About time...

When I heard about Ronald Mallett and his time-travel quest, the one thing that intrigued me most was the possibilty of sending information back into time. Once it becomes possible to send even the tiniest speck of recordable particle or wave back into the past, time would come to a standstill at that very moment and at that very point in space. Laying down standards for communication, results of years of research could be sent back, effectively completing the research within zero or even negative units of time. Hence, at the very instance it becomes possible to receive information from the future, we would instantly have the technology to build infinitely better "time machines" as the exponential growth of our knowledge becomes a permanent vertical slope on the time scale, reaching upto infinity. There would no longer be any time barrier between any two points in time from that moment on, thereby effectively putting time to a standstill.

Today I thought about how we already have thousands of years' worth of knowledge available to us. It then occurred to me that we already have working time machines, only not as apocalyptic as Ronald Mallet's. Instead of an infinite amount of knowledge from the future, we have relatively limited and sometimes distorted information from the past. Thus, you are Pythagoras in ancient Greece with a time machine that sometimes corrupts its data and works only upto the present time. You are al-Shahrastani in medieval Persia with the same partially functional time machine. You are anyone anywhere in the past with this same time machine. Put it to good use.