Tachyonic Antitelephone
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Basic Information

A Tachyonic Antitelephone is a hypothetical device that enables you to communicate with your own past. It sends messages via Tachyon transmission, and is a type of FTL Communication.

The mathematical examples at Wikipedia are very complex, and involve a person on Earth and another person in a spacecraft heading away from the Earth. The one on the spaceship sends a message to the one on earth. The earthbound persons reply to the message arrives at the spaceship before the original message was ever sent.

Sources

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Game and Story Use

  • Could be used by spaceships to make distress calls over great distances.
    • Since the reply can arrive before you make the call it's responding to, such a device can really cut down on the number of accidents in space. We hit a problem, and call for help. Help responds, and sends a warning that arrives before we hit the problem. If it shows up far enough in advance, we can choose to avoid the disaster entirely, and just send a message that details the problem we could have had. As long as everyone does there job, and expresses the messages as being "potential", you've just created a Stable Time Loop. The ship learns of the trouble when base warns them, and base warned them because the ship sent a message indicating the trouble that base told them about. Awesome.
  • With a little thinking outside the box, it can also be used for other Temporal Tricks such as Write Back To The Future, Tricked Out Time, Future Google, and Scry vs Scry.
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