On This Day in 2040

Looking Forward

On this day in 2040 I first managed to get my Internet Time Portal working. It’s been a long time coming, but my efforts have finally paid off. The trick was just to run The Wayback Machine in reverse, which just required the integration of my flux capacitor with the webserver. Thankfully, Apache 5‘s plugin architecture’s made it pretty easy, but I’ve already talked about how time-travel/webserver integration works back in my blog posts at the end of 2039, so I won’t bore you with them all again.

Despite what I said about password security back in 2011, I haven’t actually changed the password for my blog in 28 years, so it was the obvious target for my first reverse-websurfing experiment. That’s why past-me will be surprised to find this article posted to his blog, now that I’ve connected back in time and posted it. And I know he’ll be surprised, because I was.

In fact, it was probably this moment – this surprising moment back in April 2012 – that first made me realise that reverse-chronological web access was possible. That’s why I spent most of the next three decades cracking the secret and finally working out a way to send information back in time through the Internet.

Looking Back

There’s so much potential for this new technology. I’m hoping that soon the technology will evolve to the point where I’ll even be able to use ancient and outdated Internet protocols like “Facebook” (remember that fad?) to actually communicate directly with the people of the early 21st century. Just think of what we can learn from them!

After the second coming of Jesus in 2028 resulted in the deletion the mysterious “Video R” from the entire Internet, as well as from the minds of everybody on Earth, we’ve only been able to speculate what this mysterious media contained. Whatever it was, it was something so offensive to our Lord and Saviour that He saw fit to wipe it from the face of the Earth… but you can’t help but be curious, can’t you? Of course, those of you reading this back in 2012 can still see the video, you lucky lucky guys.

The possibilities are limitless. As soon as I’ve finished making this post, I’ll be trying to make contact with the past version of myself and see if past-Dan is capable of looking up this Wikipedia article for me: for some reason I can’t get access to it now, in 2040…

This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years yet to come.