The VnutZ Domain “good idea fairy” is flapping its wings and sprinkling some dust trying to figure out ways to save humanity from the Great Purge. Let’s begin with this statement: our ability to have a functional time machine or cross-temporal-messaging device is no longer limited by today’s technology. As a matter of fact, researchers may have already demonstrated the necessary technology exists through existing and on-going quantum entanglement experiments. What tools are already at our disposal:

• The Air Force has already demonstrated an ability to use photon entanglement to take a picture of something that is not physically present.
• Scientists have already figured out ways of encoding increased amounts of information onto single photons.
• Physicists have also shown that quantum entanglement can span across time (additional reading available here, here, and here)

Thus, at our disposal with today’s technology is the ability to understand encoded information within photons, an ability to expose an image from other entangled photons, and the knowledge that information may come from a timeframe outside the present. It would seem, that much like a time capsule, scientists could construct a “receiver” and simply leave the instructions on how it receives in the public domain. A separate observational machine could simply monitor the device’s output for deviations from regular noise which alerts today’s scientists to take a look. At some point in this timeline, scientists in the future could basically use the time capsule’s documentation of our receiving device to transmit new technology, research, and information backwards (ideally including how to build a transmitter). Presumably they can leverage their better technology to pinpoint our photons in our time … basically making it unnecessary for scientists of today to solve all of the technical hurdles now.

Which begs an interesting philosophical question of causality – if future scientists send the technology backwards and today’s scientists build it which in turn becomes the basis for future scientists to develop it and send it back – does that mean technology has invented itself?