Stopping Future Criminals

Early in 2010, a man by the name of Eloi Cole was arrested near the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland while trying to disrupt the supply of sodas to vending machines at the facility. It was found that Mr. Cole had been organizing attempts to sabotage the particle acceleration project for more than a year, including a previously unexplained 2009 event that involved a piece of baguette which caused the machine to overheat and shut down for a day. Cole’s confession revealed that he had been sent back in time from a future where the LHC is the cause of a “too perfect” society – there are no energy shortages, every person shares the same plentiful resources, and upward (or downward) mobility in society is non-existent – all facets of a society which the fundamentalist Cole aimed – or will aim – to destroy at its roots.

This attack from the future is not isolated; evidence accumulates each decade which points to terrorism from the future as a threat to present affairs. Evidence on hand clearly suggests, for instance, that a future version of Lee Harvey Oswald was in constant connection with the then-would-be murderer long before the United States of America ever lost their 35^th president. In The Search for Lee Harvey Oswald: A Comprehensive Pictographic Record, by Robert Groden, dozens of conflicting photos are presented in which Oswald possesses radically different facial features (240-241), some of them likely belonging to an older Oswald – that is, an Oswald from the future who happened to be photographed on a few of his visits to 1960’s Oswald.

The threat to modern society cannot be understated. Where the predominant values and priorities of today shape our own vision of the future and provide for us a frame in which to pave our own roads to get there, the ideas of tomorrow might lead individuals from another era to travel back in time and “perfect” ours. From attempting to destroy billion-dollar scientific research facilities to assassinating our presidents, there is no theoretical end to what damage these individuals might cause, or for what reasons. Furthermore, there is little or no consideration in popular science for what damage these possible radicals might already have caused. Was the Hindenburg explosion caused by an accidental spark which ignited that massive Bavarian balloon, or did the future of airships somehow offend a fundamentalist group who took it upon themselves to stop the technology shortly after it got off the ground? We may never know, but we do know we didn’t know in time to save the Hindenburg.

Time travel is a difficult concept for us to understand, as man has not presently accomplished such a feat. And so, it would seem, things should stay; if we refrain from discovering a method for travelling across time, they will never have the technology to travel back and affect our affairs. However, this logic doesn’t stand up to the progressive nature of man – new technologies will continue to be regulated too slowly to prevent their discovery.

In order to prevent these terrorists from the future, then, from meddling in our affairs, we must learn what they look like and how they act. They are a clever lot, we can be sure; they know how to blend in with us because they have been us. The most we can hope for is that they have begun to forget about their past, and that hints of a culture we have yet to be a part of will bleed through their disguises. Here are some tells that our citizens should be on the lookout for:

1.      Clothes that look like ours but are slightly out of fashion. It stands to reason that someone from the future might miss a particular “in” style by a year or by a region. When Eloi Cole was arrested, he was described as wearing “too much tweed” – something that may have been stylish in 2010 in Cambridge (Massachusetts or England), but not in the middle of Continental Europe.

2.      Strange haircuts. A saboteur from the future may spend a substantial amount of time learning to blend in with us, but if our own past is to be a teacher, haircuts are an easily forgotten aspect of any era. Cole also sported a “strange hair style”.

3.      Odd dialects. There are still thousands of spoken dialects around the world of as many languages, and it’s unlikely that any one individual has heard them all. We cannot be too careful, though; if you can’t identify someone’s hailing region by his or her dialect, notify the proper authorities immediately.

4.      A terrorist from the future might, in a hypothetical sense, assume that something which was invented in 2020 already existed in 2012. If in conversation you hear a person alluding to or describing something that isn’t real, you should again alert the proper authorities.

In addition to measures which ought to be taken by individuals to ensure a society unhassled by saboteurs from the future, the international community and governments in general should implement programs to educate people about and otherwise prevent undesired contact with those of future generations:

1.      Law enforcement agencies here and abroad should adopt training which would enable officers to identify and deal with these threats. Furthermore, training to deal with advanced weaponry is paramount in securing victory over possible activities which are more militant than the subversive, one-man operations we’ve encountered so far.

2.      If it is suspected that a criminal at large could be from the future, based in part on the list above, his or her name should be posted at the top of international wanted lists. These terrorists have the potential to be far more dangerous than the terrorists of our time, and are more difficult to understand.

3.      At present, millions of dollars in research at leading universities has both directly and indirectly led to questions and even experiments concerning time travel. Our best defense against these forces of destruction remains dismantling their technology by never discovering or inventing it. We must criminalize efforts to understand and develop time travel so that our enemies might no longer have the tools to undermine our society.

These lists represent a global effort that must be undertaken, but are in no way comprehensive. We must discuss in our parliaments and congressional halls how best to tackle this problem. The freedom to design our own fate is the motivating force behind inventions like the Large Hadron Collider and the Personal Computer. Just as we cannot allow the terrorists of today to take our freedoms and our way of life, we cannot allow those fundamentalists from the future to guide us away from those very liberties that make us able to learn for ourselves.

Groden, Robert. The Search for Lee Harvey Oswald: A Comprehensive Photographic Record. New York: Penguin Group, 1995. 240-41. Print.

"Man Arrested at Large Hadron Collider Claims He's from the Future - Crave at CNET UK." Crave - UK Gadget and Technology Blog from CNET UK. Cnet.com, Apr. 2010. Web. 07 Apr. 2010. .