I was reading through this AskMe today, and it started me thinking. Emailing yourself five or ten years in the future isn’t a difficult problem (in fact, that thread includes several solutions). But what would be the most reliable way to get a message to yourself in, say, 50 years? Not necessarily an email, and inexpensiveness and plausibility are important (becoming President and renaming the country “Hello Future Me” won’t work).
Would Doc Brown’s method of sending a letter from 1888 1885 to Marty standing in the road (not even an address) in 1955 even work back then? I doubt it. How could it be done today?
Comments (7)
I think the problem has less to do with technology and more to do with the universe getting less predictable the longer ahead you try to predict it. It’s not technology’s fault that it’s impossible to tell if the technology to send out a scheduled e-mail will still be working 10 years down the line. By definition, that problem is out of technology’s hands.
The best bet though is probably to mitigate the decreasing predictablility by redundancy and variation. Maybe a specific technology and a specific machine won’t be around 10 years from now, but not EVERY delivery system will be obsolete. I’d try something like multiple letters through post/ups/fedex and multiple e-mail services to multiple addresses. It’s still a gamble though.
Oh yeah and it was 1885.
You have to realize that Doc knew Western Union would be around in 1955, otherwise it wouldn’t have been so foolproof. There’s no way to know that Western Union, or even the USPS will be around in the future. Maybe the best way to do it would be to mmrmrmm…..
Even if you knew that delivery company x will be around in the future, what would make you think that they’d deliver a letter 70 years later? Is it possible to go to USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, or anyone else and make this request, even one month in the future? Can you hand-pick a future delivery date like this? It seems like (from a business point of view) the overhead that would be involved is far more than the number of people that would ever have a use for it.
As far as BttF 3, the time travelling car is a leap of faith, but I consider this to be a metaphorical Eastwood Ravine. But it is an effective plot device.
On the concept of overhead… Doc may have given them enough money to cover the overhead of delivering the letter. Also, it’s possible that Western Union was less formal in it’s infancy and more inclined to odd requests (if the proper amount of money was involved). It’s still kind of a longshot, since Doc and everybody that made the deal will most likely be dead by 1955, there’s no reason to really follow through on it, except as a lark for a curious Western Union agent. That’s really how they explain it and make the leap of faith a little smaller.
Interesting stuff: 1870: Western Union launches a time service, helping to standardize time nationally. Western Union will hold the distinction as “The Nation’s Timekeeper” for nearly a century.
Earlier in BTTF2, when they’re in the future, Doc makes a snark against the USPS not being as efficient as the weather service. That and the fact that Western Union is “The Nation’s Timekeeper” at the time may have swayed Doc’s decision not to use the USPS for this special delivery.
When I mentioned overhead, I meant it more as in “is this possible now”, and less as support for a BttF plothole.
FedEx can schedule delivery on a package for up to two weeks. That’s the only one of the big four that I can tell will let you say “deliver on this date”l.