Late night musings

Time machines would actually be damn useful. Let's say it's 3:40am and you really need to make that phone call at 08:00am (i.e., as soon as the office opens) to make an appointment. Of course, setting your alarm clock to 07:55 am is tantamount to torture, and having to get up for a mere five minute phone call adds insult to injury.

And now just imagine there was a time manipulation device that would allow you to make a two-way phone call four hours into the future, i.e., link your time from 03:40am to 03:45am with the receptionist's time from 08:00am to 08:05am. How awesome would that be! It wouldn't affect the receptionist at all, you could make your phone call right now and go to bed, and heck, how much harm to the timeline can four hours do?

Of course, as a next step I'd call myself in the future to ask what will happen in the next update of my favourite webcomic, and by recursive usage of such phone calls (i.e., asking my future self to call its future self) I could even look arbitrarily far into the future, thus reading every single issue of the comic that will ever be published, so that if I ever have a car accident, I wouldn't need to be sad about never learning how the story ends.

I guess it's time to go to sleep before I produce even more profound insights.

-- Birgit