.

One final thought. Let's say you create a message and store it somewhere on the internet, and it takes 1000 years for this technology to become available, if anyone were to happen to view your text within the next 1000 years it would ruin the experiment, right? What's to stop an observer seeing your message before the future people have a chance to replace it with their own?

Or am I perhaps misunderstanding your experiment in some way? Feel free to correct me because I do find what you are trying to do interesting.

Edit: It occurred to me, if people can send data into the past I think they would have done it already. They could simply start messing with the random number generators themselves to generate messages for us to see.

Maybe you could set up a website that collects random numbers and tallies them in a database, and outputs the numbers at the end of the day. The task for the future people is to bias those random numbers to prove there is communication. It would seem this might be a simpler task than injecting messages over existing random strings, and in a sense cuts out the middle man.

I believe, you can do this by sending information through your dream's.

Ok, few issues here.

First of all, quantum entanglement is definitely weird, but while Bell's Theorem show the effect is non-local (ie faster than light), it also shows that you can't use it to actually transmit decodable information faster than light. In every scheme I've ever seen for exploiting quantum entanglement, even in principle, you always need a classical channel of information transmission to make it all make sense. Yeah, you can do things like move the signal around FTL (quantum 'teleportation'), but that signal can't be read until the classical data catches up to it. This seems to be more than an engineering issue, rather more of a fundamental principle of nature. Again, plenty of weird crap you can do with good entanglement engineering (like quantum computers or some really crazy sci-fi stuff I won't get into). But it isn't gonna be letting you move information FTL, or back in time (basically the same thing, really. ask ol' Einstein about it).

Two, the Copenhagen Interpretation is not actually taken seriously by that many people any more. It was a nasty intellectual dodge from the get-go and is one of the worst models ever made of anything ever. It basically says "Stop asking what the wavefunction collapse means and just calculate it!". It's an 80 year old characterization of 'wave mechanics' (as the field was known at the time) that gets a lot press written about it. No, most folks who can do the math of QM either say "I dunno" or ascribe to some mix of the other prevailing paradigms the most likely to be most accurate/useful/best. The major interpretation now is a white-washed version of the Many Worlds Interpretation called Decoherence that hides all the interesting bits away from the public where they can't hurt themselves with them. Start mixing in some information theory from the quantum computing guys, and it seems to be the case that, yes, the universe does in fact split into multiple "worlds", or sets of mutually cross correlated quantum states of the universal wave function. It also seems that in some important ways, information may have more existential primacy (a phrase I just used in another post. Sigh, I think about the weirdest things sometimes.) than matter or energy, which are both epiphenomena of the interaction of information in a two dimensional plane.

No bud, I'm sorry, if you wanna send or receive information the wrong way in time, you're going to need another scheme. Might I recommend you look into the Casimir effect? If somehow engineering crazyness could be overcome to harness it, the Casimir effect might be able to let you generate exotic matter of negative mass and energy density. With that, you could thread the heart of a microwormhole from the quantum foam, stabilizing it and letting you send photons through it. How you'd aim the bastard at the other end, I got no clue. Course, if you just use a local one, with both ends nearby, you could clamp one magnetically and spin it up to relativistic speeds. At that point, anything dropped into the "stationary" end would come out in the past, further and further disjointed the long you left it running in a slow-time spin. Course, then you're stuck with the classic "can't go back further than the invention of the time machine" problem, which damn near always bites you in the behind.

ETA: Realized that for your purposes, you'd want to know what a wormhole looks like, so you can keep your eyes peeled. Welp, best we can tell, gravitational lensing would smear out most of the light passing through it, and you wind up with a sphere of light that gets less dense, the closer you look at the middle. Personally, I've got a... [less than a hunch|more than a notion] that that is exactly what many, perhaps most, "orb-type" UFOs are. it explains their weird movements, the splitting apart/coming together (that's just one thing going forward and backward over the same time, tuning in as it were), the color changes (color's gonna depend upon the relative speeds through time at both ends. If it turns red, that would be like someone on the other end clicking Fast-Forward, as it started moving this end through time more quickly), and even some of the High Strangeness encounters like that guy who said an orb melted his dog (that's a pretty fair description of the kind of spaghettification you could expect if you bumped into the dang thing). But again, just a wild idea that seems to be consistent with the observed data.

Anyone ever wonder why your head hurts when trying to think in a nonlinear fashion? In this verse we are 3rd dimensional entitys, how dare you try and think out of our linear box. LoL

Great post! Gets you thinking.

Good post, OP.

I have always been of the understanding that one can not touch the past, as it has already occurred. You would need to transmit a beam back to a place in space where earth was, at that time, but it has already passed that location never to return in time/space.

Originally posted by phantomjack
... need to transmit a beam back to a place in space where earth was, at that time, but it has already passed that location never to return in time/space.

"That location" as measured relative to.... what? exactly? No, relativity doesn't allow for any concept of "absolute space" to hold true. The fact is, if you're sending a beam of information back in time somehow, you need some way to control its output end's location. The only way for doing that kind of navigation that makes much sense would be to pay attention to gravity. That is, control your motion through spacetime relative to the nearest sizable gravity well, tracking relative to the barycenter of the earth. Still have to deal with rotation, but that seems like much less of an issue, probably controlel by measuring local frame-dragging or something similar.

Originally posted by voyger2
I believe, you can do this by sending information through your dream's.

edit on 30-7-2012 by voyger2 because: (no reason given)

edit on 30-7-2012 by voyger2 because: (no reason given)

Listen to your conscience. That "voice" is you in the distant future (hopefully distant) after you have died and is in the process of time dwelling inside the vessel which is your soul, trying to tell you what's best for you now that KNOW what's "on the other side". You are your "guardian angel".