"Electricity has made angels of us all," Edmund Carpenter, a colleague of Marshall McLuhan, wrote more than 20 years ago. He was referring not to our goodness but to the metaphysical wonder of our representations being everywhere at once via electronic information – a state of being heretofore attainable only by the heavenly host.
Of course, only a few mortals actually had such power twenty years ago, when the global village of television brought Oscar winners and Olympic stars into millions of homes at the same time. Most of us could have the pleasure only of sitting back and watching such angels – we were voyeurs in that old global network. Now call-in shows and personal computers have made us players in this arena too. Our words can be in almost as many places as a president's, if we get through to Larry King, or, far more likely, if we get them onto a hot list on the Internet.
Are there no limits to the miracles of information transfer? What, if anything, lies beyond the precincts of angels?
Einsteinian theory frowns upon faster-than-light movement of information; but time travel, ironically not prohibited by relativity theory, may be a more permanent holdout. The reasons have nothing to do with the clout of a scientific theory – they have rather to do with our profoundest level of sanity and existence in the world.
Consider a device that allowed us to send a message back to 1963 to warn JFK of his assassination. If the message had arrived and was acted upon, it would lead to a world in which the very motive for sending the message in the first place would no longer exist. But if the motive didn't exist, the message wouldn't be sent, and JFK would be assassinated. Which would again provide a motive for sending the message, which would in turn prevent the assassination and remove the motive, and.... Well, paradoxes like this are what make time travel to the past such good science fiction (such as Gregory Benford's award-winning "Timescape"). Only a cascade of alternate universes in which we had no knowledge of previous realms as we moved into new ones could save our sanity in such a case – a situation that would make the ancient mystic's credo "the world is my dream" seem like child's play in comparison.
Receipt of information from the future would be even more maddening. If some kind soul were to tell us exactly what we will say at 9 p.m. tomorrow, it would mean that we have no choice but to say exactly that at 9 p.m. tomorrow. But I believe to the very core of my being – and my guess is most of us feel the same – that I can say whatever I damn well please at 9 tomorrow, or maybe not open my mouth at all. A world in which such free will didn't exist – the only world possible with devices that recorded our future conversations and transmitted them to us – would be at such radical variance with existence as we know it as to be unlivable.
Here, then, we may at last come upon at least one ultimate limit to information transfer – a barrier even Carpenter's angels can't be expected to breach, because to overcome it would tear apart every sinew in our society, including the theological. We can't transmit to the past, because it no longer exists except as memories and records in the present; the past as an interactive partner died the instant after its existence. And we can't transmit to the future because it never existed at all.
Ftp to the stars, an instant Archie linkup to Alpha Centauri? Why not? Einstein could be wrong – his speed-of-light proscription is thus far vaporware.
Telnet to your own computer two years ago, gopher to your granddaughter's setup 50 years from now? No way – it would require that nearly all human beings who ever lived were wrong in their deepest sense of free will, drastically deluded in their profoundest take on reality.
The only thing inevitable about the future is that the path to it is one-way, with no turning back.
