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Q: Will traveling to the past destroy the present, due to the “butterfly effect,” which they made several movies about (2004, 2025, 2034, etc.)? A: No. Those films were based on a speculative understanding of time travel that, thankfully, is not accurate. In reality, any temporal machinery—including the stateoftheart FC3000™ rentalmarket time machine—creates a new “timeline,” or sequence of events, with each trip back in time. Observe the following illustration:
RIVERHEAD BOOKS An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 Copyright © 2018 by Ryan North Illustrations © 2018 by Lucy Bellwood Public domain images of The Last Supper, The School of Athens, and the mill painting were found on Wikimedia Commons And yes, our trigonometric values were verified with NASA We’re not messing around here Penguin supports copyright Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader Ebook ISBN 9780735220164 The information and instructions in this book involve materials and activities that may be dangerous The publisher and author are not responsible for any injuries or damage that may result from the use of such information and instructions That’s right: you’re about to read a book so badass, it has to include a legal disclaimer at the front And by the time you finish this book and know its secrets, you’ll be able to apply that exact same badass disclaimer to yourself “Hi,” you’ll say, holding out your hand whenever you meet someone new, “I’m [Your Name Here] And just so you know: the person you are about to meet knows materials and activities that may be dangerous.” It’s going to be amazing Version_1 A NOTE FOR READERS I didn’t write this guide I found it It was wholly encased in bedrock, and I know that because I was the one who broke that heavy granulite stone open I was working construction for a few weeks because I heard it paid well It did not I can tell you that I personally don’t have the technology to place a book inside solid stone Nobody does I’ve tried to have the book carbon dated, but that’s impossible: whatever exotic polymer the guide was printed on, it’s one that doesn’t include carbon The stone I found it in can be dated, of course: it’s Precambrian, which means it predates humans, dinosaurs, and most life on Earth Precambrian rocks are some of the oldest rocks on the planet So, no help there There is obviously the possibility that the text you’re about to read is part of a well-constructed and incredibly expensive prank, accomplished using technology unknown to the rest of the world, including the technology to insert objects inside solid rock while maintaining a profile tolerance of under 10-4mm It seems unlikely But the alternative—that time travel is possible, that somewhere it is being practiced, and that our entire universe is but a copy spun off from their original at some unknown point in the past—also seems impossible I’ve researched all the claims made in this guide Everything that can be verified has been, and the text appears to be an honest, sincere, and accurate effort to explain how to rebuild civilization, from scratch, in any time period in Earth’s history All historical events mentioned in the text line up with our own, though with the guide’s focus on technology and civilization instead of nations and people, there are fewer dates and individuals to compare against than you might expect “Their” world appears to be much like ours, only better: they have a higher level of technology, a greater understanding of history, and, of course, consumer-market rental time machines There’s a chance that we also might one day invent time travel, in which case the claims made here could finally be verified and we could discover when, and how, this impossible book ended up embedded in the solid rock of what would eventually become the Canadian Shield On the other hand, we might not The guide that follows is presented in its original and unaltered format, except for the endnotes, which I added in two cases: when I thought clarification or references to supplementary texts would be helpful, or when a claim was being made in the original text that reached beyond our current science, engineering, or historical knowledge Footnotes are presented as in the original text, and no other changes have been made to content or presentation The original illustrations in the guide, credited to one “Lucy Bellwood,” have also been included There is an artist working under that name in our world; she claims to have no knowledge of this book or its origins, and I have no reason to doubt her Finally, I should touch on what is perhaps the most unlikely note of all in this The technical writer responsible for this guide shares his name just once, and then only in a footnote It is the same as mine Part of me knows I can’t read much into this: there are a lot of Ryan Norths out there, and I’ve emailed most of them Our writer could be an alternate-timeline version of any of us Or he could be someone new, someone with no parallel in our world Maybe a time-travel accident left this book embedded in stone somewhere in our distant past, stranding the traveler there, or in some other time, changing our world in small but significant ways that we may never tease apart Maybe that’s why we don’t have time travel Or, again, maybe this is all just part of an incredibly expensive prank I know what I believe I know how incredibly, cosmically unlikely it is that I would ever find this guide and share my name with its author and know a Lucy Bellwood too And if you think perhaps I’m involved in some deception with this text, I will repeat what I said at the start of this section: I didn’t write this guide At least not in this timeline I’m thrilled to share, for the first time, a complete and unabridged copy of what was originally titled The Time Traveler’s Handbook: How to Repair Your FC3000™ Time Machine, and Then How to Reinvent Civilization from Scratch When That Doesn’t Work Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it —George Santayana, philosopher, essayist, and poet 1905 CE Those who cannot remember the past are cordially invited to revisit it —Jessica Bennett, CEO of Chronotix Solutions, proud manufacturers of the FC3000™ 2043 CE INTRODUCTION Congratulations on your rental of the FC3000™! The FC3000™ is a state-ofthe-art personal time machine that allows you to experience the entire range of human endeavor, from the earliest chimpanzee-human divergence (in 12,100,000 BCE, the backward limit of this rental unless you have purchased the Protoprimate Encounter Pak) to the latest mass-market portable music players (present day) Note that travel to any times later than 1.5 seconds after the instant you left your personal present (“the future”) is not permitted with this rental, and a sensitive chronometer has been installed to detect and disable any attempts to visit these periods Please carefully study the features of the FC3000™, depicted on the following page Federal regulations require us to inform you that due to the nature of genetic and acquired immunity, there are a large number of diseases to which present-day humans are immune but which have not yet been encountered by past humanity For your safety, and the safety of those around you, multiple biofilters installed throughout the FC3000™ work to ensure that your appearance in the past will not obliterate all human life with the introduction of dozens of deadly plagues and pestilences in a single instant Figure 1: The FC3000™ All other features of the FC3000™ depicted above are self-explanatory * There’s no magic to tuning forks: they’re simply a twotined steel fork The mass and length of the tines affects what note the tuning fork plays when struck, so you can shave down the tines of any tuning fork until you get the precise frequency you want Guess what? It took us until 1711 CE to invent these things! * If you haven’t invented paper yet, you can use a wooden card We don’t judge You got stranded in the past, and all you’re asking for is the chance to play a nice little ditty before getting down to the hard work of reinventing everything ever We get it! * Here we are skipping ahead to a final and comprehensive music-notation technology Prior attempts at capturing the sound of music in writing were less successful: some of the earliest were akin to memory aids, referring to melodies carried in an oral tradition, while others captured whether notes rose or fell in comparison to each other but not their exact pitches By around the 800s CE Europeans had notation that captured melody but not rhythm, and it was only around the 1300s CE that the shape of the note was being changed to represent rhythm, as we do in the modern era * You may have already invented machines that help with thinking: at their core, clocks are just machines that count the number of seconds that pass so you don’t have to, and an abacus is just a bunch of beads on a stick that you can slide around to jot down numbers as you calculate them in your head But what you really want is an analytical engine: some sort of machine with a crank we can turn (or get another machine to turn for us) that re-creates the steps humans take when reasoning, thereby transforming physical labor into mental processing * The binary digits of 0 and 1 are nice because they can be conveniently represented by anything that has two states: an electrical switch that’s on or off, a beam of coherent light that’s there or not, or even (as we shall soon see) a bunch of crabs that are present or absent But keep in mind that binary isn’t mandatory! Computers have been built on other number systems, including the 0s, 1s, and 2s of three-digit trinary, and as long as you can come up with a way to represent these digits, feel free to explore whatever number system interests you the most * If you’ve studied math, this probably comes as no surprise: you also know that division is the same as multiplication by its inverse—that is to say, x/y is the same as x × (1/y) And since division can be reduced to multiplication, which we’ve already reduced to addition, we know that division can be done through adding numbers together * These gates are called “universal” for this reason Any set of gates that can emulate AND, OR, and NOT is universal Incredibly, you don’t even need all three of these to make a universal set An OR gate can be emulated by the proper sequence of ANDs and NOTs: (p ∨ q) is the same as ¬[(¬p) ∧ (¬q)] Therefore, just NOT and AND are a set of universal gates! In fact, NOT and AND in a single gate—NAND—is a universal gate all by itself, which means a whole bunch of NAND gates is literally all you need to build a complete computer NOT and OR are universal gates too, making NOR the only other universal single gate operation * And yes, you’ve probably noticed that while you’ve defined what these gates should do, we still haven’t figured out a way to actually build any of them yet Don’t worry: we’ll get there! Probably! * It’s 2 Huh We really thought you already knew the answer * You may be noticing that these full adders only work with positive whole numbers And it’s true! But you can solve this by setting one binary digit—say, the one farthest on the left—to be your sign digit: 0 for positive, say, and 1 for negative And to work with non-whole numbers like 2.452262, you just need to remember where in your binary digit you want the decimal place to be, and everything else proceeds in the same way * And with the XOR gate we’ve got, you’ll see that a fluidic NOT gate isn’t actually as impossible as it sounds If you build the truth table for “p XOR 1” (i.e., the exclusive or of p with an always-on flow), you’ll see the output is the same as ¬p * The idea here is to have different heights of a weighted pulley marked as 1 and 0 Say down is 0 and up is 1 If you pull the cord on a vertical pulley above you down, then the weight on the other end goes up: that’s the basics of a NOT gate By adding extra cords and weights you can construct AND and OR gates pretty easily, which give you a universal set * In 2012 CE, humans discovered that the soldier crabs found on the beaches and lagoons of islands in Japan (they range in color from pale to dark blue, lightening as they get older, with shells from 8mm to 16mm long) behave in predictable ways Specifically, these crabs travel in swarms that tend to hug walls, and when two swarms collide, they merge and head off in a direction that combines the directions the two swarms were moving in An OR gate is as easy as constructing crab pathways in a Y shape: the crabs enter from the top of the Y, and exit out the bottom, even if two swarms collide An AND gate is an X shape, but with an added extra vertical line from the middle of the X to the bottom Crabs enter the top diagonally and proceed out the bottom in the same way, but when two swarms collide, they’ll move out of the vertical line you added: that’s your “AND” output The scientists who discovered the computational potential of these crabs noted that they were sometimes prone to error (turns out living animals are not as perfectly predictable as streams of water or electrons!) which— along with the absence of a NOT gate to give you a universal set—may indicate some upcoming challenges in your dream of realizing large-scale computational machinery powered by li’l crabs * We call it “sine” because when Europeans were translating Arabic works into Latin (because of course they were), the Latin word sinus (meaning “the hanging fold in the upper part of a toga”) was the closest match they could find for the Arabic word used, which was jaib, meaning “pocket, fold, or purse.” But the word “jaib” wasn’t even being used! It was jyb, which was the way the Arabs had come up with to write the Sanskrit word they were translating, jyā, into their alphabet That word has its origins in the ancient Greek word for “string.” Anyway! Feel free to name this function anything else, because you can hardly end up with a more arbitrary word than we did * I, for example, write time-machine repair manuals to reduce liability in court