Time Police

The Time Police is an organisation I want to set up.

This would make me part of the authorities and thus a hate figure for people like myself who despise authority. I accept that but I also recognise that a certain level of authority is necessary to keep the innocents in any society safe. I personally support the concept of capital punishment although I do recognise that perhaps one in a hundred criminals can turn their life around and become a valuable member of society. That would not be possible if we killed them. The savings from killing rather than jailing murderers and rapists would be enormous. We could then afford much better health care although I expect the government would spend any savings on bigger weapons or better pensions for MPs. I have little faith in those who enter parliament, not because they are all bad, but because the successful ones are self seeking publicists.

N.B. Ireland have just beaten Australia in the group stage of the Rugby World Cup. Yes!

The Time Police would definitely need the James Bond "Licence to Kill" as the dangers of tampering across space and time are potentially catastrophic. For a start we would need any society to understand the implications, so there would need to be a 'time limit'. Because it is a date across the internet let me suggest December 21st 2012 as the date before which any time travellers would be summarily executed. After that date any journeys should be logged for data tracking purposes. Any computer professional understands the need for comprehensive logging if they want to solve a problem.

If we did set that as the date then knowing human nature as I do there would be a rush in the future to be the first one to travel back at midnight plus a second on 22nd December and return home saying "I was the first". There would be many attempts that missed and I think we can see them in the sky from time to time. Unidentified Flying Objects are those failed attempts.

Accidents would be common place and in that first rush I would expect to see a mass of debris as hundred of time travellers tried to occupy the same space and time just as cars trying to occupy the same bit of road at the same time crash, or ships trying to occupy the same bit of sea crash, craft would be badly damaged trying to be the first back to the point when time travel became legal.

Time travel should really be restricted to outer space where there is (lets face it) a lot of space. The Earth is extremely crowded when you look at the universe. Any attempt to travel even above the surface of the earth which is certainly much safer than trying to travel on the surface of the Earth would carry the risk of bumping into something that is not there, was never there, but appears there at the same time as you do.

There is another aspect to time travel that we need to think about. Instrument failure. All the equipment that I have ever know has failed at some point. I accept that we are getting better and there are some new items (my car for example) that have yet to fail but experience tells me that the time will come. We should, therefore, have a method of knowing what time period we are in whenever we move through time. I propose that the International Space Station starts broadcasting a date and time stamp across the universe accessible to all.

Visitors approaching Earth can then use this, even extrapolating it back into the past, to contact us with any knowledge they have. I trust that aliens have recorded much of our past history and if we ask the right questions of the right monitoring group we will find out much more about what has been going on throughout history.

As I have said before, you are entitled to call me mad but I want to explore the possibilities rather than remain restrained within a fixed time with little hope of escape.

The Time Police must be feared but will also be a target just as the conventional police are now.