Find somewhere quiet and safe where no-one goes. Bring enough food and sanitary requirements for the amount of time you'd like to travel. Wait. Open door at desired time period. Machine will only travel forwards in time.
Who's to say we couldn't build and use such a machine? We're pretty close to being able to induce hibernation in people. How much would you pay to see the future? Even five years? What a trip.
But that's silly...
I've always felt reading images, sounds and words from the past feels a little like time travel. Watching a clear, good quality video from twenty years ago blows my mind. Even watching a previously unknown terrible quality bootleg video from a concert I went to gives me a little buzz. Or watching video footage of my band recording it's CD, video we'd all forgotten existed...
If you come at time travel from a different direction it's entirely possible to travel into your own past. You just have to plan ahead.
Let's presume, as many do, that time cannot change. Lets say that even if you could travel back in time it would all remain exactly the same no matter what you did. The easiest way to imagine that is that if you travelled back in time you'd jump into your conciousness, Malkovich style and watch everything as it happened.
We have the technology to record everything. Video, audio and every word we create. Imagine if you did exactly that. Everything you saw, everything you heard, recorded digitally for rewatching at your leasure. Combine it with a reasonably good VR headset and you're back laughing at that stand-up show you went to back in 2006. Wasn't it great?
And of course, if everyone did this, you can easily imagine your children and their children and their children travelling back to our time to see what trams were like, watch people eat meat and to witness the strangeness of single sex toilets. To witness Melbourne before it was all underground and to swim in the Yarra before it dried up.
That's what film is. That's what photographs are. They're just lower tech versions of the above. That's what books are and drawings and chips in clay and paintings on cave walls.
And like any desired piece of magic... when you see how it can become possible it's no longer interesting. Yeah, but what about touch? What about recording what I was feeling at the time? What if I want to change what I did?
But what about Stonehenge?
I think the nutjob leaders of our past understood this idea of time travel. They knew things crumble over the centuries so they built massive monuments to their glory because they wanted to be remembered, thousands of years into the future.
And they are. Well done. Clap clap.
We don't know why Stonehenge was there. Thousands of years ago they probably knew, but eventually they all forgot and we're just left with rocks.
There is a large percentage of our society who'd love to go back to somewhere in the Middle East and watch out for some well known names. And a lot of people who wouldn't.
There are some books that let them do that, at least to a degree.
We have the opportunity to travel back to the 1880s because we have photographs of that time. As long as we have those images, and ways to view them, and keep them safe, this will remain possible.
Anyone thinking of spending billions on time travel research, concider spending it on history preservation.
It's the same thing.
Anyone who wishes they could go back to a certain time period to find out something they missed, get over it. Start to help future generations do the same thing by publishing and sharing your knowledge, photographs and video.
If you went to a gig on the 29th May 2006, tell us about it. Tell us where, tell us when, tell us what happened. It doesn't have to be well written, just accurate. When someone says "yeah, I went to that show, can't remember when it was though... awww maybe 1990? Or maybe 1993?" I'm nearly in tears. It's worse when the band says it too.
And if you meet a historian in the street, give them a big hug. It's their job to trall through all this crap and come up with the facts you want.
It's not an easy job when we're so into throwing everything away.
Rant inspired by an excellent post on Lazy Luddite, Shadows & Echos.