Back to the Future at MIT

Eagerly awaiting potential visitors from the future, a crowd of over 450 people gathered Saturday night at MIT’s Morss Hall.

The “Time Traveler Convention” was organized by MIT graduate student Amal Dorai after he was struck by a thought-provoking line in the comic strip “Cat and Girl.”

“I saw a line saying ‘Technically, you would only need one time traveler convention’ and I thought ‘Why not?’” he said. “Some people make couches. I just wanted to make an event.”

The idea is that, since time travelers from all future years could simply converge if they knew where to go, there need only ever be one scheduled meeting time and place.

Moreover, the concept of time travel is not entirely unattainable, according to some experts in the world of quantum physics.

“We’re talking a long, long time in the future to be able to do this but it’s not impossible,” Neil Johnson, a physicist at Oxford University, told The Guardian last week. “It would be very hard to send through something that weighed anything, like machines and people, but you could conceivably send messages through light and radio waves.”

But the convention needed to be publicized enough that word of it reached people in the future, so Dorai set up a website to encourage supporters worldwide to leave invitations including the date of the event and MIT’s latitude and longitude.

He offered several techniques for doing this, from mentioning the details in newspaper articles to writing them on slips of acid-free paper hidden in little-used library books.

Dorai said that among the 2,000 e-mails he received in response to his idea, there were many amusing anecdotes of efforts to help.

“Someone e-mailed me from Oxford saying he was going to put a card in an 11th-century manuscript,” he said.

He also received one abusive e-mail saying that the conference gave MIT a bad name, but Dorai seemed unconcerned about it.

“There was only one,” he said. “[The author] obviously didn’t get the humor of it.”

This humor is further evident in the slightly tongue-in-cheek quality of the website, which asks visitors from the future to bring some sort of proof of their origin.

“We welcome any sort of proof,” it reads, “but things like a cure for AIDS or cancer, a solution for global poverty, or a cold fusion reactor would be particularly convincing as well as greatly appreciated.”

Unfortunately, all the anticipation proved to be in vain, as the convention received no confirmed guests from the future.

But Dorai claimed that he had not really expected any and said that the evening went “pretty close to perfect.”

As they waited, guests enjoyed entertainment ranging from lectures by prominent MIT professors to comedy sketches and bands. There were also refreshments available and a 1980s DeLorean car, the model used in the “Back to the Future” movies, to set the appropriate atmosphere.

The event proved such an attraction that guests even had to be turned away at the door because of capacity restrictions.

Despite its popularity, Dorai said that he did not plan any similar occasions in the future.

“The whole point was that you only need one and if the front page of the New York Times wasn’t enough to let future time travelers know about it, it’s just more evidence that it’s impossible,” he said. “Either that, or our party was just too boring.”

—Staff writer Alexandra C. Bell can be reached at acbell@fas.harvard.edu.