An Iranian scientist has registered a device called the “Aryayek Time Traveling Machine” with the nation’s Center for Strategic Inventions.
I’ve often said that no good can come from time travel, because sooner or later somebody’s going to flip out and step on a butterfly and then ka-blammo, it’s dystopian nightmare time. It’s a terrible power by any measure – and now Tehran-based scientist Ali Razeghi claims to have perfected a “time-traveling machine” that he’s been working on for the past ten years, and he’s now registered it with the Iranian government.
The good news is that the device won’t let Iran send modern troops back to, say, 1776 to nip this whole Great Satan thing in the bud. Instead, it foretells with great detail and accuracy the next five to eight years of the life of its user. “It will not take you into the future,” Razeghi said. “It will bring the future to you.”
This is still problematic. With it, the Iranian government could ensure maximum preparedness for future military conflicts or fluctuations in oil prices, or plot its foreign relations with allies and adversaries with a far greater degree of certainty than has ever before been possible.
“Naturally a government that can see five years into the future would be able to prepare itself for challenges that might destabilize it. As such we expect to market this invention among states as well as individuals once we reach a mass production stage,” Razeghi said. He also dismissed concerns that his future-seeing device violates Islamic religious tenets, adding, “The Americans are trying to make this invention by spending millions of dollars on it where I have already achieved it by a fraction of the cost.”
The good news for those concerned about the possibility of a prescient Iranian state is that Razeghi hasn’t yet built a prototype of the device, apparently because he’s worried about copyright issues. “The reason that we are not launching our prototype at this stage is that the Chinese will steal the idea and produce it in millions overnight,” he said.
Source: The Telegraph
UPDATE: I am shocked – SHOCKED! – to report that Iran has now officially denied that it has a time machine.
“Making scientific claims is free for all, but registration of these claims as inventions should undergo certain legal stages based on scientific proofs and evidence,” Iran’s Deputy Minister of Science, Research and Technology Mohammad Mehdinejad Nouri told Fars News Agency. “Such a claim has not been registered in Iran’s State Organization for Registration for Strategic Inventions.”
An absolutely baffling deception, to be sure – but, I must admit, a relieving conclusion.
