Time Traveler Convention

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The Time Traveler Convention was a convention held at MIT on May 7, 2005, in the hopes of making contact with time travelers from the future. The convention was organized by Amal Dorai with help from current and former residents of the MIT living group Pi Tau Zeta. As of the date of the event, it was the most significantly publicized Time Traveler Convention, including front page coverage in the New York Times, Wired, and Slashdot.^[1] ^[2]^[3]. It was presumed time travelers would have the capability to visit any particular time if they could travel to that general time period at all.

The convention was held at 22:45 EDT on May 7, 2005 (May 8, 02:00 UTC) at the East Campus Courtyard and in Walker Memorial at MIT. That location is 42.360007 degrees north latitude, 71.087870 degrees west longitude. The Convention was announced in advance (that is, before the event) and over 300 contemporary people attended. (For fire safety reasons, a handful of attendees watched the convention via a closed circuit broadcast.) The spacetime coordinates continue to be publicized prominently and indefinitely, so that future time travelers will be aware and have the opportunity to have attended.

The convention included lectures on various aspects of time travel from three MIT professors: Erik Demaine, a MacArthur "genius grant" winner, Alan Guth, an Eddington Medal winner for theoretical astrophysics, and Edward Farhi, winner of numerous MIT teaching awards. A De Lorean DMC-12, the car featured in the Back to the Future trilogy, was also on display, near the "landing pad" located at the exact coordinates advertised.