Take Me Back to Another Time and Place.

(Contributed by Laurie Smith)

Since Sid broached the subject of time travel and made me the central character of his exposition, I felt it only fair to write a short response.

Everybody wants to be part of something meaningful and grand, and the opportunity to experience a pivotal moment in history would be a huge temptation. Time-wise, the ill-fated journey of the Titanic is a brief event. Would I want to spend four days of my life immersed* in that world? Sure. Being a witness to the Hundred Years War? Not so much.

I figured that being a first class passenger would not only provide one with the best amenities that the White Star line had to offer, but also increase the odds of survival; namely because first class women and children were ushered into the lifeboats sooner rather than later on the night of April 14, 1912. As Sid pointed out though, I might not enjoy the experience – no modern conveniences, no hot stone spa massages and only weird food available (cucumber sandwiches, champagne, candied quail eggs, what have you)….rather than protein powder, chicken wraps and stir fried Chinese vegetables. I wouldn’t have my TRX or laptop with me, and the ship likely did not have a proper gym on board.

Dr. Robert Ballard spearheaded the first successful recovery efforts in 1985. Considering the “twonky” issue, what if I had brought my BlackBerry™ onto the Titanic with me and had kept it hidden, but had lost it when the ship sank? The salvage team in the mid 80s would have been almost as puzzled by it as the passengers from a century ago, had I brought it out at the Captain’s dinner table.

I firmly believe that time travel will forever remain in the realm of fantasy, despite its popularity as a topic in science fiction. H. G. Wells was onto something with his 1895 publication of The Time Machine. Far more possible is the future emergence of a Choose Your Own Adventure trip down memory lane, à la Total Recall. They actually had something like this in the 60s and 70s: back then it was called LSD.

- Laurie

* Mild pun intended

September 1st update:  as it turns out, we are guilty of not performing due diligence in our research.  The Titanic gym was located on the starboard side of the Boat deck, adjacent to the second funnel.  Between the rowing machines, the stationary bikes, and whatever other pieces of steampunk exercise arcana were available, Laurie might be able to get an acceptable workout.  In fact, it might be an unexpected bonus for her to have the opportunity to work out in a Victorian gym, just to see what state of the art was like a hundred years ago.

- Sid

She used to own one of those damn necklaces, too.

I don't know about you, but I intend to write a strongly worded letter to the White Star Line about all of this.

Jack Dawson, Titanic

A recent conversation with Laurie brought up the following question:  if you could travel in time, where (or more accurately when) would you go?

Laurie expressed her desire to travel on the Titanic, with the unexpected codicil that she'd like to be one of the survivors. I can certainly understand wanting to see the Titanic during its heyday, but I'm not sure I'd want to go so far as to experience the accident itself, although I'm relieved to hear that Laurie wouldn't want to go down with the ship. She went on to explain that she'd be a rich heiress, at which point I stopped her. 

"Wait, how would you become a rich heiress in 1912?  From whom would you inherit your riches?"

Travelling back in time and experiencing historical events in person is an interesting idea, and something that I think would appeal to a lot of people, but the practical aspects of arranging that sort of a first person temporal holiday are daunting, to say the least.  I don't object to someone wanting to be a rich heiress - no one wants to travel below the waterline, especially in this case - but how do you introduce participants from the future into a well documented, dead-end scenario like the death of the Titanic?

Let's lay down some ground rules first.  Changing the timeline is completely verboten - no going up to the bridge and holding the crew at gunpoint to make them change course, but even smaller Butterfly Effect changes have to be avoided.

We also want to make sure that there are no twonkies. In the parlance of time travel, a twonky is an anachronistic artifact, like a Coke can in a medieval midden - the name comes from a 1942 short story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore.  Avoiding possible twonkies in this situation is especially important because we already know that James Cameron is going to be all over the place in a submersible with an Imax camera less than a hundred years later.  So, Laurie, my apologies, but just to be safe, no iPod. No iPod, no earbuds, no camera, no bottled water, no protein bars, no pantyhose, no running shoes, no Tylenol, no tampons, no hand sanitizer:  roughing it, in other words.

The passenger list of the Titanic is a known historical fact, which either already includes Laurie's name (indicating that she makes the trip into the past from her future timeline) or does not.  But even if she's not on the list, that doesn't mean that she can't go.  Because we know who was on the ship, Laurie could just find someone with a ticket*, whack them on the back of the head, and take their place.

That might actually be the best option, given the difficulties of laying hands on sufficient legal tender for the time period to allow for a ticket purchase.  A top of the line First Class Parlor Suite on the Titanic weighed in at £870, or $4,350**, which is a lot of antique money to find, let along buy. Alternatively, you could haul a big stack of gold back in the time capsule and sell it in 1912, but given that the price of gold in 1912 was about $21, you'd need to take about 210 ounces of gold - that's about $350,000 in today's market.

Other options include counterfeiting the money, or even just making a preliminary trip and robbing a few banks, but again, it's important to avoid making ripples in the time stream.

However, a little research reveals that although there are several Smiths on the ship, they all appear to be married couples rather than heiresses.  (There are also a couple of Trouts, but that's an inside joke.)  So if Ms. Smith is going to be on the Titanic, it's either under an assumed name, or as a stowaway.

Being a stowaway is an interesting solution, in that it avoids all of the issues with passenger lists and money and so forth.  On the other hand, you have to find a place to sleep without being noticed, and discretion is equally important while exploring the ship.  After all, it would be a very bad thing to be locked in the brig without your time travel ticket when the ship started to sink.

This is all based on the assumption that Ms. Smith is the only person who would want to add the ultimate cruise experience to her resumé.  As previously discussed, easy access to time travel allows an infinite number of visitors to arrive at Shakespeare's childhood home if they so wish. Similarly, everyone who has ever or would ever want to be on the Titanic has to show up during that narrow four day window. The joke is that eventually the entire Titanic passenger list would consist of time travelling visitors rather than any of the actual people who originally bought the tickets.***

And me?  Oh, I wanted to see the Beatles in concert in 1965.  A modest ambition, I realize, but at least I don't need to practise treading water in a cork life vest - just in case.

- Sid

* A rich heiress, presumably.

** To be fair, this is a worst case scenario.  A first class berth accommodation was about a quarter of this price, but after all, we are talking about rich heiress territory.

 *** In this scenario, the ship doesn't need to hit an iceberg.  It sinks under the unexpected weight of a million temporal tourists.

One giant leap.

"A bit of history for you…

Do you know how many people are watching this live on the telly?  Half a billion.  And that's nothing, 'cause the human race will spread out among the stars, you just watch them fly, billions and billions of them for billions and billions of years, and every single one of them at some point in their lives will look back at this man taking that very first step and they will never ever forget it."

The Doctor, The Day of the Moon

Neil Armstrong died yesterday at the age of 82.

 * * *

It was, in fact, just one small step.  And I acknowledge all of the people who contributed, all of the ground work, all of the other small steps necessary to make that final small step possible.  But to be that person at that place at that time makes Neil Armstrong a unique figure in human history.

In many ways the potential offered by that moment has been wasted.  Dreams of moon bases and Mars landings have become just that, dreams, as fiscal issues and changed directions diminished the focus on space exploration.

None of that matters.

The instant when Neil Armstrong's foot touched the surface of the moon on July 20th in 1969 changed humanity forever.  It opened the doors to the universe - it made us infinite and immortal.

You just watch us fly...

- Sid

Old school.

I cannot even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity, and dissolution; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation, the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide. God knows it was not of this world - or no longer of this world - yet to my horror I saw in its eaten-away and bone-revealing outlines a leering, abhorrent travesty on the human shape; and in its mouldy, disintegrating apparel an unspeakable quality that chilled me even more.

H.P. Lovecraft, The Outsider

"The putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation" - now that's what I'm talkin' about, baby!

- Sid

 

Have Space Suit - Will Travel.

Well, I might as well just come out with it - I'm thinking about building a space suit for Hallowe'en this year.

The company that I work at places a large amount of importance on employee involvement in shared social activities (to the point that we have an Employee Engagement manager) and for the last couple of years, I've maintained my standing by showing up on October 31st in some form of costume.  Two years ago it was my infamous zombie outfit, and last year I took the easy way out and wandered around in a life-sized version of my port pass badge - with my actual face in the space for the ID photo.

Having won the Best Costume prize both years, I was thinking that I might legitimately skip a year in the interests of letting someone else take the prize, but I stumbled across a site that was selling transparent acrylic domes, and I got to thinking...

After all, take a look at the various spacesuits in movies and TV shows (and at NASA) and you'll immediately see that an awful lot of them rely primarily on a padded coverall and a helmet, plus whatever amount of greeblie dressing the designers felt like sticking on.  How hard could it be?

Yeah....

And now I've been foolish enough to put it in writing...wish me luck.

- Sid

 

Eye candy.

In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.

Warhammer 40K

My spare time for the last month has been almost exclusively dedicated to a large work project with a short deadline.  Happily, I finished writing and laying out the first portion of the project at about ten o'clock last night, which gave me Sunday off to relax.  (Well, I have to do laundry and clean and go to the gym and so on, but after a month of doing nothing but write content on how to take cargo containers off ships, trust me, that's relaxing.*)

As part of my R&R for today, I took some time to get back into a game that I purchased on the Canada Day weekend - Space Marine, a third-person shooter set in the Games Workshop Warhammer 40K universe.

For those of you unfamiliar with Warhammer 40K (ie, everyone but Donovan, and Colin a little bit), it's one of those almost stereotypically über-geek multi-player games that involves a fistful of 20 sided dice, rulers, and painstakingly assembled and painted miniatures. Originally launched in 1987 as a spin-off from Warhammer, a fantasy-based game in the same style, it has in some ways eclipsed its older sibling.

The interesting thing is that unlike most entertainment involving dice, tabletops, and arguments over whose turn it is, games like WH40K have developed a deeply complex and involved back story to support the gaming experience.  Checkers, for example, has no plot.  Chess, which is one of the oldest strategy-oriented games on the planet, doesn't bother to name the pieces.  And, as much as you may enjoy Monopoly, would you really expect to find Amazon.ca selling novels about the brutality and squalor experienced by the race car during its time in Jail?  (Without passing GO or collecting $200.)

WH40K has all of that, and that's much of the reason that Games Workshop dominates the tabletop marketplace.  The universe in the 41st millennium is portrayed as a place of constant conflict, as Space Marines and the Imperial Guard, loyal to the godlike Emperor, struggle against hordes of brutal green-skinned Orks, life-stealing robotic Necrons, the ancient Eldar and their perverse cousins the Dark Eldar, the expansionist alien Tau, and the forces of Chaos, including the Chaos Space Marines, former fellows in the armies of the Imperium who have been changed and distorted by the Warp. Each of these groups is supported by reams and reams of what is technically known as "fluff": documents, maps, descriptions, diagrams, novels, iconography and histories - everything that anyone could possibly want in order to enrich and deepen the gaming experience far beyond the movement of painted plastic on a table.

I've never gotten involved in the tabletop gaming experience (although I had a near miss with Dungeons and Dragons back in the 70s) but the WH40K phenomenon is just one of those known factors in the geek continuum.  I was quite pleased with the PC strategy simulation version of WH40K, ending up with all four of the expansion modules, and as such when Space Marine and all its expansion content went on sale for $14.99, I thought I'd give it a try.

Ironically, compared to games like Fallout 3 or Bioshock, Space Marine does not present a complicated gaming experience.  It's very much a linear dungeon-style game, and to date there's been nothing elaborate in terms of quests, challenges or puzzles - so far it's all pretty much just an excuse to kill orks in a variety of gory and graphic fashions.

However, full credit for the manner in which the feel of the Imperium has been translated to the game environment.  The Space Marines are very close to a monastic order, and their world is presented as a dark, gothic environment full of memento mori and religious symbolism.  Space Marine presents a gloomy, atmospheric environment full of towering bastions, flying buttresses, ornamental skulls and massive reliquaries containing weapons upgrades.  For me, this has more than made up for any shortcomings in terms of intellectual challenges in the levels.

So, back to the game - I've gotten out of the sewer complex beneath the Manufactorum that contains the mammoth War Titan, reunited with my brothers of the Ultramarines, and I am eager to return to the struggle with the Ork invaders.

After all, I fight for the Emperor - and I WILL KNOW NO FEAR!

- Sid

* On the other hand, I'm a bit sceptical about my decision to follow up a month of intensive writing by catching up on blog posts...