Wouldn't that defeat the whole purpose?

A student at MIT is hosting a Time Traveler Party this week with the hope that people from the future will show up...too bad people from the future already know the party sucked!

- Tina Fey, Saturday Night Live

More on time travel - in the past couple of years there have been a couple of unsuccessful time travel experiments, one in Australia and one at MIT in the States, both of which were done in the simplest and cheapest way possible: advertise that you would like time travellers to show up at a specific place at a specific time. (As experiments go, this is pretty cost effective, since all you need is a little advertising and an empty piece of ground.)

Sadly, in neither case did the experiment result in a flash of light and the appearance of a modified Delorean, a blue police box, or a Victorian steampunk time chair. However, organizers were oddly unconcerned by this, since it was their contention that time travellers could easily be attending incognito. Sigh...guys, if the purpose of the experiment was to prove that time travel existed, what kind of cruel and unusual punishment would it be for a time traveller to show up and hide in the crowd? And even then, it would be surprising to have a small group of people attend. My god, if time travel were possible and even the smallest fraction of a nearly infinite future population of time travellers hears about one of the parties...actually, come to think of it they're lucky that some comedian didn't make an appearance disguised as a giant mutant ant or something similar.

However, all of this silliness addresses the one of the basic questions of time travel: if it were going to become possible, why aren't we knee-deep in visitors from the future? Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine ran a story in 1979 entitled The Merchant of Stratford by Frank Ramirez, wherein the first time traveller goes back to visit Shakespeare, only to discover that time travellers have been visiting Shakespeare for his entire life:

"I've been getting visitors from the future as far back as I can remember. My mother, being a good Christian woman, had the hardest time giving me suck, because the documentary team from the thirty-third century wanted to film it all. I barely survived childhood."

The punchline is that the first time traveller begins to receive a similar treatment from other time travellers because he's the FIRST time traveller, and as such an historical figure.

Presumably, if time travel were possible, then history would be full of visits from time travellers. (In Robert Silverberg's The Time Hoppers, a future police department is charged with ensuring that time travellers leave on schedule in order to conform with historical records.) Does this take us to the conclusion that time travel is not going to happen? Ah, this takes us to the Doctor Who quote that starts the last entry - only from the linear viewpoint is that the case. If time is in fact "a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff", then it's equally possible that once time travel is invented, then historical documents will obligingly change themselves in order to conform to the new state of affairs, and that will be the way that things have always been...and this post will never have existed.

- Sid