We have always been dreaming of the time machine in a physics-challenging manner, mostly under the curiosity of altering history. But in reality, civilization and technology has enabled a read-only time machine in an increasingly mightier pace.
History originally exist in past time, and in our memory. Either way, it fades, it is not persistent.
Then our ancestors invented oral/written language, historical moments are described and written down, so that it can be relived.
Then our ancestors tried so hard to perfect painting, resulted in a much more effective way reliving moments. A painting is better than a thousand words. Through it we can relive the whole picture of a moment in just seconds, with all the details that are there. Of source a painting does not actually capture the real scene - too many imagination was put in it - but you still get a thousand time more information from it than from words.
Then our grand-grand fathers invented photographing, a revolutionary technique of capturing still scene. Instant, exact, and duplicatable. Photographing was made so easy (only takes seconds of effort), and can produce data that’s of profound value to us, that everyone starts capturing moments everywhere, all the time. Video recording has come to people’s life in parallel to photographing, letting us capture not only still scenes, but continuous ones.
If we keep taking more photos, until we can capture every scene, anywhere in the universe, all the time, do we reach the finish line of making the read-only time machine? Not quite. To we emotional animals, history was not made of commodity seconds, minutes, or hours. It was made of moments. - Hey I had been traveling in New Zealand last month, that was a great month in my life, it was much more exciting then the lunch time today, when I had the same duck noodle and nothing special really happens.
That is why we need Facebook to mark our life events, Foursquare to check-in places, Instagram to archive photographs, Twitter to publish whatever we want to say. We need meta data of out life’s moments, to make it efficiently indexable, searchable, relivable. We don’t just want a time machine, we want a time machine that can locate moments we’re looking for.
Recently I was trying out an app called timehop. This app aggregates all your Foursquare checkins, Facebook events, Instagram moments, Tweets, and Photos to relive your ‘today in history’. This is the beginning of we building this time machine. There’s a long way to go, a lot can be done, and after blood sweat and tears, we will have something we had always wanted but had never imagined before.