Time and Space Machine

Creating a Time and Space Machine with Today’s Technology

(C) 2005 Aaron L. Richards

A Time and Space Machine - Able to traverse time and space at a moments notice. Just select a location, and a point in time and ba-boom, you are ready to fight evil aliens, and others bent on doing harm to our world. It is a premise filled with all sorts of contradictions as to altering the time-space continuum.

Popular fiction? An advanced future technology? I don't think so. We can start recording time and space for use in our Time And Space Machine today. We can do this by extending currently available services through the use of popular and commonly available technologies. We can make the Time and Space Machine available through the World Wide Web. What we are in need of is the vision. Here it is!

Concept of a Time and Space Machine in the Popular Media

According to popular fiction, a Time And Space Machine is a device that bodily places one or more individuals over geographic space and through time to different location and a different time in the past or future. Once there, an individual can often view (and interfere with) great moments in history, and change the present in an unexpected way. At other times, individuals go into the future, and bring back devices of great or terrible purpose, which have been developed in our future and which have capabilities for which we are unprepared to accommodate, and which cause problems in the current time.

How We Are Going To Define A Time And Space Machine

I would like to define a Time And Space Machine as a service that allows individuals to see images of different locations at different points in time in the past. It would only be able to view such images of locations at times that had previously been recorded. The viewing of such recorded "history" would occur on a personal computer or workstation. I see such a service being made available on the World Wide Web. I will describe what the Time And Space Recorder consists of later on in this article. A Time And Space Recorder will be designed to be used on the worlds roadways as I envision it, and as a result the Time And Space Machine will primarily be designed to view scenes from automobile traveled roadways.

Such a system would have the ability to go forward or reverse in time while focusing on a view of a specific location provided recorded data existed for that location.

Similarly, geographic space could be traversed, while time was frozen.

In addition, one could traverse both time and space at the same time. Either in forward or reverse order, at "normal" speed, or fast forward or fast reverse, kind of like watching a DVD of a travel video.

What Would a Time And Space Machine Consist of in the Way of Equipment?

There would be a Time And Space Viewer, a Time And Space Server and there would be the data acquisition component which earlier I referred to as the Time And Space Recorder.

The Time And Space Viewer would be a personal computer or workstation with a web-browser program. All that it needs to do is view and interact with the Time And Space Server as a standard PC interacts with a web server.

The Time And Space Recorder would consist of a Global Positioning Satellite receiver, one or more video cameras, a video digitizer if the video cameras were not digital, a cellular broadband modem, a small computer, an internet connection, a database program, and a computer program that could tie it all together.

This equipment would be tied together by the computer in a system that allowed the video camera(s) to take in video as a vehicle drives down a road, encodes each frame of video with a latitude, longitude and orientation (direction) taken from the Global Positioning Satellite receiver as well as a time stamp. It could then transmit these images with their associated data to the Time And Space Server. This data would be transmitted through the cellular broadband modem.

The Time And Space Server would be part web-server, part specialized search engine. It would match time and space queries received from the Time And Space Viewers to the data supplied it by the Time And Space Recorders.

How Would This Time And Space Machine Work? What Would It Do?

In order to be feasible, this system would have to be deployed something like an On-Star system with video capability. Cars and trucks would be equipped with Time And Space Recorders as described above. As vehicles traverse the worlds roadways, they would capture video all along their routes. Each frame of video would be encoded with time and location data and sent to the Time And Space Server. If the Time And Space Recorders became commonplace, then many popular roadways would be traveled by these systems several times an hour.

Traverse space

If you had a large number of vehicles that were equipped with the Time And Space Recorders, that were traveling over a given geographic space, collecting images at roughly 30 frames/second, and each frame of video was being encoded with latitude and longitude from the GPS system, there would be quite a collection of images that would span a large geographic space.

If the appropriate software systems were in place to locate and traverse this information (the Time And Space Server), allowing the aggregation of all of the information from all of the vehicles with TASRs that were on the road, one could have a system such as that in the following description:

One could have a website that was similar to today’s map websites such as MapQuest, Yahoo Maps or Google Maps. The individual could type in a specific address or intersection and in return receive an image of a map. Like Google Maps, this map would be scrollable by clicking and dragging the mouse. In addition, there would be an image from a Time And Space Recorder (TASR) on the web page of the given location. If you moved the mouse, guiding a cross-hair around the streets on the map, images that had been acquired by TASRs at that geographic point could be displayed real-time (with a broadband connection) on the web page with the map. Not all of these images would necessarily come from the same vehicles TASR. The images displayed could potentially be from tens or even hundreds of vehicles systems aggregated over time into a system that coordinated with a mapping system on the Internet.

Traverse Time

Now that we can traverse space, how do we traverse time?

Well, taking the system described above, with images aggregated over a large geographic area from multiple vehicles' TASRs, note this: in areas with more traffic, it is highly likely that certain areas will be traversed by TASRs multiple times a day, perhaps, depending on how prevalent these systems are, maybe multiple times an hour. Now in these places that are traversed by TASRs multiple times an hour, if this data is recorded, there will be multiple images of a location per hour, for as long as the information is recorded, which at some future time could potentially be years worth of images. Now imagine the same mapping website as mentioned above. A user puts an address or location in the mapping website, and up pops a map of the surrounding area with a star at the specified location, as well as an image as viewed from the TASR of a vehicle at that location. Now in this scenario, imagine that this page would also have a clock and calendar on it. As you move the hands of the analog clock on the page, images taken of that location closest to the time specified would be displayed real time on the web page. If you wanted images from a different date, you could change that calendar date and the image of that location, closest to the date and time specified would be displayed. It is highly likely that the images would not all be from the same vehicle or TASR, but from an aggregated pool of images coded for that geographic location.

Now Imagine – Time and Space Traversal

Just imagine what would be possible if the number and density of the TASRs was great enough. It would be possible to view the scene of an accident, such as a two car collision using this system, and then follow either vehicle in reverse through time and space to see the events and behavior of the vehicles before the accident. You could, provided the image data resolution was great enough actually watch the accident occur in the form of a video clip. There are a number of possibilities, some very beneficial, and others more reminiscent of the Surveillance Society of Big Brother to be feared.

Although such a system as described may raise certain fears, being bodily transported into the past to battle aliens, and in the mean time disrupting the time-space continuum is highly unlikely to happen given this technology. Or is it?